Thoughts about Monster Hunter

I've been currently the odd one out in my friend groups, both in person and online, with regards to Monster Hunter Wilds. I just don't have it within my budget at the time, meanwhile all my irl friends have just hit credits I think? Most of us have been playing since Gen 3 (some Gen 2 but I never figured it out on my own) and it was always hard to figure out if a Monster Hunter is just easier or if we've just been more experienced. Reality is that it's a bit of both right?

For those out of the loop, Monster Hunter Wilds is the sequel to Capcom's mega blockbuster Monster Hunter World, which did crazy numbers and cemented Monster Hunter as a world wide hit. Worlds brought with it a lot of changes to the Monster Hunter formula and created a sort of rift between "modern" (World, Rise, & now Wilds) vs "classic" (Everything before World, Gen U/XX)

This discussion of if the "modern" games are easier then "classic" will always be a debate that I'm honestly not that interested in having. I think every Monster Hunter could be someone's first and sometimes when a new game like this drops, experienced players who are used to G rank from their previous title come in and decry the new game's difficulty. Happened with World, even after they added harder fights and dropped Iceborne. It will happen every time.

What I will say though is that, while the newer games are really cool in their own rights, there is something missing to them. Some kind of friction that feels lost. I don't know how much of that is difficulty of the fights themselves, simplifying and exposing how skills work, simplifying crafting, exposing damage numbers, etc... Now in Monster Hunter you build for optimal damage, sometimes that differs depending on what weapon you like to use but you usually build one (or one per elemental) and done

I feel like the experience of "building for the fight" is kind of lost. Of course there were always low tier monsters that didn't need such efforts, but some more difficult monsters felt necessary to build around. Maybe it was just elemental resistances, maybe it roars a bunch, maybe it was poison resistance, maybe you needed to build for survival on certain fights. None of that seems relevant in the "modern" games. Monster has double poison? Just bring 10 antidotes and 10 antidote herbs to make more. You're bag can handle it and crafting more antidotes is super easy.

I don't think I'll ever have the sort of experience of fighting the Jhen Mohran again. A huge set piece monster that you fight by riding a sand ship next to it and jumping onto the monster's back. The ship has a health bar and you fail the mission if it gets destroyed. The ship has a dragonator for big damage, but has to be timed carefully. There are also ballistas and cannons that you have to fetch ammo for, as well as a big gong that you can strategically use to flinch Jhen and stop its attack.

We needed skills that let us grab ammo faster, skills that made cannonballs do more damage, and we needed coordination in such a unique way. It was a blast, even the runs we didn't win. 3U added a G rank Jhen as well. At some point we became a well oiled machine with that fight. That initial friction coming into the fight, not knowing what to do and just piecing it together bit by bit was something magical. Honestly that was how Gen 3 felt

I feel bad I didn't engage with Gen 4. I tried 4U with insect glaive and between playing on 3DS, insect glaive being very rough in its initial debut, having binged a bunch of 3U with another group, and just kind of not being accepting of the mounting system (it would get toned down) I just dropped out. But I think I would of still had that magic I described above. I'm a grumpy puss about Gen's styles and moves (and then I played Rise like a huge hypocrite).

While part of me doesn't miss breakable pickaxes/nets and having them in my pouch, it made what items I did bring all that more important. Need to craft out on the field? Better bring some books or else you're getting garbage. Every trek out in Monster Hunter wasn't just to get straight to the monster. We would develop routes to maximize rocks or bugs if needed. Hunting where the monster would be required using context clues, sometimes spreading out, sometimes grabbing psychoserum or that one food skill, or just experience from doing it lots and lots of times.

Wilds just gives you a mount that can run straight to the monster if you've grabbed enough research things, which the creature will bring you to. It kind of has allowed them to build grander maps that are larger in scope, but it feels like the hunting part of Monster Hunter has been left in the dust. Now it is just Monster Killer over and over again. Sometimes just going out for mats in old games or checking the farm was a nice diversion.

So that's the rub I guess. Maybe I'm old man yelling at cloud about things. Which is funny because I enjoyed my time with World (less so with Rise) and I would probably enjoy Wilds. But it'll be for different reasons than my time with "classic" MonHun. You can enjoy both, or just enjoy one. That's fine too as long as you aren't telling others what to enjoy or belittling them for not being "real" hunters. I love to fight the monsters but I miss some of the things that used to happen around that fighting.

Some congratulations have to be in order for Capcom's team since they finally made Monster Hunter a household name in gaming spheres around the world. Would breakable pickaxes and failing item crafts have over 1 million concurrent users on Steam? Probably not, but in this age of YouTube tutorials and wikis, it'd probably do okay. Some of the roughness and friction I enjoyed fighting against had to be sanded down to entice a general audience. I would never be gatekeepy about MonHun, but part of me does miss the very strange and weird little game I played with friends and would have to explain that I need to break a monster's right paw so I can get a material.