There are no wilds in Monster Hunter Wilds. Instead, beautiful dioramas. The fauna are as ferociously believable as ever, but the flora are plastic aquarium plants. You regard each new environment with wonder precisely once, then adopt the suction-hungry gaze of a Kirby-esque loot inhaler. You turn off your Seikret’s auto-trundle just to feel the wind in your hair, then realise the freedom it offers is roughly analogous to the the freedom you have to stand up and scratch your bum on a bus.
“You aren’t in conversation with the landscape of Wilds in the same way as you are in Breath Of The Wild or Shadow Of The Colossus,” wrote Brendy. The scoutflies “reduce lush and curious environments to an all-purpose gumbo of Matrix code and button prompts,” wrote Edwin. That thing about bums just now, wrote I. For all their fidelity and art direction, these biomes are laminated. Save the odd mushroom or helpful rock slide, there’s no reason to interact with them in ways that reinforce their believability as real places.
So, Monster Hunter Wilds has no wilds. But wait, who’s this?! Someone for whom each humble patch of woods represents a cornucopia of possibilities so textured and significant that you can practically smell the bark, the berries, and your own molding armpits? Henry has come to see us!
Wilds’s artificial ecosystems have me imagining an alternate scenario where, like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s Henry, you start with nothing and have to fight for every inch of progress, forcing you to become intimately acquainted with the wilds instead of just treating them as a background to monst bonking. This is obviously both impractical and antithetical to the actual fun parts of Monster Hunter, but since Capcom themselves saw fit to spend millions of dollars and much effort on a bloviating, tedious story that’s just as antithetical to the fun parts of Monster Hunter, I feel okay about it.
When I say fight for every inch, that starts with your armour and weapon. You get one knife and one set of pyjamas. You’ll need to tediously stab and gut many small monsters just to get a basic weapon, and you have to wash your pyjamas in the river regularly or large monsters will sniff you out from a different postcode and visit to chew on you. If they chew on you and you don’t bandage up the wound, you get blood parasites next time you go in a river. The blood parasites gradually consume you from the inside until you find the correct herbs to make a poultice. The herbs are coated with a different, worse type of parasite unless you pick them during a thunderstorm. The thunderstorms make you blind.
Also, no home base. If you want somewhere to relax, you’re tauntaun-ing your way into a Ajarakan’s intestines. If you want a frying pan in which to pour honey on fried lettuce, you have to steal it from the Wudwuds. To get the honey, you need to fight bees. To find the bees, you have to track them through thicket and tundra, paying careful attention to signs of regular pollination. To recognise signs of pollination, you have to spend days studying botany books. You have to steal the books from the Wudwuds, who also have guns now.
Alright, that’s enough of that. I do not actually expect or really want even ten percent of these suggestions to come to fruition, but I do feel like maybe adopting even one percent of their spirit would make for a more interesting time. Maybe start with some kind of tracking at least? As it stands, Wilds feels like a case of haphazardly applied reduction: the streamlined combat and shorter hunts are wonderful, but biomes feel little more than very pretty film sets. I’m generally against the shoving of survival game systems into every orifice, but a few nods towards that kind of experience would help these wilds earn their name. As it stands, I feel like I’m exploring the prettiest lobby in gaming.