Action RPG

A Monster Hunter For Everyone Isn’t For Anyone

BBG News

I bounced off Monster Hunter: World and Rise pretty quickly. As much as I enjoyed making my character in World, as much as I liked leaping around in Rise, I knew very early in my journey that both games just weren’t for me. With Wilds, it’s a little different. I’m adapting how I play, making my way through slowly, and still probably doing a lot wrong, but I get it. This time, I finally get it.

Part of that is undoubtedly the streamlined approach. While there’s still a mess of alerts and markers that don’t fully make sense to me every time I turn the game on, I feel like I’m hanging in there despite everything. I know, just about, what I’m meant to do next. And I can do it. Just about. That’s more than I could say for my previous two attempts at the series, and I expect to see this one through to the end, even if the end for me is the first set of credits rolling. But at times, I wonder if I’m even playing the game at all.

SOS Flares Make Battles Too Easy For A Game Meant To Challenge You

So far, I’ve only resorted to calling in help once. After one of the story beasts killed me three times in a row, I decided to send up an SOS flare, despite (as usual) not fully understanding how it functioned. This helped me push back the immovable object, but also made me feel too much like an unstoppable force.

In my solo battles, I had whittled the monster down through its first two stages well enough, only carting once, if at all. Then in the final stage, I would be wiped out twice (or thrice), caught out by its area attack that required getting to high enough ground and staying aware of my surroundings. However, with the SOS flare in action, we dealt so much damage so quickly that the beast never even got this area attack off. I was glad to see the back of it, especially with how draining it can be to lose in Monster Hunter given the length of the battles, but it also made me wary.

Finally getting past an enemy that had given me so much trouble already was one thing, but if I were to play the whole game this way, how much of it would I not see? How many challenges, attacks, or epic moments would I miss out on? Not find them easier than they might otherwise have been, but simply not experience them completely? It has meant that I’ve since stuck to a firm rule of not using the SOS function until a beast has gotten the better of me three times, and as a result means I have since not used it at all.

Monster Hunter Wilds Plays Itself

We see this in the exploration too. When moving from camp to camp, tracking fleeing beasts, or following quest markers, the game takes over control. You can wrestle it back at times, if you want to grind out material, ignore the critical path in search of bigger fights, or just actually play the game you’re playing, but by default a huge chunk of Monster Hunter Wilds is an in-engine cutscene. It doesn’t help that the characters and dialogue are so flat – functional for a game meant to be about the hunt, but not compelling enough to hold your attention through reams of dialogue or an enforced slowness as you trek from place to place. You’re encouraged to put the controller down and listen, but there’s nothing worth listening to.

It appears that the game has been intentionally structured to aid players in their progression. When Wilds initially came out and critics cautioned against oversimplification, I was unsure about the viewpoint that this made the game less challenging than it should be if it provided too much assistance. As someone who struggled with the previous versions, I found the idea of a Monster Hunter game that encourages play appealing.

But I understand now the fear that it could go too far. That at a certain point, it wants you to play it so much it stops you from playing it at all. Though more of a lore issue than a mechanics one, I had a similar reaction to the flattening of Dragon Age’s worldbuilding in The Veilguard, making the whole thing feel more dull. I appreciate that for a lot of players, beating Monster Hunter is actually starting Monster Hunter, and the endgame is the real game. But if Capcom has made these choices to help us speed through everything, it doesn’t seem to understand that the more casual players these tweaks appeal to will not be the ones who stick around for 100 hours. The result is a very good game that doesn’t actually seem to suit anyone.

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2025-03-18 01:07

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