User blog comment:Lord Loss/Discussion of the Week: Giant Monsters/@comment-17735225-20131020153728

From my experiences in MH game so far, I believe Capcom is going into the (somewhat) good direction so far regarding the giant monsters. Back then most of the fights are really boring/frustrating as hell, sure it does give you the sense of fear and heroism the first few times you fight them but then you have to farm them. Now with the introduction of Jhen and Dara, now we know what the better giant monsters fight are.

1. Switching between fighting with artillery and fighting with weapon. Lao and Shen fights does contain some arsenals of weapons, but it's not forced and most of the time weapon damage will outdo them most of the time due to how time consuming it is to get them to fire. Jhen, on the other hand, forced to to constantly switch between both to maximize damage output (except some situation like bowgunning). It does give out a lot more variety to player's decision and it's fun to watch other player's video to see how they strategy works. I hope they added more options of weapons to choose and toy around with.

2. Fights of which you have to be aware of the monster's changing move. This will make you constantly look at what the monster is doing, such as learning different windup for different attacks, it keep you from the boredom of mashing attack buttons a little bit. The prime 'bad' example of this is Lao, who you just mash attack and roll buttons constantly. I think capcom did a pretty good change back at Yama Tsukami, it gives the hope that large monsters aren't that boring and horrible, even though it is arguably the most trollish monster in the game at that time due to it super spamming exploding thunderbug all over the place and how it took him so long for blademasters to be able to start fighting him (I'm talking about the Dos/Frontier version). The good example of these are the 'giant version of this game's normal monster' like Ceadeus, Akantor/Ukanlos (if that count), Jhen and Dara.

3. Fight of which the monster's moves are unpredictable. Any people would want a Jhen fight that isn't this horribly scripted. At least gives it a variety of which side of the boat it will surface, maybe gives some sort of hint to the player. This will support the 2nd reason and will makes the fight (a little bit) more interesting.

4. Fights that you have to move around to different part of the area, each with a different strategy. This is foretold in the climbing on monster's back, and then the underwater giant monster fight (where you have to constantly fight with the camera and position yourself right) but finally full realised in Dara fight. Again it gives player a lot of option to attacks, for example, when Dara is coiled up at the 'tower thingie', you have the option to 1. jump on its head, carve/attack/bomb it 2. climb on its back and attack/bomb 3. stay at the ground and attack its tail. And then it starts to coil around the area, you have the option to 1. attack the tail 2. aim for the head 3. aim for the chest 4. aim for the arms a lot of option and places to move around makes the fight much more fun.

5. A good bit of pressure. This is probably the hardest to put in action because to put in pressure you probably have to either increase its attack power/speed or some fragile thing you have to protect. G-rank Jhen does give a bit of pressure because of his HP, he can luck out and constantly belly flop the ship into oblivion just when you ran out of artillery. And Shen in MHDos, at town stage. He could destroy the fortress within 5-10 minutes if you don't plan his stagger to stop almost all his attack, which is pretty insane to solo due to how his stagger rate doesn't go in proportion with your weapon's attack at all. A huge attack boost might make them scary the first few times, but then it would be super annoying to farm like Fatalis, for example.

If anyone got more idea for a good large monsters fight, please put them here.