Health bars make sense in most video games. When fighting a generic enemy or are facing a challenging boss battle, having an indication of how much damage has been dealt and how much longer you need to survive is essential. I couldn’t imagine playing through Elden Ring without such a visual presence, because its absence would alter how we approach combat and the pacing of boss battles, which ask you to learn how they look, move, and react to your actions. In Monster Hunter though, the absence of a health bar is deliberate and necessary.
I don’t need to tell you that Monster Hunter Wilds is a hard game to wrap your head around. Despite being the easiest and most approachable game in the series to date, those who have never touched an entry before will still spend hours trying to figure everything out. You would think a health bar would make defeating monsters and learning how to play the game much easier, but I promise it would have the exact opposite effect. So don’t you go installing mods that put gaudy health bars on the screen above every single creature.
Only Cowards Would Use Health Bars In Monster Hunter
Every monster you stumble across behaves in different ways, existing in deliberately catered ecosystems you can choose to either respect or disrupt. While you have health and stamina bars to keep an eye on, all the creatures, great and small, you encounter behave differently. Your job is to analyze how they react once attacked in terms of animation, appearance, alongside their general behaviour.
Unless you are absurdly overpowered or working with players with a ridiculous level of knowledge, most hunts you engage in will take at least five minutes, and the hardest encounters can take the better part of an hour if you really get stuck in.
The beauty of Monster Hunter’s lack of a traditional health bar in encounters like this is how it grounds every single action you take in the world. The majority of weapons are clumsy and cumbersome by design, which makes the act of mastering them and pulling off truly amazing moves all the more satisfying. This is only possible by learning the time and power it takes to use each weapon combined with mastering the behaviour of monsters to hit their weak point with maximum effectiveness.
It feels incredible, and the presence of a mandatory health bar all but robs these moments of their majesty. They would cease to exist, because for the whole battle you would know exactly when it was destined to end so long as you dealt out enough punishment. That isn’t what Monster Hunter is about.
And Their Existence Actively Makes The Game Worse
Hunting monsters can be an agonising and monotonous experience on your own. You’re trying to deal as much damage as possible while figuring out the strategies of each creature along with what must be done to counter their attacks. But you are meant to feel overwhelmed, so when you finally break through, you’re on top of the world.
Riding that wave of euphoria as one well-placed strike of your sword suddenly tears into a monster’s armour and brings them to the ground, leaving them vulnerable to a flurry of brutal attacks, is Monster Hunter. This routine is a common part of each hunt, leading to a showdown in a monster’s lair as you desperately try to hang in there and deliver the final blow. You don’t know when it’s coming or if you’ll emerge from this battle alive, but that only furthers the drive to keep on going.
Health bars could make the game easier, and they could make Monster Hunter appeal to a larger audience, but it isn’t worth the damage it would do to the game’s identity. Its design ethos is dependent on trusting players to learn how each weapon works and how monsters behave, and learning the ins and outs of those intricacies is key to victory. Health bars risk changing hunts into generic exercises with a beginning, middle, and end when, for decades, they have been so much more than that.
- Released
-
February 28, 2025
- ESRB
-
T For Teen // Violence, Blood, Crude Humor