My hunting adventures in Monster Hunter Freedom continue.

I finally managed to slay Rathalos after umpteenth attempts. I felt like a superhero, World Cup winner and a rock god combined when the wyvern slumped to the ground.

The Attack of the Rathalos is an urgent village elder quest available when you’ve cleared every three-star quest and you need to complete it in order to gain access to the four-star quests.

The quest is a toughie for a variety of reasons but mostly because of the time factor. Fifty minutes will just fly by as you’re hunting the Rathalos. The problem with Rathalos isn’t its offensive or defensive abilities; its most aggravating characteristic is its cowardly nature.

This is not a brave creature despite its majesty and size. It may be dubbed the King of the Heavens but Gutless Wonder would be a more apt description. It has an annoying tendency to fly off at the most inconvenient moments — for instance, when you have the upper-hand — and on top of that, it heals itself as well.

You’d think it didn’t want to die at your hands.

There’s a GameFAQs guide specifically for hunting Rathalos which I found useful and I’d like to add my two cents’ worth of advice.

I had planned to use Pitfall Traps to snare the wyvern but unfortunately, wily ol’ Rathalos was on to me and flew away as soon as I set a trap. This happened twice and my attempt to combine my last Net and Trap Tool failed.

I was not pleased.

I had no way of keeping the Rathalos stationary which meant I had almost no chance to use the Small Barrel Bombs and Large Barrel Bombs in my inventory.

So I did it the old-fashioned away: repeatedly bashing it on the head.

This is easier said than done since the head is the business end of Rathalos. It has a painful bite for close-quarter combat and a powerful flame breath to blast you at range.

With experience, however, you’ll not only be able to anticipate his attacks but you’ll be able avoid them and counter with a few swings of your own. Try to curb any impulse to mash the attack buttons. Launching into complex attack combos is not advisable since it leaves you vulnerable.

There are those who would recommend wielding a Great Sword for its high attack value but I found it much too unwieldy and cumbersome a weapon. I much prefer the sword and shield combo and thus relied on the Poison Axe to hunt Rathalos. The Poison Axe only has an attack value of 224 but it’s good enough. It’s also capable of poisoning targets but in my experience the chances of poisoning the target are so slim as to be negligible.

For defence, I would suggest using a Piercing Helmet for the head and Velociprey gear for the rest. The overall defence value of this set is low but the skills conferred are useful.

Piercing Helmet confers the Auto-Guard skill which automatically guards against attacks with your shield as long as your weapon is drawn. Be warned, however, Auto-Guard doesn’t activate if you’re attacking yourself or if you’re hit from behind.

The Velociprey gear, meanwhile, negates knock-outs which is critical since you cannot afford to be seeing stars when Rathalos is in the area.

You’ll be provided with a few Paintballs (two, if memory serves) but you may need a few more since they wear off after about 15 minutes or so. I’ve failed numerous attempts in this quest because I just couldn’t locate Rathalos before time was up. I’ve also been left frustrated when I’ve missed with the Paintball so pack extras.

Happy hunting!

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.