Those who have played Phantasy Star Online will recognize many conventions of Monster Hunter. The basic premise involves a central village you call home and quests that draw you out into the wilderness in search of prey. You’ll gain experience, create and buy better and better equipment, feed yourself and, most importantly, share all these experiences online with a team of other hunters.

You’ll begin the game with very little after you name your character, choose a gender and select from a good amount of different face and hair combinations. You’ll have a home, some skivvies, a knife and a shield – just enough to get you started. There are several missions at the very beginning designed to familiarize you with the controls and the fact that there’s a lot more involved than just running around killing dinosaurs. There’s eating, trading, item creating and fishing – just to give you an idea. These missions can drag out, particularly the ones that force you to find a particular kind of herb or mushroom, but once they’re over with you’re ready to get going.

In town you can get new missions, trade and save. There’s no way to explore the wilderness without being on a mission, which is a bit frustrating because many missions have time limits. They don’t often leave much room for searching and experimenting – unless that’s the whole point of a particular mission.

Even though combat with dinosaurs isn’t the only thing you’ll be doing, it’s still the focus of Monster Hunter. Your left thumbstick controls movement while the right is used for attacks. Left and right make your hunter swipe, down and up perform overhead and charging attacks. You can center the camera behind you by pressing L1, or by using the directional pad.

Simply moving around the map with these controls is a challenge. You’ll be pressing L1 as much as any button in the game just to keep your bearings because the camera never adjusts itself. Why the camera is controlled with the directional pad and not the other thumbstick is a mystery. Once you start attacking dinosaurs, they’ll move – obviously – and that means you’ll have to move, too. They won’t go in a straight line in front of you, so if you want to have any chance of keeping your bearings you’ll have to tap L1 almost constantly during a fight. Your buttons are largely unresponsive while your hunter is executing an attack, especially a combo, so you’ll have to time his movements and your button presses almost perfectly to avoid swinging at air. As if that’s not enough, collision detection between you and the monsters is extremely erratic. Often you’ll step right through different parts of them and end up on the other side. There are herds of plant-eating dinosaurs in the early parts of the game that don’t fight back, and it’s a good thing. No matter how much you practice, the combat system is a clunky ballet of timing, button pressing and even guesswork.

Once you put the poor monster out of his misery, you can harvest meat and sometimes valuable parts. But you have to do it quickly because the carcasses disappear after a few moments. You’ll have to stand in precisely the right spot, and the fact that your character takes an involuntary little step with everything you ask him to do – sheathe a sword, search, whatever – doesn’t make this any smoother. Generally speaking, the controls are horrible, and it’s a shame you have no choice but to get used to them because you can’t change them at all. At times, you’ll get the feeling your biggest challenge isn’t the dinosaurs.

But the monsters themselves look great, and they’re well varied. There are big, lumbering plant-eaters, wild boars, variations on most of the dinosaurs with which you’re familiar and, finally, dragons – several different kinds of dragons, ranging from relatively scary to absolutely enormous and seemingly unbeatable. Some have quirky tendencies that make them more interesting to hunt, like being susceptible to bait and traps. They all move well and look fantastic as they’re putting you in your place. The wilderness is lovely and lush, at least from a distance. Pay too much attention to detail and you’ll find that there’s isn’t much.

The only other visual drawbacks are the menus and maps. The onscreen maps – a necessity – are blocky and take up a lot of screen. The menus use very small, thin type and take almost as much getting used to as the controls. Your character has plenty of detail and is more easily recognizable the further you progress and have opportunities to customize him.

And there are plenty of those opportunities. Item management and creation is so involved it’s almost a game in itself. You have limited inventory, in your home and on your person, so there’s lots of time spent keeping track of what you need and what must be sold. Weapons and armor define your character as much as anything because many of the better weapons are bigger than you.

There are some great sound effects, like a satisfying “chew, slobber, slobber, chew,” when eating a freshly roasted leg of dinosaur. You’ll get a good grunt of pain from your hunter when he takes one on the chin, he groans when he’s hungry and he lets out a nice, satisfying sigh when he’s full. Little nuances like that go a long way in adding personality to the experience.

Unfortunately, Monster Hunter is prehistoric in more ways than one: A USB keyboard plugged into your PS2 is the only way to communicate online. This makes getting a group together and executing all but the very simplest of missions a ponderous exercise. It’s too bad headset and voice support weren’t included, because instead of one more reason to get familiar with Monster Hunter – easy communication and the smooth, group play it affords – having to type conversations is just one more obstacle.

Monster Hunter is a very deep game – there’s lots to do and many different ways to do it. If you’re willing to put the time in and learn all its nuances and put together a small team of regular players online that are willing to overlook its shortcomings, you’ll get more than your money’s worth out of it. This is particularly true for those who are looking for a Playstation 2 online game, of which there are precious few. But for most, particularly those playing other, more polished online games, the flaws will probably be harder to ignore.