I'm 20 hours into Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection, and the anime visuals keep impressing

Monster Hunter 3 art — (Image credit: Capcom)

Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection doesn’t just adopt an anime aesthetic; it leans into it hard and builds almost everything else around it. After a few hours of hands-on, what’s striking isn’t just how it looks, but how thoroughly that look informs how the game moves, how the world is designed, and how it plays. This is art direction doing the heavy lifting and feeding into all aspects of the game's design.

At first glance, Monster Hunter Stories 3 is still unmistakably Monster Hunter (read our Monster Hunter Wilds review). The silhouettes, the creatures, the familiar rhythms are all there, but everything is filtered through a heightened, expressive anime lens. Shapes are pushed further, colours are bolder, and animation is doing far more of the storytelling than before. The screen is rarely still. Small flourishes such as a monster’s sideways glance, a weapon swing that lingers for an extra frame, sparks and dust bursting outward like manga panel breaks, give the whole game a sense of constant motion.

That philosophy is clearest in the creature design. Monster Hunter Stories 3 walks an unusual tonal line, making its creatures cute, threatening, and slightly ridiculous all at once. Pukei-Pukei remains a highlight – still strange, still oddly endearing – but the rest of the pack makes a strong impression. Chatacabra, in particular, is memorable for how it moves: flexing, slapping, and lashing its oversized tongue with a gleeful sense of physicality. There’s a satisfying, squashy, and flexible quality to the animation that makes these monsters feel like performers playing to the camera.

Monster Hunter 3 screens, colourful anime style game images — (Image credit: Capcom)

Crammed with atmosphere

The world itself matches that energy. Environments are bright and colourful, but they’re also surprisingly open and vertical for a Stories game. As you explore, short animated moments punctuate the landscape – lightning cracking across distant peaks, explosions rippling along the horizon – framed almost like miniature cutscenes. They don’t interrupt play, but they do reinforce the sense that this is a world designed to be observed as much as traversed at pace. Occasionally, it borders on visual overload, but that busyness feels intentional rather than accidental.

Combat follows the same principles. Battles unfold as rapid sequences of exaggerated animation: characters darting in and out, monsters reacting with theatrical timing, weapons cutting wide arcs through the air. It’s busy, sometimes noisy, but rarely confusing. Impact frames, colour cues, and clear silhouettes make each action legible, even when a lot is happening at once.

Mechanically, Monster Hunter Stories 3 sticks to familiar ground before gradually adding layers. Combat still revolves around a rock-paper-scissors system of attack types – Technical, Speed, and Power – with each countering another. Different monsters and weapon sets naturally gravitate toward particular styles, and learning those tendencies remains key. On top of that sit items, team attacks, monster synergies, buffs, and multi-stage attacks and weapon abilities. What could feel unwieldy instead unfolds at a steady pace, helped along by a visual language that makes cause and effect easy to grasp.

All about the stories

What’s interesting is how closely this mirrors the game’s broader structure. Monster Hunter Stories 3 is recognisably Monster Hunter: explore, fight, gather materials, upgrade gear, repeat. But the experience is broken into smaller, more contained chunks. Areas are more compact than in the mainline series, yet densely so and often vertical, with collectibles, Poogies (comedy pigs to find), side-quests, and optional encounters tucked away in corners.

The narrative approach reflects that modularity. Rather than pushing a single, uninterrupted main plot, Monster Hunter Stories 3 frames much of its storytelling around your companions. Each party member has a short, self-contained arc tied to specific locations, delivered episodically. These stories unlock gear and weapons while fleshing out a cast that leans knowingly into anime archetypes. Crucially, they also provide a reason to step away from the main quest without it feeling like busywork, in effect, a neat way to hide the 'grind' all anime RPGs rely upon.

Monster raising remains the series’ biggest point of difference from mainline Monster Hunter. The Pokémon comparisons are obvious, but the systems here have their own identity. You raid nests, steal eggs, hatch monsters, then either raise them or harvest their DNA to strengthen others. Slotting coloured DNA into matching grids triggers 'bingo' bonuses, while defeating a region’s dominant monster unlocks that environment for breeding. Releasing the right monsters into suitable habitats improves the quality of future eggs. It’s dense with systems, and potentially intimidating, but the presentation keeps it playful rather than clinical.

After going hands-on, the most compelling thing about Monster Hunter Stories 3 is how tightly bound its visuals and mechanics feel. This isn’t Monster Hunter dressed up in anime visuals, but Monster Hunter reinterpreted through them. Animation timing, world layout, and combat all feed back into that central idea. There’s still plenty left to judge over longer play sessions, particularly whether the main story stacks up and does the grind for weapon parts and stat levelling overwhelm the fun. Still, even at this stage, Monster Hunter Stories 3 feels confident in what it wants to be: an anime RPG that will make fans egg-static.

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Ian Dean is Editor, Digital Arts & 3D at Creative Bloq, and the former editor of many leading magazines. These titles included ImagineFX, 3D World and video game titles Play and Official PlayStation Magazine. Ian launched Xbox magazine X360 and edited PlayStation World. For Creative Bloq, Ian combines his experiences to bring the latest news on digital art, VFX and video games and tech, and in his spare time he doodles in Procreate, ArtRage, and Rebelle while finding time to play Xbox and PS5.

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