We don’t know when, but every bunch of years it comes.  In certain societies, it was referred to as “that cold.”

People get stuck at home, unable to work, go to school, or see loved ones in social gatherings.  Nobody knew when it would be over; what we did know was that Monster Hunter was coming. So it’s been more than a week and I’ve managed to wrangle myself away from the game long enough to be able to talk about it, so here we go.

I love the game. If that’s the burning question, this is the short answer. I don’t think anyone would be surprised if they dug up my history on Monster Hunter, where I started with World. Considering how that title performed, it would be crazy for Capcom not to make a follow-up on the new direction they’ve taken the series. However, that task is by no means a simple one. First, make a game that’s more impressive than Monster Hunter World. Next, make a game that is not only engaging enough for old-time fans but also accessible enough to welcome a curious new audience. Ah, yes, the new fans vs old fans dilemma. Always necessary, always ugly, and sometimes entertaining.

Streamlining much of the experience appears to be the answer from Capcom. Where instead of making the game one way or the other, it chooses both and leaves the decision to the players themselves. On the other hand, somehow, they are still able to expand on almost every weapon to give even the more seasoned players something new to experience. And a world that has so much more to show you if you’re willing to trudge through the uncharted. 

After really sitting down with the Monster Hunter Wilds. I thought, “Wow, that’s a lot of spinning plates.” Inevitably, they do fumble in a few places. But it’s honestly impressive they got to that point in the first place.

While some of you may know how I like to break down a game. I’m not sure if that format will really convey my feelings about the game. So I may free style here and there, unsure of where it may lead. But what’s an adventure if not venturing into the unknown? Journey with me.

 

 

Production (4.5 / 5)

 

 

Without the rose-tinted glasses, the graphical fidelity upgrade is off the charts. Even the ground looks naturally uneven. The wind blows, foliage sways, waters flow. It has a lot of small details that make the world feel more natural than crafted. The biggest change from previous games is, well, the weather. In previous titles, there would be a shift between night and day. But this time, the several interconnected biomes would have a season where a sandstorm is active, and the sand is grainy and gets everywhere and I hate it. The forest would have a season of downpour where it’s actually harder to get around as the heavy rain floods anything not elevated. The result is that each biome would have 4 versions of itself as it cycles through its respective seasons. What’s extra cool about it is that it actually affects how the areas behave and what you can find in them; more on that later.

After that, we have the models. If we’re looking at general design, it’s hard to say it looks that different. Definitely improved, but the look being different is another thing. Rathalos and Rathian are my prime examples here. They look good, but you won’t see how well they’re improved unless you’re seriously studying the models, their textures, and the fine details. And those details are honestly hard to see when you’re running circles around a fire breathing lizard trying to cut their tails while not being sent home on a cart.

As for your hunter and characters around it, the faces and hair are modeled well enough to look convincing and capable of forming natural-looking expressions. Costume design is on-point for your companions. For your personal threads and weapons, they are a bit simpler by comparison but look distinguishable enough. Sad to say that some of the armor, in particular, has texture packs that look like they may belong to a previous generation. I mean, have you seen the Arkveld armor? What’s going on here? Luckily for PC players, they have the option of downloading high-res textures, though they have to get the game to work, first. By the way, I’ll just say that I reviewed this on the PlayStation 5, and it performed well on the balanced setting. I chose to go console because I simply don’t have a beefy enough rig to be able to record or stream the game while I play it. I’m sure the PC crowd has a bit more to say about the game’s optimization, but that’s something I can’t speak to myself.

 

 

Moving on and I think this is what matters the most, the visual clarity. Even in a sandstorm, you can tell what’s important. For example, if the Rey Dau is about to blast you with lightning, or what the terrain around you looks like. It’s easy to tell what the monster is from the rest of the area, you can tell, for the most part, what you can use in the current arena you’re fighting in. Is there something you can use as slinger ammo? Are there special interactions I can do here? A lot of it is kinda guided by what people might recognize as “yellow paint” in the form of scout flies, but honestly, you’re going to need it with so much going on around you during a hunt.

 There is the typical wrestling with the camera when you find yourself up against a wall and a giant creature, but it’s not to the point that you can’t get out of it. Also, when I said giant creature, that can be a problem, there are three monsters I can think of that have this issue, where it’s just so big that when you’re hitting it up close it’s pretty hard to figure out what it’s doing and before you know it you’re sent flying off the ground. I think Capcom can do a little better if they want us to have a better idea of what to do when fighting these behemoths.

Now on the audio dimension. You know, I like it when a game has a consistent melodic theme across the songs it features. And you guessed it, Monster Hunter Wilds has a central theme to many of its songs. That theme is such a layered statement of the world it’s trying to convey. Proof of a Hero returns to us but the Wilds version gives us such an interesting spin on it. If World’s main theme song was all about adoring the beauty of nature and the creatures that live in it, Wilds’ theme does a bit of this and more. It picks up Proof of a Hero, making it like a journey, it has these twists in the melody that makes it as if the lands you venture on have yet more to reveal to you. Intentionally slower, trying to make you take it all in, and somehow, in all its beauty, presents a danger you must be aware of and be willing to overcome. Look, I’m not a music major, but if there’s anything I truly enjoy about games it’s these wonderful BGMs, and the tune here just sets the stage so wonderfully for what Monster Hunter Wilds offers. And this is just the main theme, there’s more to find as you play through, my personal favorite would be Rey Dau’s theme. Not to say that any of them was a slouch at all.

One thing that’s quite unique about my experience with MH Wilds is how it makes use of the Dual Sense’s speakers. Instead of just making the controller vibrate for haptic feedback, it plays out the audio of footsteps in the water, or the crashing of monster claws right next to me. Even the sharpening of weapons. It’s a cool gimmick they’ve incorporated into the game.

Then there’s the voice acting that I do believe does a great job, I was afraid that a talking Palico was going to annoy me at some point. But they do manage to avoid making it there. Alma, the commander, and other characters do deliver their lines well, but the way the game is designed for dialogue in cutscenes can make their pace feel awkward unless you’re proceeding with the conversations on your own. Not an ideal way to do it, but thankfully this isn’t the kind of game that is carried by these scenes, at least not for a veteran like me.

 

 

Mechanics (5 / 5)

 

 

We’re not going to make me talk about all the changes in the weapons. I simply don’t play all of them, and even if I were to talk about one out of the 14, that would be a different session all in itself. I can make the Gunlance a 15-minute lecture, easily. Instead, let’s focus on the more general changes they’ve introduced to MH Wilds.

First is the Focus Mode, where going into it is pretty much like aiming down-sights in Resident Evil 4. It zooms in, you get a reticle, and you directly attack whatever’s in front of you. This holds true even as you change the direction you’re facing with the right analog stick. And this is probably the largest indirect buff that pretty much every weapon has received. Imagine winding up your Great Sword or your Charge Blade only to have the monster you’re looking at shoved in another direction for whatever reason. Previously all a player could really do is just sigh and watch their setup go to waste, and just try to reposition as soon as they can after. But with a press of a button, a tilt of a stick, you can just reorient your weapon’s trajectory! Back then I would opt to have faster weapons for more agile monsters since it was just that annoying to get a good hit in with my usual arsenal. But no, I haven’t felt the need to turn to Dual Blades or Sword and Shield through my entire 60-plus hours so far with the game.

But that doesn’t mean MH Wilds doesn’t want you to have a second weapon, you can now, by default, carry a second weapon around. Letting you have the option of having an alternative weapon if you think the one you’re currently carrying isn’t quite up for the job. They have changed up the skill and decorations system to make this viable as well, since builds and load-outs were traditionally designed to augment one kind of weapon. Now skills are split between two categories, weapon skills and armor skills. Where in general, armor skills are for more universal abilities and the latter are found specifically on the weapon they’re used on. You won’t find skills for shields or guns on a Bow, and status resistance skills can only be attached to armor. It makes it easier to use two different weapons alongside each other, but you’re more than welcome to have two Long Swords if you’re into that kind of role-play.

 

 

To switch between these weapons though, you’re going to have to call on your Seikret and switch weapons while aboard it. What is the Seikret, you ask? It’s basically your portable everything hub. An evolved version of the Palamute from Monster Hunter Rise. It can rescue you, carry to you the supplies the guild provides, and serve as the highly mobile cavalry that lets you travel through any terrain with ease. It’s wonderful, if not a little too useful. And now that it’s here, I can’t imagine playing Monster Hunter without it.

Now when it comes to the monster, how you’ll fight it is still the same good old “hit-it-until-it-stops-moving” method. But it does come with an evolution of the anomaly monsters you got from Sunbreak. By hitting a certain area enough times, you’ll open up a wound, and we help the monster get rid of that wound by destroying it. I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense in text, but it’s pretty fun. By destroying monster wounds, you increase the chance of them being staggered and opened up for bigger attacks, as well as get bonus drops as rewards. It creates good short-term goals in combat while building up to the longer-term goal of defeating your mark.

When you pile these new mechanics together, you start seeing a combat flow that has a lot less time where you’re just letting the game happen. You can realign your aim to hit the monster more consistently, you can change the weapons if the situation calls for it. And now we have a faster version of breaking monster parts, making you consider more options in combat. You no longer have to be stuck in a strategy or style that you don’t think is working. Hunting monsters is no longer a simple journey from point A to point B. There’s always something you can do, and something you have to decide on every few seconds. The way you fight is now much more dynamic and engaging, and you can maximize what you can do at every moment. It’s such a rewarding combat system and it works like a well-oiled machine, and maybe, a little too well.

 

 

Content (5 / 5)

 

 

Monster Hunter Wilds is the first in the series that I’ve ever played that has such a railroaded story. You and your team travel from place to place with Nata, a survivor of an Arkveld attack, seeking out the truth behind the lesser-known parts of the world. As this plays out you are at the same time, paced through the more general lessons the game has to teach you about playing the game. And I can see how on paper, this would work. This whole journey feels more like an onboarding process for newcomers to the series, and that’s probably important. Not everyone is going to find the idea of being a Monster Hunter appealing on its face and could use a good story to help them be motivated to play as well as see what being a hunter is about in a better light. But man, the surrogate parent or uncle to a child is a writing trope that I can use less of these days. And Capcom can do a better job writing it. The pace that it essentially makes you go through in Low Rank (which is usually the story) feels like it’s getting in the way of me enjoying the game. And I was more excited to see it over than I was to see how the story ended.

Thankfully, it does get a lot better as you clear the base story. Yes, even a kid that everyone gets annoyed with finds a better role to be by the end. To be honest, I hope this continues to mature as the game adds new content for us to play through. Monster Hunter Wilds truly opens up as you finally enter the game proper, High Rank. Even the color palette of the forest changes as the weather finally clears. I found myself a bit frustrated that it took this long to see how good the biomes can actually look, honestly. But from here you can now start farming your hunter rank and the gear you want to have.

 

 

That gear will be somewhere among the 29 and soon-to-be 30 monsters you can hunt in the game. Each of them has a tempered version, and up to 5 markers on top of their monster icon, indicating how strong they are. 

These monsters are, to be frank, mostly stronger and more capable than their World counterparts. No, I’m being serious. I honestly believe that Arkveld is harder than Nergigante or Magnamalo. And yes, maybe the giant chicken is a pushover but I do believe that this is more of how well-designed all the new weapons are, especially with the new functions and combinations they’ve been given for Wilds. Better combos for Dual Blades, Gun Lance, Insect Glaive, and more. Reworks to make how they work synergize better with the rest of their respective kits. I haven’t gone to explore more weapons from my usual types, but I can see it from how friends are enjoying the weapons they chose.

The story isn’t necessarily over, either, as you still interact with village folk and are asked to handle problems caused by monsters in every region. But rather than uncovering some huge secret, these feel more like a regular day in the life of a Monster Hunter kind of genre. It will probably expand further as we get more content in the future, so where this is going to go is something we’ll have to watch out for. Honestly, though, this format works for me just fine, and wouldn’t mind having variants of these down the line.

The major background character of every Monster Hunter game is the map itself, boasting 5 major biomes, all of which you can travel to in a loosely interconnected manner. That feature though is pretty much overshadowed by the convenient fast travel you can unlock with all the camps you can manage across all of them. In fact, the functions on the map are so convenient, that you can see all of the monsters around at any moment, on any map, and when you find a monster you want to take on later, or with your friends, you can always save them as an investigation to be able to revisit them later.

 

 

But what if you’re more of a solo player, and just want to explore, want to experience that emergent gameplay? That mystery and uncertainty is rooted out by how you always know where the monsters are, yes. But there are still things for you to discover and do, you never know how much you have to learn about a game just to find a particular fish or wild animal for you to catch. There could be events that the game never mentions to you, for you to find. Minor spoiler here, but I don’t think anyone ever mentioned how the Wudwuds have a bonfire festival, which isn’t really rewarding in terms of what you can get, but certainly amazing to discover. I found so many particularities about each biome without having to refer to youtube guides or whatnot just because I was exploring the map, looking for better camp locations.

When you’re done with all of these, the endgame is all about making your own set of customized weapons, the Artian weapons. You forge them from a combination of 3 pieces of broken weapons you obtain from high-level hunts, and upgrade them to random stat increases that hopefully are a match for what you’re looking for. In case you are wondering, yes, we have seen this in certain Gacha games before, and now it’s here. You can also attempt to grind out 3-star decorations that can be a combination of skills that you are looking for. Giving you a total of 2 RNG timesinks to motivate you to farm so hard you might as well consider putting together an Arkveld ranch. We got them free-range tempered Arkvelds, all year long. Fed only the worst hunters via carts. Giving us the best drop rate, and all of these to be offered to the RNG gods.

I know it sounds grim, but hey, fighting monsters is pretty fun.

 

 

Features (4.5 / 5)

 

 

So here’s one major complaint I have about Monster Hunter Wilds. Networking, and no not the netcode, cross-play does come with its challenges but when the game works, it works out great. I’m talking about adding friends, I’m talking about forming parties, and figuring out where to look and how to get things done to set up your session with your buddies. It took us all a while to figure out what to do and how to get things rolling! I’d like my gaming session to not feel like I’m signing up for a driver’s license, please. I’m not sure how, but figuring out how to do these basic network functions just didn’t feel like something I’d know. How do I add you? Go to your profile. No, there’s no friend request button there, but there IS a friend code. You have to read off, go to a different part of the menu, encode, and then add. It’s kinda bewildering how massively they missed the social and networking interface. It feels like I’m trying to re-learn an alternate operating system, or going around a bureaucracy just trying to figure out how to apply for a license.

But when it works, it works great. Link parties are like another dimension of lobbies, that helps you get prioritized for each other’s quests without having to be in the same lobby. It’s a smart solution to help people stay connected.

 

 

Then there’s the UI they knocked out of the park, the smart healing menu which is your default on your in-combat inventory, is amazingly handy. It immediately shows you what immediate recovery item you need to use to heal an appropriate amount of health or to get a debuff off of you. Great stuff. You can still customize much of your radial menu, but the default settings are functional enough to get you to hit the ground running with the content.

Speaking of customizations, yes, you can still put together your layered armor, customize your hairstyle, and put together some truly insane combinations for either impressive or funny looks. I’m already looking up ideas to make a Qubeley.

Another level of ridiculously good customization is the UI itself, you heard me complain about some of it a while ago, well, you can just turn it all off if you want to. Nothing but you, the monster, and you wondering if you have enough health to tank that next hit. Some features help people who may have issues with reading text, seeing certain colors, or handling motion sickness. I personally appreciate being able to zoom out the game as much as the system will allow me, so it’s easier to see exactly how I’m about to cart in the next few seconds.

 

 

Conclusion

 

 

The sixth generation of Monster Hunter has attempted to streamline so much of the game in service of those who might be overwhelmed with the many small details you might have to pay attention to. And I’m certain that there will be those who will be disappointed at how simplified the game has become. I, in fact, harbored some of these feelings when I played Rise, coming from World. Some might say that the entire game is becoming a boss rush simulator, leaving behind the concept of the hunt. And I’d say that these arguments have merit. However, it’s also true that you can still play the old-fashioned way. You don’t have to entirely rely on fast travel, you can turn the ridiculously useful Palico off, and you can still have your preparation phase for monsters. Though honestly speaking, at this point most defensive skills seem unnecessary.

It feels like it’s attempting to be two games at the same time, being an immersive world you can get lost in, and potentially only return to towns to take care of certain errands. And at the same time, it wants to be that sort of game you and a bunch of your friends can quickly drop in and out of. And it can certainly be both if you let it we’re not even aware of what the full plan is for the game yet. But so far, it seems to have hit the mark.

It has become clear to me that Monster Hunter is a game that refuses to stagnate. Every iteration, every generation invites us to seek out a new frontier. It refuses to simply phone in the experience, cross out a list of requirements, and call it a day. They attempt to give players more freedom in what they can do, they unite the successful innovations they made in previous attempts. They try to create the ultimate experience by making hunting more dynamic, making exploration rewarding, and tying it all together with the stories the game presents as well as you can make with its emergent gameplay. This new edition invites not only the old fans to break new ground in the series, but calls anyone who might even be remotely interested in to rise, and discover the world of Monster Hunter.

 

Alright, joke over. I love the game, I’m gonna play it, and I’m going to keep playing it, thanks for watching see you in the Wilds.

 

Monster Hunter Wilds is a game I’ve been waiting for, scoring a 5 / 5

 

 

Available on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S