Monster Hunter Wilds is Too Good
Like many gamers, over the past week or so, I've been absolutely buried neck deep in Monster Hunter Wilds, the newest entry in the Monster Hunter series by prolific developer, Capcom.
Let me tell you, these games are... Sticky. There's no way to get it off your fingers. If you're anything like me, once you're invested in a Monster Hunter game, it's difficult to explain just how much it holds onto your brain and haunts your every waking moment. This is a game series that feeds hyperfixation; sticks it's claws into you and simply refuses to let go. Every single Monster Hunter title is like this, but Wilds offers some additions to the traditional formula that makes it extra-interesting to me.
First, I wanna give you a rundown of the basic mechanics of the series as a whole, in case you're not familiar. You can skip that section if you're already familiar with the games, but, I wouldn't. I think it's nice.
How These Games Work
Your goal is to hunt monsters. But before you can do that, you'll need to pick a specific weapon that you'd like to use, which feels a bit like choosing a character in a fighting game. Each weapon has a learning curve associated with it, and offers individual strengths and weaknesses over other weapon types. Some are slow or fast, aggressive or passive, offensive or defensive. All of them are used to kill monsters, and they're pretty good at doing that once you've spent time learning what your weapon specifically does, and you've gotten good at weilding it. My favorite weapons are the Hammer, a slow but surprisingly mobile weapon that offers high damage and the ability to put monsters into a knockdown state by hitting them on the head, and the Greatsword, a slow, hulking, giant sword that you can charge up to cleave through monsters' bodies for massive damage. Each weapon will offer something a little different to each player who chooses them.
Then, you'll accept a quest, and go on a hunt. Depending on the game, these hunts may have slightly different mechanics, but in all of them, your goal is to run around in a big jungle or desert or cave system looking for a big beastie. Once you've found it, the fight begins. Hunts play out a little bit like a cross between the deliberate pace of Dark Souls, and the bombastic insanity of Devil May Cry. There's a focus on health and stamina management over the course of a fight, and you'll want to carefully observe what the monster does in order to dodge away from it's attacks at opportune times, and find moments where you can punish accordingly. Sometimes, the monster will get extremely angry and go into a hyper-aggressive state, learning new moves and generally being a bit harder overall. This mixes up the flow of combat, and forces you to pay attention to what's going on.
Once you've reduced the monster's health to zero, it dies. Shocker! You'll then have an opportunity to carve parts off of that monster. Maybe you'll get teeth, or fur, or bones, or scales. After the hunt is officially completed and you're looking at the results screen, you'll get more of these rewards, more of these monster parts.
After returning to your home base, you can use these monster parts to make new equipment. Stronger weapons or armor that feature better stats, elemental resistances, unique skills with effects that may matter to your overall "build". There is no real progression within Monster Hunter that is "experience point" or "level" based. Almost all character progression is through this equipment system. This means that in order to get better gear, you'll need to hunt more monsters and gather more monster parts.
This cycle deliciously repeats. Fight strong monsters. Get their parts. Make better gear so that you can fight stronger monsters. Over and over again, Monster Hunter asks you to go out into the wild and prove what you're made of, so that you can turn a monster's tailbone into your next piece of armor.
This whole time, you're also getting better at the weapon you've chosen. You'll start to find optimal rotations of moves that afford you the maximum damage possible within a specific section of time, like say, a monster's knockdown period. You're not just getting better through equipment, you're getting better at the game, and you're becoming one with the weapon you've chosen.
This delicious cycle of equipment upgrade focused progression, as well as the game asking you to improve at the weapon you're playing, hits my brain like nothing else. Monster Hunter is a game you can spend hundreds of hours getting really good at, and it's one of the few games that I think genuinely earns it's playtime. Every single second of this game is just juicy fucking good.
Monster Hunter Wilds has all of this goodness, in the same way that every Monster Hunter does. However, I think it offers some great new stuff that makes the game extra enjoyable for me. One of the biggest reasons is something that I actually couldn't have possibly seen coming, as someone who is familiar with the older titles.
Monster Hunter Wilds has a good story.
The Narrative
Monster Hunter games do not typically feature strong narratives. These games have traditionally offered extremely paper-thin plots, exclusively existing to lead you along the path between fights. Something something about the sanctity of nature and the restoration of the natral ecosystem, yeah yeah okay, let me put my hammer into a big creature's forehead, thank you.
That may seem a bit shitty of me, but, really, these games' stories are nothing to write home about, and often don't matter in the slightest. You could ignore every bit of dialogue, and come out on the other side of the experience entirely satisfied. The games don't even really try to make you care. They more often just want you to play.
Monster Hunter World, released in 2018, attempts to fix this by forcing the player through a single-player focused campaign with a huge narrative and big setpiece moments. However, I kind of hate this game for forcing me to engage with it's story, because I think the story is... bad. It sort of feels like the old Monster Hunter style of storytelling, except this time, the game forces you to pay attention to it. It doesn't offer any particularly striking characters or wildly interesting plot points. I found myself almost suffering through it, desperately trying to get to the point where they would just let me play the goddamn game. In a game series that has traditionally given you free reign to experience it at your own pace, it's startling to have to watch unskippable cutscenes and awkwardly wade through missions at a snail's pace while you follow NPCs around, who always seem to walk slower than you'd like them to. It's fucking MADDENING stuff.
When I saw that Wilds would very much be following in World's footsteps, focusing on a single-player narrative structure, it very much concerned me. However, I'm happy to say that this story is VERY well written, and held my interest the entire time. It has genuinely good characters, involved in a plot that really connects you to both the world, and the people that inhabit it. There are parts of this game that had me so hype, I could barely sit still. The "by my own order" scene is some genuine shounen hype shit, in the best possible way.
One of these characters, the one featured in the picture a couple of paragraphs above this, Nata, is a joy. I love this boy so much, and I want to see him happy. I want to stress that Monster Hunter has simply never made me feel this way about a character. The fact that this game does it should sell you on the quality of it's narrative. I think if you walked into this game and skipped all of the dialogue, you would genuinely be missing a core part of what makes the whole thing enjoyable. It's really good stuff.
New Weapon Abilities
Okay, that's enough about the narrative. These games are about killing shit. Let's talk about the cool new ways that you can kill shit.
In older Monster Hunter titles, certain weapons would offer you the ability to parry the monster's attacks. However, it was sort of a toss up whether or not your specific weapon would get an ability like that. Only certain weapons, with certain additional moves equipped to your character, would allow you to parry monster attacks.
The developers of Monster Hunter Wilds, in their infinite wisdom, realized that parrying the monster's attacks is insanely fucking cool. Once you have an ability like this, you're able to actually play with the monster's ability to attack you, rather than simply being forced to position yourself to avoid it, or dodge out of the way. Because of that, they've given most weapons in the game some way to interact with monsters mid-attack, spread across 2 new systems: Perfect Guard, and Offset Attacks.
Let's start with Perfect Guarding. Some weapons in Monster Hunter (about half of them) have the ability to block attacks by holding a button. Blocking a monster's attack will consume some stamina, hurt you a bit, and knock you backwards. Traditionally, this ability is useful, but not something you'll want to be doing often. Because of these downsides, it's better to simply reposition yourself to not get hit, and blocking is something that's usually done as a last second option, if there's no other way to avoid taking considerable damage.
Now, all of these weapons that can block have been given the ability to Perfect Guard. If you time your block right before the monster hits you with an attack, you'll flash white, lose less stamina, lose no health, and stand your ground instead of being knocked back. Depending on the monster, and the attack used, you may even enter a Power Clash with the monster. This is a moment where the two of you are locked together, pushing against one another, fighting for control. If you can mash your attack button fast enough, you'll push the monster backwards into a short knockdown where you can get some extra damage in.
And then we have Offset Attacks. This is, conceptually, an option preseted to weapons that can't block, to give them the ability to interact with monsters in a similar way. Your weapon will have a specific attack that, if timed correctly so that it perfectly clashes with a monster's attack, will play a huge flashy animation where you knock the monster backwards, and you'll get an opportunity to perfrom a super special huge attack that you don't normally get access to.
These options are incredibly cool, because they've essentially leveled the play field in terms of mid-monster-attack interaction. While this used to be sectioned off into niche applications on specific weapon types, now EVERYONE has an opportunity to fuel their insatiable parry-lust.