Do you remember the first time you saw Bazelgeuse in Monster Hunter World? Of course you do, it’s one of the coolest moments in gaming history. For many of you (Redditors specifically) it was probably the most important moment of your entire life.
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The way Bazelgeuse announces his arrival is easily one of the best monster entrances of all time, and I couldn’t help feeling his absence in Monster Hunter Wilds.
Look Out, Here Comes The Bazelgeuse
I’m sure you don’t need a reminder, but I’ll give you one anyway. You’ve recently started High Rank in Monster Hunter World and you’re working on raising your hunting rank while scrounging up as many purple investigation tracks as you can find. You’re out on a typical expedition, gathering parts and XP from some random wyvern you’ve hunted a hundred times. Nothing is out of the ordinary, until, all of a sudden, without warning, the music dramatically changes to the most dreadful sound you’ve ever heard.
It’s like Ride of the Valkyries and Michael Myers’ theme song are playing at the same time, and you know, instinctively, something very bad is about to happen. You swing the camera around looking in every direction. You look left – nothing. You look right – nada. Sweat is pouring down your face when you finally realize you have to look up, but it’s already too late.
Rocks start to rain from the sky, crashing down around you and your target monster who you’ve completely forgotten about at this point. You’re suddenly surrounded by watermelon-sized stones, and more are smacking into the ground every second. What are these things? Monster eggs? Monster poop!? They start exploding. “Oh my God,” you realize. “They’re f*cking bombs!” You dive for cover, but there’s nowhere to run. You barely survive the attack, and that’s when you see it: the biggest, ugliest flying monster you’ve ever seen, and it’s running right at you.
If I Say Its Name Three Times Will Bazelgeuse Come To Wilds?
There were 20 Monster Hunter games before Bazelgeuse (henceforth affectionately referred to as Bagel) was introduced in World, and all of those instantly became de-canonized the first time Bagel did its signature carpet bomb attack on me. What a brilliant monster this one is, not just because of the way it fights, but because of the way it’s introduced.
After dozens of hours of grinding away all of the novelty in World, Bagel shows up just at the right time to inject some much-needed surprise and danger into High Rank. Does constantly getting your hunts invaded by Bagel start to get annoying? Absolutely. Do I want to see Bagel in every Monster Hunter game moving forward? Absolutely.
I’m disappointed there’s no Bagel in Monster Hunter Wilds, and more generally disappointed there’s nothing Bagel-like anywhere in the game. It’s too late to introduce it now. The brilliant thing about Bagel is that you have no idea it’s coming. You think you’re doing a routine hunt and then suddenly you’re in a tango with a monster you’ve never seen, doing attacks you didn’t even know were possible. If Bagel just shows up in an upcoming content update it won’t have the same effect, because we’ll be able to see it coming.
There’s no third act energy shot in Wilds, which is one of the game’s huge misses. Nothing happens to remind you to expect the unexpected, which was Bagel’s most important purpose in World. They hit a home run with this monster’s design and theme song, but even if Capcom decided never to use Bagel again, these games would still need a Bagel-like moment.
There are a lot of reasons that World felt like a more fleshed-out game than Wilds, but the Bazelgeuse intro is the one that stands out to me the most. Dual-wielding weapons is cool and the wound system is fun, but does Wilds give us anything truly iconic? The World needed Bagel, but so do the Wilds.
- Released
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February 28, 2025
- ESRB
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T For Teen // Violence, Blood, Crude Humor