The basics of the series are still familiar. Your character is the combination of your face and hair combinations, and he's the product of a small village out in the middle of nowhere. You don't really advance your character, you collect money and animal parts to improve your equipment to make yourself better able to survive a fight with a dinosaur.

The fighting is part of what makes Monster Hunter unique. Most of the time, games put the player in the role of the hero (or anti-hero) who takes a the bad guy against any odds and in a relatively traditional fashion – even the sneaky games result in a face to face fight at some point. But Monster Hunter is about hunting beasts that are, usually, much, much bigger than you and much, much more powerful, even when you have great weapons. So, fighting in monster hunter can be boiled down to the art of staying behind most monsters, running away if he turns around, and going back around to the back – repeatedly. It's not any less fun that fighting a monster straight up, it's just different. And when facing a dinosaur, it's usually your only choice.

But that's only about half of what defines the game. The rest is a very deep system of making items, all kinds of items. Nearly everything in the game has a purpose – plants, chunks of meat, bones, teeth, skins and so on. As much time as you have in a day can be spent playing with different bits of everything to make potions, clothes and other useful toys.

You can also play the game online with up to three other people. There's no voice communication, obviously, but if you're willing to get by on emoticons you can team up to take down some of the tougher missions – beasts you'd have a much harder time with on your own.

Along with a very complex experience comes terrible tutorials and very little direction on how to get anything done. Monster Hunter Freedom 2 puts the onus on the player to figure out nearly everything, and the game is complex enough that doing so is no easy task. Unless you've already played one of the earlier versions, getting comfortable with the game is a mystery – where to go, how and what to hunt at your current level, etc. There are also many visual cues that are very small and very hard to find in the crowded screen. It takes an inordinate dedication and level of patience to get the most out of the game.

Just like previous Monster Hunter games, Freedom 2 offers a lot of detail – lots of items, lots to create, collect and kill. But it offers the inverse when it comes time to draw you in at the outset. The investment necessary to figure the game out and enjoy the rich rewards of hunting is huge. That means it's up to the player to decide, very early, if it's worth it. If the series could start offering more personality and more entertainment in the early stages to draw in the player, there'd be a lot more people interested in figuring out how to take down the biggest, baddest beasts.