Monster Hunter has always been a hard game to get into, so much so that for years it had a reputation of being near impenetrable for newcomers. You need to have huge amounts of patience to master its myriad weapons, complicated mechanics, and different strategies to learn in order to take down its menagerie of monsters.
But for the same amount of time, Capcom has been trying to introduce the series to a much bigger audience, one that goes beyond the hardcore subset of fans who, for decades at this point, have been obsessing over how good it feels to conquer its biggest obstacles. Fans who understood that once you cleared these hurdles through your own skill and technique, you would fall in love and do this again and again and again, creating new armour and weapons that compelled you to jump into the fray until the cephadromes came home.
Monster Hunter Wilds Was Always Going To Be More Approachable
However, in order for Monster Hunter to gain international acclaim, something had to give. It needed to open up its world design and simplify its mechanics, or at the very least make the gameplay experience easier for those with no prior knowledge to parse. I remember playing the PS2 original, cooking meat, and dying countless times before running out of patience. It wouldn’t be until Monster Hunter World over a decade later that things would finally click, an epiphany that so many others like me experienced.
Monster Hunter has always been popular in Japan, but recently marketing for the new entry has been everywhere. It is clear that Capcom wants this game to be a very big deal.
The best part about World was that it was still incredibly complicated and challenging in most of the ways you wanted it to be – it just had the politeness to do away with most of the rubbish Capcom had made commonplace over the years. Going on hunts on your lonesome or along with a group of friends was easier than ever, while you no longer needed to tag enemies with paintballs to avoid them loading into a new area and disappearing forever. Larger levels and more varied design across encounters, weapons, and armour also made the act of constant progression more enjoyable than ever.
I spent hundreds of hours in World and its Iceborne expansion, and rarely did I feel lost or like I wasn’t pulling my weight, yet those with a desire to sink deep into the meta of certain weapon strategies could embrace the most complex challenges of the game and feel rewarded.
Rise would emerge a few years later and offer an experience more akin to portable efforts on the 3DS and PSP before being ported to more consoles in the months to come. It was a very different game in many ways, but carried over many of the more approachable parts found in World that developing fans like myself could now jump into without worry.
From here, Monster Hunter was a changed series that understood it needed to appeal to both hardcore fans and folks like me who wanted to relive the brilliance of World again and again. Like anything mainstream, it was going to simplify itself in pursuit of a larger audience or increased profits, so the critical reception to Monster Hunter Wilds is the least surprising thing ever.
But This Casual Approach Is Both A Blessing And A Curse
In his review, our own Eric Switzer was incredibly positive about Monster Hunter Wilds, but couldn’t help but come to the conclusion that the series leaving behind some of its irksome and confusing systems ultimately takes something away from its identity that can’t be replaced. If it went any further in this casual direction, he feared, it would no longer be Monster Hunter.
Previously, if a monster poisoned you in the midst of an extended battle, you would need to pilfer through your inventory and pray you had the resources required to stay alive, but now you have a quick selection that lowers the complication and allows you to focus on the here and now. A great quality-of-life improvement, but for players who have spent the past couple of decades getting used to this and shaping their experience around it, removing it to make combat the core focus isn’t the boon it claims to be.
That’s especially true when combat itself is far easier than it’s ever been and the differentiation of certain weapons and items isn’t what it used to be. You want to spend 40 minutes fighting a monster and felling it by the skin of your teeth, but that doesn’t seem to be the aim anymore. Triumph doesn’t feel the same when there’s not a struggle before it, and that’s a problem for a series that has always lived or died by its feeling of adversity.
An increased focus on narrative and characters in more recent titles also gives a good reason for the difficulty to be toned down. If we want to be invested in this story, dealing with constant roadblocks ruins that focus.
I feel the same way about Monster Hunter Wilds current difficulty predicament than I do after people claim that FromSoftware titles need an easy mode. I understand the desire for these games to be more approachable and easier to conquer, but once you take a step towards a goal like this, there is no turning back. You have opened Pandora’s Box and recapturing what these games used to be is an impossibility.
This is the predicament that Monster Hunter has found itself in, and while it could circumvent it with harder difficulty modes and hunts that are desired to test our mettle in the months and years to come, with a bigger audience holding a specific set of expectations, exactly how far can that new identity be pushed?
The last thing I want is for Monster Hunter to become a matter of spectacle, where the draw is to embark on an adventure to down creatures with ease and play dress-up with their cold corpses without feeling like you’ve earned the privilege. We are still a long way from that reality, but with the release of Wilds, it feels closer than ever.
- Released
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February 28, 2025
- ESRB
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T For Teen // Violence, Blood, Crude Humor