Monster Hunter Wilds
Photo taken by Jason Miller @itstailtime.com
The Real Monsters were the Friends we made along the way.
I started playing monster hunter at mh3 ultimate for the 3ds. I had no fucking idea what I was doing and no idea how to even start a mission without the help of my mh sherpa and current webmaster. That same feeling came back in Monster Hunter Wilds with avengeance when simply trying to play multiplayer with my friends. Do I join tge same lobby, a link party or a link environment? Please! That is an honest question I still don't know the answer to. From what I can tell if you are in the same lobby you can join eachothers posted quests unless you are in the middle of any story shit so you basically have to beat the game to play multiplayer. Environment links are for running around and dicking about ad hoc hunting monsters in free roam I think? And link party is sort of an in between way to group up with people either in environment links or lobby quests? I DON'T KNOW! ITS TOO COMPLICATED! When I played Rise I was like wow they finally did it, I can easily play multiplayer with my friends without having to navigate a bunch of menus or walk up 3 flights of stairs to get to a multiplayer hub.
Complaint number 2, why won't the funny cats make me a big delicious feast that would be lethal to eat in real life. Now I gotta grill on a camp stove by myself? Gimmie that back capcom.
One thing about world and wilds that is present in the older games is the whimsical tone. I know these are trying to be a big more grounded and realistic but I really did love the lack of seriousness, all the puns, and goofy animations. The older games were also brighter and more colorful, the music in the hub worlds felt cozy and fun. I wanted to go to the village in real life and eat the big meal and rub my tummy in a hammock. The tone is there a little in this game but not as much. Idealy that will be more present in the next game the rise team works on. Not a big deal but i miss it a little.
Complaint 3, story mode. I'm a souls fan so I really appreciate story you have to dig for and am completely averse to story that is forcibly shoved down my throat. I like to be wined and dined by my story, i like when the story plays hard to get, i like when the story doesn't want me to know whats going on. This approach is great cuz if the story sucks and has nothing to say you can also ignore it entirely. Its a win win. Controversial statement here, Monster hunter as a franchise has a bad story and thats fine. Its a flimsy set dressing excuse for you to fight monsters, it serves its purpose, not to be read into. The mire you read into it the worse it becomes. Its like when pokemon starts questioning the ethics of capturing pokemon. We all have an agreement to pretend pokemon are cool with being captured and fighting for sport, cuz its a fun game. But the second the game draws attention to it you go "yeah that is fucked up, how do you justify this" the answer is they dont and what ur doing is bad, but you know if the game takes a strong stance that the core gameplay loop is morally wrong there would be no franchise. So ultimately nothing is said and nothing changes. Mh is the same, your killing monsters for the ecology or whatever but ultimately you are killing way more monsters than is reasonable. So even trying to justify it calls attention to how fucked up it is. My proposed solution is dont. Don't bring up the reason for hunting monsters the reason is that its a fun game and fun to do. I dont need to see the article some hack writes every mh release that says, "are you actually the bad guy? Is hunting monsters indiscriminately, wrong? I must be the only person who has ever had this onteresting and original thought." Yeah obviously you are bad if your trying to account for the actions you perform in the game, the player motivation to kill 20 monsters is to make some new shoes. We aint playing a prestiege story game that wants to just be a movie. Save those questions for last of us when you have to marally justify killing 20 people every 10 min, even the answer to that can be chalked up to the need for gameplay.
The story has another major problem though. It wont let me play the fuckin game. So much of the story your stuck on bird back at a set speed listening to characters talk about the story I don't care about while I ignore them and grapple every item not nailed down like I'm on a an interactive universal studios ride. I just wanna hunt the big cool monsters, and I gotta slow down to hit a button to look at the pretty graphics. Let me look at the graphics on my own I say. Because of how hard it was to play multiplayer while still in the story I ended up rushing through the campaign solo just so I could play the multiplayer game with my friends.
Complaint 4, the difficulty sorta. When I say difficulty I mean a couple things, both in terms of knowlege and in gameplay. To start I do likr the seikret conceptually. I like riding around on a mount as much as the next guy an I even like autopilot to some extent but because of that, I have no idea how to navigate the map on my own. And these new maps are cool and I would like to explore them, but the autopilot realmy did make me unable to bring myself to do that. I know I can turn it off but I love optimization like most people. I wish they had been more like palimutes from rise because you still had to control them, they were fun to control and you could dog drift which is pretty rad.
As for the combat itself, its a little too easy. At least in low rank. I only carted once or twice in low rank because of how careless I was being. High rank the tempered gore magala still kicks my ass. In order to be fair I went back and started playing generations ultimate to see the difficulty difference. Its definitely harder but I will say It wasnt exactly hard in a way I enjoyed. I felt like I spent more time healing up then actually doing anything cool with my weapon. So the easier difficulty isnt all bad. I think the monsters may just need to be a bit more aggressive or at least have higher thresholds for being stunlocked. If you can get 4 people with strong meta builds you can lock a monster down so hard its more of a slaughter than a hunt.
Speaking of combat its time for some positives. I live the combat in this game. The new defensive techniques are super fun to pull off and knocking a monster out cold as it charges at you is the whole reason I play this game. The wounding system feels great especially if you make a build around it. Being able to set up a bunch of wounds and cash them in all at once with a focus strike is pretty sick. I love the offeset slashes and perfect gaurds especially with the greatsword. Now that it can have a defensive playstyle I finally put in the effort to learn it. These mechanics are more fun then the ones in GU at least in my opinion, and there is no way you would be able to pull off half of these moves if the hitboxes from GU were present here.
Another great addition to the series is being able to have a good armor build and not look like a complet asshole. Layered armor makes the fashion top notch in this game. I now have a reason to grind out sets I dont plan on using for their stats.
I wish the color custom color sections were a little bit more robust, but I'm sure that would be way more work.
A big part of every games popularity is monster count. Obviously since this is a new entry the monster count isnt crazy high but it is composed of a majority of new interesting monsters and new types. Like the cephalapod monsters. Getting able to fight a giant octopus and cut off all its tentacles is probably one of the more memorable moments of the game for me. I really look forward to the point in the game's life when the monster count is at least double. Hopefully it wont be too long till they pull in the rest of the monsters from world.
One of the coolest parts of this game that is unfortunately not really noticeable is that all the maps are physically comnected. What sucks is that the story rarely demonstrates this to you and that I almost always fast travel making its connectivity pointeless. I feel that its possible that they wanted monsters to be able to change locales at will so you could end up fighting them in all different maps in one hunt but it may have got cut for one reason or another. I think its a very cool experiment that I hope pays off later in the franchise.
Overall despite my many gripes, its still a monster hunter game and I am fully on board. It lacks the same feeling of being able to play a AAA console version of monster hunter with a full controller for the first time but its a nice new entry. That said I look forward to the generations ultimate equivalent of the bigger budget console games like world and rise. Its a solid game but may be something I revisit after an expansion or whenever my friends are able to play.
I give Monster hunter wilds :
7 wyvern "milks" out of 10.
(Compared to other monster hunter games, its leagues above most other slop coming out these days)