Color Associations Examination 2

Game Examined: Monster Hunter Freedom 2.

Color Associations/uses examined: Food, Tactility, Sound.

Please note: The camera's reproduction of the images from a LCD PSP screen has created a loss of chroma and color accuracy.

Monster Hunter 2 is a portable game played on a small PSP screen. Color is important in games such as these because due to portable gaming platforms being less capable of big details, color serves as an immediate indicator of things; color is used to associate the player with familiar objects, such as food for example.

Green and Yellow are used in this case by the game developers to indicate the presence of healthy, natural, earth grown foods. These colors are used in the game to mark gardens, select shrubs, and similar spots of edible vegetation.

Red and Orange are used in the game to indicate meats and other fleshy foods (depicted in the image above).

Blue and violet are used in MH2 to attract players to edible fungi such as mushroom and other quaint delectables.



Sound: The loudness of a color, as stated before, depends on its chroma.



Tactility: Monster Hunter 2 has a myriad of landscapes and an assortment of varied tactile surroundings.



In the image above, the low chroma rocks may seemed solid but the vibrant high chroma red, orange, and yellow colors of the lava flow speak otherwise. Unstable, melting hot to the touch, and bubbling, the environment that the video game developers created is not a place that you might want to bathe in.

Playing it safe with earthen colors, Monster Hunter 2 uses green for grass in most landscapes and for textures of growth. Blue and violet are used to depict cold, crunchy snowbanks and brittle environments, with blue being used again for crisp, airy skies.