There’s a new Monster Hunter game out now. You know what that means, right?
It means I probably won’t be playing much else this month.
Monster Hunter Wilds is the follow-up to 2018’s Monster Hunter World. It’s a slightly different experience than you’d get with the more Nintendo-y MH games; the MHW games are more focused on appealing to a wider audience to bring in new players and, being completely un-portable, only support online multiplayer. That’s already a knock in my book, because 50% of the fun of Monster Hunter is getting together with my brother to hunt locally.
That factor aside, I’ve had a lot of fun with Wilds over the first week. While not a single one of the pre-release trailers got me hyped in any way, I’m happy to report that the game is just as good as or better than any that came before it. Which is what you’d hope for from a sequel. It’s been a while since I’ve played either World or Rise, so I was a bit rusty at first, but I got back into the swing of things pretty quickly. At least as far as basic mechanics go.
There are a lot of little changes and new features in Wilds, and a number of those are still tripping me up. To be quite frank, I still have a poor understanding of how the online system works. And also my PS5’s wi-fi connection is pretty dodgy and disconnects at random times, so it’s a bit of a crapshoot for me anyway. Fortunately, the SOS flare makes it easy to ignore the lobbies and parties and whatever, and just hop into a quest or summon other players to your own. And if nobody shows up after a few minutes of firing off your flare, the game will spawn in NPC hunters for you now. Neat!
The revamped item box interface took me a long time to figure out. Upgrading armor is also super unintuitive now (it didn’t help that it took ten hours to actually unlock the feature. WHY?). The map is generally nice, but I would like a simpler way to fast travel, please. I don’t really get the point of the Ingredient Centre or whatever it’s called; thanks for the rations but why do we need a whole menu for this? Fishing just doesn’t seem to work; I’ve tried many times for many minutes, and I can’t get a fish to even nibble the lure.
Those are my teeny-tiny gripes for now. I’m sure that I’ll either figure them out or learn to ignore them in time, none are actually a problem in any way. The thing that actually bothers me is the sheer volume of story in this game. I know Capcom went to a lot of trouble to try to write a compelling, emotional narrative for this big blockbuster game, but I just don’t care. It’s not what I play Monster Hunter for, and it’s not interesting enough to really add anything to the experience. It just forces you through numerous cutscenes and endless dialogue and so many times when the game wrenches control away from you. I, personally, would like to go back to the times when the story in Monster Hunter was five text boxes after an Urgent hunt.
The other thing that’s driving me nuts are the story NPC characters that follow you around and chatter at you endlessly (“You can carve small monsters, too!”). It’s not nearly as bad as the pawn chatter in Dragon’s Dogma, Capcom’s other kill-giant-dragons game, but it’s still annoying. Compounding the issue is that palico partners can now speak English, which is a terrible curse, since they actually never shut up. I initially thought that the old-school meowing would be more annoying, but I was wrong. So very wrong. I miss my silent palamute from Rise.
But hey! The core gameplay is still rock-solid! That’s why I’m here, so I’m pretty darn happy about that. I don’t think there are any major changes to how combat operates on a fundamental level. The switch axe, my weapon of choice, now has a slick counter move, which is much appreciated. It’s not 100% ingrained into my muscle memory yet, but we’re getting there. I think there are actually two new counter abilities, but I haven’t really learned how to do the one for axe mode yet, and the tutorial made it seem like the timing is too precise for my rusty old reflexes anyway.
What is different is Wilds’ main gimmick: the wound system. In previous games, you could break monsters’ parts to earn bonus rewards at the end of a hunt, but this goes way beyond that. Now, as you’re fighting a monster, if you keep hitting the same spot over and over, you’ll see a glowing wound form. If you attack that wounded area, you’ll then cause more damage than usual. Going one step further, if you use a special attack on the wound, you’ll do massive damage that will often topple the monster over, giving you a huge opening to pile on even more damage. Honestly, it’s felt a little broken in my favour while I’m still going though the story, though I’m assuming that once I bump up to High Rank it’ll seem less overpowered.
Following that, Wilds has been… very easy so far. I know I’m an MH vet and that I’m still only in the story half of the game, which is always much easier, but still. I’ve only been knocked out once in about 10 hours, and only because I wasn’t really paying attention to what I was doing. I’m eager to get up to High Rank and square up against some truly dangerous monsters.
A tiny new feature is that you can now hold the touch pad to end a quest immediately after slaying/capturing a monster. It’s not like waiting the full minute before going back to camp is a huge hassle, but having the choice to skip that timer is cool.
Finally, the most important thing in a Monster Hunter game: the monsters. Wilds has a fairly paltry gang of 29 monsters (compared to Rise’s 46 at launch), though 20 of them are brand new. I didn’t pay much attention to the pre-release material, so I had little knowledge of what I’d be going up against. Most of the new monsters I’ve gone up against so far have been really cool! Chatacabra is your run-of-the-mill boring tutorial monster, and the rock leviathan guy is just a weak Agnaktor without fire powers, but the rest have been really neat! Probably my favourite so far has been the weird plague-doctor-bird-thing; Rompopolo, I believe it’s called. It’s not a particularly challenging fight, but the creature is just so damned odd-looking and creepy that I can’t help but be obsessed with it. Having fought half the roster at the time of this writing, I’m looking forward to seeing who’s left to meet!
The returning monsters are… less impressive. For starters, we get Congalala, Blangonga, and Gypceros, which nobody has ever liked. Then of course you have to have Rathian and Rathalos which everyone’s kind of over but it’s Monster Hunter law that they appear. That leaves four more legacy monsters: Nerscylla, Gore Magala, and two that I don’t know yet. Nerscylla’s cool, but also an easy beginner monster (that first appears halfway through the game). Gore Magala is one of my all-time favourites, so I’m very happy that it’s here. I can only hope that the last two aren’t Plesioth and Tigrex, but Capcom loves Plesioth and Tigrex.
So all in all, huge success! And it’s only going to get better once the story is done and out of the way and I can simply focus on the hunts. I get that this is supposed to be a AAA-style game, but did it really need dozens of walk-and-talk segments?
I also streamed the first couple hours of the game last Friday. If you want to see just how long it takes to get to any real game play, go and check those out. I say “those” because my PS5’s connection pooed out halfway through so the stream is broken up into two VODs. And the DualSense’s mic technically worked well enough, but the quality is definitely a few steps down from what I’d like. I’m never streaming directly through the PS5 again.