Monster Hunter has always been about killing wild animals to make awesome hats from their corpses. You rinse and repeat this cycle for hundreds of hours while upgrading an arsenal of weapons, armour, and other equipment so you can kill even bigger monsters and make even cooler fashion accessories out of their decaying hides. It’s the way of life, and judging by the player count, millions of people are okay with accepting that awkward ethical quandary.
But as I play Wilds around friends and family, I’ve come to learn that normal people are not the most accepting of a game where the core drive is murdering wildlife and infiltrating their volatile ecosystems. And I get it, I really do. But we’re talking about virtual creatures, and we should have the emotional intelligence to realise we aren’t hurting any living creature for real, and in the context of this game’s narrative, we only ever do battle with those on deadly rampages.
Monsters Are A Necessary Sacrifice In The Forbidden Lands
Wilds, more so than most other games in the series, touches on the roles monsters play in the world alongside the humans who call it home. For the most part, monsters and humans have learned to exist alongside one another, share resources, and stay out of each other’s way to avoid any needless bloodshed. But sometimes, maintaining this delicate balance is unfortunately not possible. Carnivorous monsters will hunt down food, whether it’s other monsters or human beings who dare fall into their clutches.
If this happens, it’s only natural for the local hunter to be dispatched to deal with it. If some person I cared for in real life was attacked by a wild animal with the intent to kill them, there is zero chance I’d hesitate to jump in and help. The act of hurting an animal doesn’t factor into the equation when it’s a life-or-death situation, and I think people shaking their heads at the moment-to-moment gameplay in Monster Hunter are forgetting that… and that it’s meant to be an absurd and seldom serious fantasy.
One of these days it might be interesting for the player to meet a character who takes so much pride in the act of hunting that they risk hurting the ecosystem they claim to protect.
Wilds, at least so far, follows a scouting party entering a new continent for the first time as they make contact with a civilization that shares similar experiences with monsters, who in this world occupy the roles of predators, prey, and livestock much like our own. But we live in a world where animals have largely been domesticated, and those who haven’t been are left to their own devices. In the less advanced world of Monster Hunter, the act of taking down monsters or ensuring their numbers remain in control is a part of an average Joe’s existence.
Spin-off titles like Monster Hunter Stories have you fighting creatures, but here it is far more about the role they play in society and how, over centuries of existence, they have become parts of culture, history, tradition to the point where some of them are even worshipped. It’s rather easy to look at the base concept of Monster Hunter and assume it immediately encourages you to murder every single animal you come across, but that simply isn’t the case. You can head into the open world and chill with a pack of grazing herbivores until the sun goes down.
But There Is A Dissonance Between Gameplay And Narrative
While the narrative of games like World, Rise, Stories, and Wilds are largely sympathetic to the overall existence of Monsters, there is a blatant dissonance between the messages that Capcom tries to convey and how a player decides to act. If you’re so inclined, you can slice and pilfer every single creature you come across, becoming the video game equivalent of a Big Game Hunter with buckshot in hand. Or in this case, a kitted-out crossbow.
There’s also the gameplay loop of embarking on hunts again and again to gather all the materials needed to craft rare armour and weapons, turning narratively justified encounters with iconic monsters into a conveyor belt of slaughter where you team up with fellow players all after the same binary goal. When a friend walks into the room, and I’m slicing the skin from a creature I have spent the past 30 minutes systematically beating to death, I understand their concern.
I mean, we have no problem with killing fellow humans in the games we play, so why should giant fictional dinosaurs be any different? You aren’t turning them into hats, either.
But it’s also so much fun, so mechanically satisfying, and so rewarding when mastering the use of certain weapons while crafting the greatest equipment each game has to offer. After playing video games for so many years, especially those that involve the fictional death of animals, I have developed a thicker skin, a desensitization to the idea of dispatching living things so an arbitrary goal can be achieved. Yet not everyone is immune to these feelings, especially in a game like Monster Hunter where coordinated slaughter of living creatures is the whole point of the experience.
- Released
-
February 28, 2025
- ESRB
-
T For Teen // Violence, Blood, Crude Humor