QS stands for “Quickshot”, a series of short form review/preview/opinion articles.
Monster Hunter has shown up quite a few times on this blog. In fact, one of the first articles I ever wrote was a Quickshot article on the Monster Hunter short film, Legends of the Guild. It’s a series I quite enjoy, even if there are actually a startling number of aspects of the games that don’t actually mesh with me (I’ve never been a fan of the huge amount of grinding, nor the somewhat lazy Low Rank and High Rank split of quests). Still, I enjoy the games a lot.
The most recent installment, Monster Hunter Wilds, just released, and has been putting in some absurd numbers of copies sold and player count. Let’s talk about it for a short bit!
For anyone who happens to be unfamiliar with the series, rest assured that Monster Hunter is an extremely easy series to summarize. Stick with me here, alright? You’re a hunter, and it’s your job to hunt monsters. And, honestly, it really is as easy as that. You traverse the world tracking down big beasties, slay them, and then carve them for parts (like horns and tails) to upgrade your gear so you can take down even bigger baddies. You usually do this with a Palico by your side (an anthropomorphic cat able to support you while hunting), but the core gist is that you hunt monsters, and that’s about it.
Every installment in the franchise tries to do something to shake up the formula, though, and Wilds accomplishes this by adding a mount for your character to ride around, putting in some new combat mechanics for the actually hunting, and attempting to place a heavier emphasis on storytelling. Two of these three changes work pretty well for Wilds. One of them definitely does not.
The mount (this fuzzy velociraptor creature called a Seikret) is a fantastic addition, and essentially a refinement of the dog-like mount from the previous game. It ferries you around the place to wherever you direct it to go, whether that be the monster you’re fighting or a distant resource you want to collect. It autoruns too, so you can sort your inventory or examine your map all while you make steady progress to your destination, and the Seikret always knows how to take the fastest route. It’s a big time saver, and I can’t imagine not having a mount in all Monster Hunter titles from this point.
Map exploration is also still as enthralling as it was in World, even if there’s arguably a little less incentive to actually explore every nook and cranny. Still, there’s a lot to see and do, and I enjoy wandering around this very beautiful landscape and firing my net at every living thing that moves (I love capturing tiny critters, what can I say?). Fishing isn’t very good, but it’s never been good in Monster Hunter. Everything else is pretty great, and I like the freedom you have in choosing where to build your mini camps that act as fast-travel points (and you can customize them too, which is neat).
Monster Hunter 3 dabbled in water combat (which has yet to ever return), Monster Hunter 4 added verticality and mounting, Monster Hunter Generations included hunting styles (which are awesome, and I pray they return someday), Monster Hunter World brought in the ranged slinger and the clutch claw (the slinger is still here, but my beloved claw is no more), and Monster Hunter Rise introduced wirebugs (which I never jived with outside of exploration, so that’s no big loss to me). Now, this most recent installment introduces the concept of wounding monsters, which is both the simplest mechanic and one of the most dynamic.
It’s very simple in theory. The more you hit a certain spot on the monster, the more you open up a wound that then leads to that spot taking more damage. And, at a certain point, you can unleash a devastating Focus Strike that explodes the wound and deals a ton of damage all at once. It’s flashy, it’s cathartic, and it’s shockingly strategic, as you pick and choose when would be the best time to use a Focus Strike to try and knock the monster off-balance or mess up their upcoming big attack…or, if you’re like me, you do a Focus Strike as soon as you can because it’s flashy and fun and I don’t have the self-control to resist.
My biggest takeaway from the wound system is how it adds another level of control to your hunter character, which I greatly appreciate. I exclusively use the Dual Blades in every Monster Hunter game, and I love them, but it can often feel like I’m just slashing at the ankles of monsters. Mechanics like the wounding system really help me feel like I’m contributing more, and go a long way towards helping me love the game more as a primarily solo player.
The Support Hunter mechanic is also an amazing boon in this regard. For the first time ever (excluding the previous game, but even then only in certain circumstances and only in the DLC) solo players can recruit NPCs instead of either going it alone or wading into the uncharted waters of online multiplayer. It’s so amazing to hunt monsters with a full team, but I don’t have the pressure of getting flamed by hateful online strangers if I underperform. Better yet, each Support Hunter has a specialty different from my own, which really compliments our team-building strategy. I’m especially fond of Olivia and her massive bonking hammer!
As I mentioned above, though, there’s one huge area in which this game falters. Thankfully, by the twenty-ish hour mark, you’re fully past it, but that initial journey can be a slog…because the story is really bad.
Most Monster Hunter games have a lackluster story. Some even have a serviceable, if ultimately forgettable story. Some have a simple but genuinely effective story (looking at you, Monster Hunter 4, my beloved). Wilds is the first time a Monster Hunter game has had an outright bad story, and it’s a shame, because according to the developers they really tried with the narrative this time.
I think I’ve narrowed down my major complaint. Wilds has a story that tells itself like a classic anime-inspired JRPG, but is only a fraction of the length of a traditional JRPG.
See, JRPGs are chock-full of clichés and tropes. I’ll admit to it, and it doesn’t make me love them any less. But they’re filled with “power of friendship” and “heroic speeches” and “dramatic revelations lacking proper foreshadowing” and so on and so forth. But in a typical 80-hour JRPG, this hodgepodge of nonsense usually comes together into a genuinely enjoyable experience. In Wilds‘ 10 hours of story content? You end up with a rushed story that has no time to develop characters, no time to tell a meaningful story, and no time to have any of its plot beats hit home.
Essentially, you’re left with a story that doesn’t have anything to say, but is 100% it’s telling you the most gripping and evocative tale of all time.
I don’t care about the villages we stop at, because we’re at each one for less than an hour. I don’t care about any of the minor NPCs, because none of them have anything interesting going on. I don’t care about this big evil monster we’re chasing, because he has no relevance to our main character and really no plot impact. I don’t care about the classic Monster Hunter “but wait actually this monster was pulling the strings” because it happens so late in the story. I don’t care a single ounce about the central character, Nata, because the rushed story emphasizes his annoying traits and doesn’t build up to any sort of redeeming quality.
It’s also really railroad-y, in that despite Wilds being touted as an open-world game, its plot is the most restrictive and exploration-averse of nearly any game in the series. There’s barely anything to do in the early hours of the game except for a parade of story mode quests, there’s multiple extremely lengthy sections of either just talking to an NPC or walking in a straight line, and it can be a real slog to muster up the motivation to keep moving forward.
It’s an absolute mess, and I wish it wasn’t, but it is. It’s really rough.
But hey, as I said, the story is only a small chunk of the full experience of Wilds! Everything else is genuinely top notch! The combat is great, the soundtrack is as phenomenal as you’d ever expect from the musical geniuses working on the Monster Hunter series, the visuals are superb, I love riding around on the mount, and there’s more character and armor customization options than ever before.
In fact, check out these two photos of my personal hunter! She’s Cinder Fall, modeled of course after Cinder Fall from RWBY! I’m pretty proud of replicating the likeness! Also, rest assured that I did manage to find an eyepatch for her to wear, to really bring the look home!
Anyway, at the end of the day, you should absolutely still play this game. If you’re a long-time fan, or a series newcomer (this is definitely the easiest Monster Hunter game to get into, and also just literally the easiest), Wilds is a great time!
The Contrarian Corner 