Monster Hunter Wilds offers a dizzying array of weapons – all 14 types are available before you have any idea what you’re doing. You can use the Great Sword, Long Sword, Sword & Shield, Dual Blades, Hammer, Hunting Horn, Lance, Gunlance, Switch Axe, Charge Blade, Insect Glaive, Light Bowgun, Heavy Bowgun, and Bow as soon as you start hunting. That’s a whole lot of options, and if you’re a relative newbie to the series like me, it’s one of several early game choices that can trip you up before you even begin.
I avoided getting overwhelmed in the character creator by making my Hunter look like Kaladin from Stormlight Archive, and my Palico look like Liv the Dog, my greyhound.
Meeting Monster Hunter Halfway
This is a series that has, previously, defeated me. I played two dozen hours between Monster Hunter World and Rise, and fell off both before I saw anything that could realistically be described as ‘late game’. It wasn’t so much the difficulty that I didn’t gel with as it was the feeling that the core loop was all that was really there to pull me along, and I just never got to a point where I felt in sync with its rhythm like so many Monster Hunter fanatics seem to.
This time around, Capcom is doing a whole lot to get players like me to make it further. There’s a greater emphasis on story, with quest lines and characters being part of the motivation to go out and hunt. There’s a more open world to explore, rather than isolated maps. The game eases you into the complexities of its mechanics, gradually adding new characters with new roles to your base camp so you don’t need to learn everything all at once. All of this feels designed to get people like me — people who gave up on these games long before rolling credits or stayed away entirely — to give it a try.
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With Capcom grafting so many olive branches onto the familiar tree, I figure I need to meet Monster Hunter Wilds halfway. I’m doing that by resisting the desire to get needlessly overwhelmed. For me, that means looking at that bristling array of armaments and picking one, and only one, and sticking to it.
One Weapon Is Enough
I’ve played enough Monster Hunter (and been around enough online discussions about the series) to know that some of these weapons are a little trickier to use than others. The Hunting Horn and Insect Glaive seem cool — and the Insect Glaive was the one I tried first in World — but I know that, for a noob like me, the Long Sword is my best bet. Good range, good speed, and not too different from, well, a regular sword. It’s the video game weapon I’ve been using since I first picked up Ocarina of Time as a kid. I get the basics.
The thing is: just because the Long Sword is familiar and one of the more approachable weapons in the game, doesn’t mean it’s easy to master. There are a lot of different attacks you can do, and keeping them all straight when you’re about to get set on fire doesn’t always come naturally. But I’m much less likely to master several weapons than I am to master one. So sticking with the Long Sword, instead of swapping around, is my best chance at getting good at the game.
As I make an effort to stick with the game long-term, I’m realizing how unique Monster Hunter is. Sure, fighting games give you a bunch of characters to play, but those characters are designed to be used against each other. They have different strengths that you can learn to use to exploit other characters’ weaknesses. It’s rare that a game gives you this many options in order to exploit the game’s weaknesses. Instead of the familiar rock-paper-scissors fighting games ask you to work through to beat your friends, Monster Hunter asks you to bring a rock, a paper, or some scissors onto the battlefield and see if you can make it work.
To extend this metaphor even further, you know how people will sometimes play rock-paper-scissors by picking one of the three and sticking with it for the whole game? That’s what I’m about to do. Get ready, White Wraith. I’m coming for you with a big ol’ pair of scissors.
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