Monster Hunter Wilds is the fastest-selling game in Capcom’s history. It continues to lord over the Steam charts, with peaks that might cause Counter-Strike 2 to glance momentarily down from its Olympus of user-created hats, and while people are still booting the dung out of the PC version’s performance, verdicts upon the beast-punching as a whole are glowing.
To suggest that now is the time to go back to formula is probably pure contrarianism, but Wilds makes my brain itch. Building on (and hopefully not just recapping) Brendy’s excellently ambivalent Monster Hunter Wilds review, I think the series is balancing on the edges of contradictions that extend throughout its design, from the combat through the user interface to the world and narrative themes. I think it’s been doing that for years, in fact, but Wilds, for me, is where Monster Hunter’s confusion about itself has come to a head.
The top level contradiction that informs all the others is the usual, much-revisited problem that Monster Hunter can’t decide whether to hunt the Monsters or love them. The series has long styled hunting as the act of managing a wildlife preserve, with hunter guilds intervening to stop renegade predators disturbing their world’s fragile balance. There’s no way of reconciling that “caretaker” ethic with the game’s core loop of indefinitely harvesting Monster giblets for weapon crafting. Perhaps Capcom could take more inspiration from older hunting cults, and lean further into the idea of the Monsters as sacred beasts, both eaten and worshipped, but I’m not sure that would chime with the essentially ‘modern’ mechanics of the game, which are a blend of feverish overexploitation via endlessly replayable quests, clipboard-heavy bureaucratic ceremony, and jovial gig work at the command of a ridealong manager.
The closest Monster Hunter today comes to the sacred, I think, is in celebrating the introduction of a ‘realistic ecology’, with carnivores and herbivores and all manner of “endemic life” mingling and interacting. Leaving aside whether this ecology lives up to the term, emphasising the menagerie’s liveliness only makes the act of killing Monsters feel more murderous. The game’s quintessentially triple-A mindset of greater fidelity and naturalism from iteration to iteration works against it in fascinating ways, because the more credible the creatures appear, the more reluctant I am to slaughter them.
This difficulty is captured by the new Wounds system in Wilds – back in the PS2 days, Capcom might have represented this as a set of glowing weak points, but Monster Hunter’s tech is now clever enough to render that as believably hacked-up flesh, and slamming a Greatsword into a bleeding gash just feels vicious. I’m grateful for the pop-out damage numerals, which remind me that it’s all just for show.
The Wound presentation also speaks to the second contradiction I find in modern-day Monster Hunter: the series can’t work out whether to have you read the world or the interface. The two are heavily entangled in a way that sometimes feels symbiotic, and sometimes like two wyverns caught in a turf war, obliging you to poke at the customisation options to soothe their differences. The interface is sort of winning the battle, not least because it now infests the notionally “raw” geography and does away with any need to navigate.
The chief culprits there are the Scoutflies, introduced by Monster Hunter: World, which flurry forth and bespangle any interactive object, while leading you unambiguously to your waypoint. I absolutely hate the Scoutflies. Much to my astonishment, there’s still no way to fully turn them off without mods, and the result is to reduce lush and curious environments to an all-purpose gumbo of Matrix code and button prompts. The Scoutflies are abetted in this by your wrist grapple, which lets you scoop things up without even getting close enough to see the object beneath the prompt, and by the Seikret mount you unlock early on in Wilds, which autopilots along the trail of Scoutflies to your waypoint. So much for the “hunting” bit.
The Seikret speaks to another holistic problem in Wilds, which is that on some level, it wants to make a clean break from the clunkier Monster Hunting game feel of yore – clunk that predates the coining of “game feel“, in fact – but can’t work out how to do it without provoking a fan stampede. I think a lot about the whetstone, for example. Back when I first played Monster Hunter Freedom on PSP, finding a few seconds in amongst the chaos of Monster movements to kneel and hone my blade was a thrilling nuisance, a real exercise in timing. In Wilds, you can do that while galloping about on your Seikret, care of a fool-proof item wheel. The effect is to make sharpening a weapon so easy that sharpening a weapon starts to feel pointless. Just do away with whetstones, Capcom! Or recommit to them. Don’t half-and-half your innovations.
For me, this kind of indecisiveness saturates the design of Wilds. The older Monster Hunters obliged you to fight without lock-ons using a manual camera, which was particularly aggravating on the crabclaw-inducing PSP. This unwieldiness was a barrier to wider acceptance, but I think it resonated with the comic spectacle of an outmatched human loaded down with improbable dragon-slaying apparata. Later Monster Hunters seem to want to shed the clank entirely, but can’t decide how. There’s a camera lock-on in Wilds, but it’s cumbersome by the standards of other action games, whipping the view around like a shopping trolley, and the result is an experience that’s neither as ponderous nor as elegant as it could be.
Similar things can be said of item management in combat, which Brendy characterises beautifully in his Monster Hunter Wilds review as “like rummaging through your mum’s messy purse for the single pound coin she needs for the toll booth that is swiftly approaching”. That’s more true of the older Monster Hunters, but later games have softened things with bits of automation. Wilds auto-brews potions for you when you gather the right ingredients, so that there’s always one ready on the ability wheel, and again, I wonder whether the better approach here is to just rip the bandaid off and do without potions altogether. Wilds is full of features like this, which feel like an incomplete molting of staple mechanics from the days of PS2.
Again, I wonder if I’m being contrarian. Or just ignorant – I’ve played a lot of Freedom, Monster Hunter 4 and World, but I couldn’t give you chapter and verse on every Monster Hunter. I suspect that for many – for millions, going by the sales – the control and interface issues don’t feel like evidence of incompatible visions. Particularly if you’re new to the series, Wilds may simply feel like an engagingly heavy-footed action game with a lot of mid-fight item management.
I will also say that, in some sense, I consider Monster Hunter’s contradictions advantageous. Returning to my opening point about the perennially false-feeling “caretaker” narrative, and with the obligatory note that I’m vegan, I think Monster Hunter is a useful demonstration of contradictory attitudes towards nonhuman animals. Its insistence that hunting the Monsters can be both profitable and preservative squares with the engulfing chicanery of societies where conservation can’t help but double as exploitation, and oceans of blood are spilt unseen – societies that pet, protect and venerate certain animals while invisibly and mechanically shoving billions of other animals into grinders and electric baths. Perhaps in that respect, Monster Hunter should remain self-divided. It’s a site in which to explore our own hypocrisy. Still, I could really do without the Scoutflies.