I may have put close to 70 hours into Monster Hunter Freedom but I’m still learning new things about the game’s subsystems. The basics of the game are covered well in-game and in the manual but beyond that a lot of the game has to be discovered through experimentation. Fortunately, there are a lot of guides online.
The official site is Flash-powered with no HTML links on the front page but this link will allow you to navigate through the site. The most useful part of the site is the weapons guide which (unlike the one found in the manual) provides suggestions for attack combos.
Brady Games has a few free mini-guides in PDF form covering the controls, item combos and monsters. The controls guide repeats information found on the official site and in the manual but the guides for item combos and monsters are essential. The separate guides weigh in at a hefty 200-plus megabytes but the 5MB single-file version is good enough.
The most useful of the GameFAQs guides would be the Armor Skills guide and the Rathalos guide. The former explains the inscrutable skills in the game while the latter will help a lot of frustrated hunters as they try to make the difficult transition from three-star quests to four-star quests. The Weapons Guide would be a contender if it had included the material requirements for the weapons as well as their attack value.
The Skills, Attributes and Felynes guide mostly covers the same ground as the Armor Skills guide but it goes further in that it also covers Felyne whim skills obtained after eating in the Felyne Kitchen.
Capcom, for whatever reason, opted to omit the Infrastructure Mode connectivity that was available in the Japanese version, Monster Hunter Portable. However, a workaround does exist. It’s meant for users of Xlink Kai and Datel WiFi Max but others will find it invaluable.
One final tip for those who haven’t got the game yet. The game is available in Malaysia in both Region 1 and Region 3 flavours and I’d recommend getting the Region 3 version since it includes a booklet with a lot of semi-useful game data. I say semi-useful because the booklet is in Chinese but it’s easy to make out the important data. It may seem redundant since it has the same information as most of the guides above but it’s good to have a hard copy close at hand when you’re playing.
