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The hunting action itself seems great at first, but when players start fighting the game’s larger “wyverns”, the action turns almost painful. Without a lock-on mechanic, players must constantly wrestle with the camera on the D-pad while controlling their character with the analog nub. It doesn’t help that the larger monsters can take a long time to bring down (between 20 to 30 minutes of dedicated hacking and slashing), especially if they flee a zone heal up.

In mission inventory management is a pain, too. Want to drink a health potion in the middle of battle? Well, players have to select it, sheath their weapon, and sit through the drinking animation, hoping all the while that a dinosaur doesn’t come along and kick them in the face.

Odd design choices like this abound, and they don’t make the experience “nuanced”, or “layered”, they just make it frustrating.

Even more frustrating is Capcom’s choice to, once again, forgo infrastructure multiplayer for the game. Ad-hoc is great, but let’s be serious: how many people are going to have four friends with PSPs and copies of the game? Not many. Infrastructure would have made the game’s bone-crushingly frustrating gameplay more bearable with human allies. Also, solo play renders most of the projectile weapons in the game useless, since they’re designed to be used in tandem with melee fighters in multiplay.

Also, any review of Monster Hunter Freedom 2 would be remiss if it did not include a mention of the game’s insane loading times. The game has a background loading option (that defaults to off, for some strange reason) that shortens loading times between zones during hunts, but those loads shouldn’t be there in the first place. It can take a full minute to move from town to a hunt and back, and 15 seconds to get from town to the training menu or the item-gathering farm. Expect a lot of waiting.

If a gamer can get past all these problems, then there is a meaty game here. The monster hunting idea is a strong one, and gaining the phat loots that the game affords is a powerful motivator for a lot of gamers. For most PSP owners, however, this game is, much like its predecessor, a missed opportunity.