Monter Hunter Wilds - Context, personal experience and opinions

This game about hunting monsters is... wild...

Hello! As I said in the previous post, this one will be about Monster Hunter Wilds, one of my favourite games even though I have my complains. This post will contain some spoilers about the monsters, but none of them will be story related! In fact, I won’t talk about the story in this post, only about the game itself - in the future I will do a post talking about the story, the characters and the narrative.

I'd like to talk about how I got into Monster Hunter before I start talking about Wilds. When I was a kid, I saw an ad about Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate in a magazine. It talked about big monsters like Lagiacrus, about farming and crafting new weapons and about being able for the 3DS and the Wii U. Since I had a 3DS, that same summer I asked if I could get the game as a present for having good grades, and my grandparent accepted! We went to a game store, got the game and that same afternoon I was in their house playing with my beloved Switch Axe.

I wasn't a good player and, in that moment, I didn't want to farm since I wasn't used to it, so I never finished the game. I got to defeat Lagiacrus and then I never progressed, so, after lots of hours of trying (only in low rank...), I just stopped playing. Recently I wanted to check how I was doing to remember part of my childhood, and, to my surprise, I realised I never used potions when I was a child, and, of course, my armour was trash (I already knew that since, as I said, I didn't want to farm). I don't know how I managed to get that far (even though it is not far at all), tbh.

When Monster Hunter: World got announced, I was so excited. It's true that I never got really far con 3U, but I LOVED every second of it, and I wanted more. The problem was I didn't have a PS4 nor a good PC that could support the game, so I could not play. That made me sad, but there was no money in that time, so I could do nothing.

In 2021, I got a new PC. It wasn't the best I could get in the time, but it was the best I could get with the money we (my family) had, and later on I got a controller and a new RAM stick. That same year, in December, I finally got to buy Monster Hunter: World, and oh damn, it was so good.

Since then, I have become obsessed with this series. I love the monsters, the weapons, the combat, the maps and even the characters, even though they weren't that important until Rise. Monster Hunter has a very unique personality, full of exaggeration, good vibes and cats. This can be seen in almost every game of the series, in one way or another.

For those who don't know, the gameplay of Monster Hunter is very different to any other action game. Of course, you have to fight big monster, but the fight itself is more like a hunt, where you have to prepare yourself with supplies, find the monster, fight it, follow it when it tries to escape, break parts from its body (and even cut their tails!)... Most hunts have a time limit of 50 minutes, and depending on your equipment, your abilities and sometimes random stuff, your hunts can take a lot of time, specially in Master Rank, where they can easily take between 25 and 35 minutes if you go solo. If we compare this to other actions games, where fights usually take a maximum of 5-10 minutes, we can see how different the very essence of MH is. It doesn't mean it is better than any other game, though (though, since it is my favourite video game IP, I'll say it actually is the best). I came here for the dragones, and stayed for everything else!

Of course, as you may have guessed, a big part of this game is farming and grinding. When you hunt a monster, it gives you materials you can use to craft armor and weapons. The first hunt usually won't give you all the material you need, though, so you'll have to hunt or capture the monster again. In Wilds, I needed to hunt 18 Rey Dau in order to get a single gem. Some materials are rarer than others, and the gem specifically, in High Rank, is the rarest of them all (in Master Rank, the rarest material you can get from a monster is its mantle). In other kind of games, like Genshin Impact, I always hated farming, because it became tedious and boring, but in Monster Hunter every monster feels like a boss, and every battle can be very different, even if the monster is the same, so it feels rather charming and fits the topics of the game (although it sometimes conflicts with the lore, where hunters are supposed to only hunt monsters who are endangering the ecosystem or the civilization… I don’t think those 18 Rey Dau where actually a problem…).

My experience with Wilds was awesome. I used the Hunting Horn for the first time ever (in this game, though, you can bring with you a secondary weapon, so you can switch in the middle of the battlefield. I usually had a Gunlance of a Charge Blade with me) and it was a really pleasant and satisfactory experience. Some people complain about the difficulty of the game, but I think we must understand three key factors here:

1. Most of Monster Hunter fans complaining have been playing for a long time now, and managed to get to Master Rank in, at least, one game. That means we played for lots of hours and got used to the challenges of the games, and we forgot about what Low and High Rank are like.

2. The gameplay is more polished than ever. Before this, the combat could be a little rough and it was hard to get used to it. I understand there’s some magic in having mechanics that suck a little, and I like old MH combat, but getting more polished systems doesn’t mean monsters are easier.

3. Monster Hunter combat priorities have changed a lot during the last years. Before, we had a really slow and punishing system, where every button mattered and patience was the key to survival. Now, Capcom gave more importance to reflexes and reactions. That may change the experience to lots of us, but requires a totally different set of skills and it must be kept in mind when judging the difficulty of the game.

Having said that, of course I would have loved to have some more challenging monsters at the end of High Rank. I consider Arkveld and Gore Magala to be quite hard to defeat, specially when they’re tempered, but I think they will introduce more challenges with time, as they did with Monster Hunter: World base and it’s DLC, Iceborne. I do not care that much about difficulty or challenge, and “hard” is not all a game can be. If I can complete the game doing amazing and incredible stuff at the expense of difficulty, I would be more than happy. If I wanted to make my hunts more difficult, I’d use my own hands instead of giant weapons with explosions, lighting and music. Even then, to make the game more challenging and to learn the monsters better, I hunt them first without the palico, who is the cat that helps you hunt by doing damage, healing you, setting traps… I love them, but I like to play without them the first time I encounter a monster.

What matters more to me are the monsters and the world they live in, specially in a game so immersive as Wilds. For the new monsters, I have to say I loved all of them, from Chatacabra to Arkveld. My favourite monsters right now are Arkveld and Rey Dau, one of the apex predators of the forbidden lands. Some of them are not that relevant for me, may it be because I haven’t fought them a lot or because their design wasn’t my style, but even then I think they were at least cool! This is the official cover for Monster Hunter Wilds, which shows off Arkveld!

There were also returning monsters, such as Rathalos, Rathian, Congalala, Gore Magala, Yian Kut Kut and more, and new versions of Ebony Odogaron and Fulgur Anjanath, called “Guardians”. I’ll talk about those guardians later on. If I had to choose one of the returning monsters, I would go with Gore Magala. It’s so cool, so dark and so menacing. It’s a shame that his plot doesn’t last longer, but he already has an entire game for him (Monster Hunter 4 and part of Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate), so I guess it is understandable!

Gore Magala brings with him the Frenzy Virus, which causes monsters to lose control and become more agressive and unpredictable. In MH Wilds, there are not many frenzied monsters, and, to be honest, I expected more of them, but, as I said, all of this has his own game, and maybe Capcom didn’t want to eclipse the rest of the game (which is the main thing, lol).

Guardians are a new type of monster. I won’t enter into details because it would be a spoiler of the main story, but they work like a “subspecies”, more or less. I like the concept, but, again, I expected more of them. In another post in the future I’ll talk more about the story and about the context of these guardians.

One thing I didn’t like at all was that you can only fight the final boss once (I won’t talk about him, I’ll say general information that is shared across every final boss of Monster Hunter). In World, you could fight both final bosses (High and Master Rank) anytime time you wanted, for example, so you could farm them for materials. The same happens with, at least, Monster Hunter Rise High Rank. I’m not sure why it isn’t the case here, I’m assuming they want to add it, or a variation of it, in a title update, but we will have to wait until then.

Now, as far as I love the apex predators, specially, as I said, Rey Dau, I have one bad thing to say about them. There are four apex predators:

• Rey Day

  

• Uth Duna

  

• Nu Udra

  

• Jin Dahaad

  

So, I’ll start with the positive things about them! I really like the concepts of Rey Dau, Uth Duna and Nu Udra. I love dragons and wyverns, so obviously Rey Dau is the perfect match for a hunter like me, it’s a rail gun made wyvern! Uth Duna is so colorful and their armour can be used for incredible outfits! And what can I say about Nu Udra? This is the first octopus-like monster they have added to Monster Hunter, and it’s amazingly well made (and their armour is so cool as well!). I love these three with all my heart.

But then comes Jin Dahaad, the last of them all. First of all, I think it’s really ugly. Like, really. I don’t like him at all. If it had a more animal-like body, like a snake, a drake or any reptile, I think I would like it, but this way I don’t. Besides that, I think it is kind of out of place, because all the other apex are regular size monsters which are stronger than the rest of monster in their areas, but Jin Dahaad is straight up a GIANT monsters with a fight that reminds more of Safi’Jiiva from World, which is a giant elder dragon that you fight at the endgame, than of an apex predator or any other leviathan, which is the type of monster it supposedly is. I don’t know, the fight is not bad, but I would have saved it for another monster, not for an apex.

Now, I want to talk about the world where the game takes place, where these creatures live. In this game, they wanted to make a more open concept. The big difference between old gen games and World when refering to their maps was that in World loading screens disappeared when hunting - the only loading screens you see are when you initiate a mission and when you finish it. In older games, every area of the map was separated from the others with loading screens, which could be used strategically. Now, with Wilds the maps are even more open. Glorified passages now separate the maps or biomes. You can travel with only one loading screen from the first biome to the last village. This is not really useful, and I would have loved if monsters could travel between biomes, I think it would have given the game a really cool feature, but it is barely used. Players mostly prefer to just fast travel, since it is faster.

Every biome has three climate states: fallow, inclemency and plenty. Depending on the climate state the biome is at, the colors can change a lot. Fallow and inclemency in the Windward Planes, for example, are almost colorless. The same happens with the inclemency in the Scarlet Forest. And do you know which monsters appear during the inclemency period? The apex predators! Uth Duna, as I said, is very colorful, but, as it appears during inclemencies, it seems almost black and white.

The inclemency depends on the biome. In the Windward Planes, for example, it is a big sandstorm with lots of lightings, and in the Scarlet forest it is a really big downpour. This leads to a lot of interesting situations, specially in High Rank, where the climate starts to rotate and you can see the true colors of monsters that usually appear during colorless climate events.

I love the maps and their systems, even though I think them changing the colors that much can be strange. I think I would have liked it most if the story was more colorful, since almost all of it happens in fallows, inclemencies or white biomes. Even so, it is more colorful than World, for example, and I really like that.

I had so much fun playing the game - and I plan to play more when I get a new PC, since this games destroyed my “gaming” laptop! But, seriously, it is such a pleasant, fun and immersive experience. I can’t recommend it enough. It is not optimized enough and that’s a shame, because everyone deserves to experience a game this cool and I hope they do a better job in future updates.

Thank you for reading! Hope to see you around in the next post!