Is it wrong to eat a dinosaur that wants to be eaten? What if it asks you to make a little hat out of its gall bladder? What if the gall bladder has different opinions on the matter? Discover the answers to these and more as our merry band of conservation enthusiasts/trophy hunters discuss Monster Hunter Wilds!
Nic: Life, the absolute bastard, has kept me away from the Monst. Let me experience it through you. What’s the best Monst so far?
Brendan: I am fond of the squiddy critters that slop about. The Nu Udra is a giant gloopy octopus that feels like a stand-out fight partly because of its many, many arms, but also because of the environment you fight it in. It’s horrible (in a fun way) to wade about in the oil of this region, and try to avoid the flames that inevitably start to spread. Another later squid-like beast has some horrible knifey hands at the end of its tentacles, but I’ll let the readers discover the rest of that creep’s tactics by themselves.
Ollie: I’m partial to the Yian Kut-Ku myself. It was the very first monster I ever fought in any Monster Hunter, back in the days of Monster Hunter Freedom on my PSP. And all these years later, I still recognised all its moves, and it made the whole act of beating up the big fire-breathing chicken even more enjoyable and satisfying than it already was.
Brendan: Oh, it’s a good one. I like the way it soars between areas, limping through the sky on holey wings. Shame it only arrives at the end of the lengthy story, mind.
Jeremy: The Lala Barina, an early game spider monster that exudes a web of scarlet flower petals and fluffy white poofs of fur, is one of my favourites. This came as a surprise because I usually veer on the side of disliking spiders in just about everything. I think it’s just a splendid design that somehow manages to make one of the dullest video game bosses – the giant arachnid – compelling and even beautiful. Also, all of its weapons are sleek, refined, and kind of princess-like, and you can get a frilly dress as one of the armour pieces that makes your hunter look like a Nier character. I feel very pretty wearing it.
Nic: Are some of the later monsters still exhausting to fight? That’s something that stopped me getting into the last one as much as I wanted, just realising I’d have to carve out 40 minutes for non-stop wailing.
Brendan: I got tired of emptying endless arrows into the final boss. I won’t spoil the exact nature of it, except to say that it goes through phases which mix up the fight’s flavour, but I still felt fatigue as it dragged on. Battles do get more protracted the further you get into the endgame. There are new “tempered” abominations that are there to act as more challenging fights. Big bruisers who have seen the wars and won’t go down easy. That feels like work to me, but I’ve read complaints that the game feels too easy to long-toothed veterans of the series (it’s true that I’ve only fainted in two battles so far, and only properly failed one quest). So where I see a long battle and think “god, just die” a lot of fans will probably stomp in gung-ho, glad to have a lengthy hunt.
Edwin: I’d like to hear more from Brendy about the geography of the game not being very layered or mysterious, as discussed in his review. I liked that aspect of World, so I was disappointed to read that bit.
Brendan: Ah, yeah. The geography itself probably would feel layered and interesting, but all the actions you perform within the space remove that feeling. The auto-piloting dino plays a big part in this. Even if you wrestle control back there’s still an always-on trail of fireflies leading you straight to where you need to go. I couldn’t find any option to turn this stuff off, and I’m not sure how the game would play if you could. It frustrates me that level designers and environment artists have put so much effort into providing a sense of place, but you quickly become numb to it because you don’t actually need to think about the routes you’re taking. It feels more like getting on a bus to the next fight, rather than driving there yourself. You don’t need to worry about shortcuts.
Edwin: Do people have favourite weapons? I was hoping to do an against-the-grain run as a solo Hunting Horn user, because back in the day, the Hunting Horn was designed quite deliberately for support roles in multiplayer. Sadly, they’ve made it a lot more single player friendly, though that’s possibly more to do with the other changes to the controls over the years. I might fall back on my old friend, the Gunlance.
Brendan: I read recently that the designers wanted all the weapons to be equally “viable”, so you can still pile on the hurt even with a traditional support bubble machine. The Gunlance I didn’t try (I got scared when I tried to use it in Monster Hunter World and could NOT understand the best way to use it). I started with the Twin Blades, which feel like absolute wreckers once you learn to perform the mega twirly sawblade manoeuvres. You roll down a monster’s entire spine like a hideous human buzzsaw. But I found that fighting up close made monster movements harder to track and I kept getting knocked down. I swapped to the bow, and it was very satisfying to learn, if a little fiddly at first.
Nic: “This is a story of monsters and humans and their struggles to live in harmony in a world of duality”. Discuss.
Brendan: This is a comical line of marketing for a game about murdering dinosaurs for high-heel boots. But it is a minor theme of the story. These monsters are simply animals doing what they are naturally compelled to do, we are sometimes told. A small boy comes to relate to a big bad mega monst who once wrecked his village, but his emotional turnaround is so unconvincing it doesn’t land at all. I could scoff and chuckle and wryly fnar-fnar-fnar at how the dialogue and characters try their best to tackle this subject and ultimately fail. But that might just be making a stink out of the game’s mild lip service to wildlife preservation. As humans our relationship to animals is an absolutely batshit web of intractable contradictions. My brother’s dog is dying and my entire family is currently in bits. But we eat endless cows for supper without thinking too much about it. The natural instinct is to try to scrunch these contradictions until some “right” way of thinking about animals emerges. But it rarely does. All this is to say that preservation and good treatment of wildlife is beyond both the scope of this article, and the scope of a game in which you ride around on Yoshi from the Bob Hoskins Super Mario movie while killing his lizard cousins for their glands.
Ollie: I liked the bit where one of the villagers asked me to deal with a monster that was plaguing their ore miners. I went and clobbered the living shite out of it, harvested its parts for my armour, and then returned to the villager and said “actually, they’re really not a threat, you can learn to live with them in harmony”.
Jeremy: Generally, I think Monster Hunter as a franchise has made some strides since the early days, which were really more overt about how the setting only existed as a gameplay loop for you to brazenly brutalise big beasts and carve up their carcasses to craft cool clothes. But perhaps that overtness was more honest? As it stands, the concessions that Monster Hunter Wilds makes to the idea of ecology or preserving life come to a halt whenever you run into a big boss. Your hunter immediately turns to Alma, the latest doe-eyed handler who kind of looks like she stepped out from behind a barista counter. It’s obvious what you want – Guild permission to engage the enemy. And Alma grants it without a second’s hesitation, even when said enemy is just an ornery toad who’s lashing out because the annoying humans are in its home.
There are moments that hint at alternate worlds where Monster Hunter is less focused on killing, though. I’m thinking of the Lala Barina again, and how prior to fighting it you’re exploring its ecosystem, which is a truly gorgeous forest packed to the brim with enough wildlife to justify the game’s entire photo mode. I was reminded of those edutainment ‘90s CD-ROMs I used to play as a kid, about navigating a rainforest or boating down the Nile. There’s potential here to go further in that direction in future installments of the series, perhaps having hunters navigate environmental shifts or undertake more missions that are about transporting injured monsters or healing sick ones. But ultimately, all of this vanishes when we realise that the Lala Barina has paralysed one of our comrades, so off we go again to beat a behemoth and then use its spinnerets to make a switch axe.
Edwin: It’s sort of fascinating to watch Monster Hunter attempt to carve a coherent throughline from those intractable contradictions. It makes room for a lot of discussion about conceptions of humanity and animality and how certain categories of human have modelled certain categories of nonhuman to suit their purposes. Monster Hunter’s “ecology” is really just a slaughterhouse mechanism with various outputs; the more they try to simulate “natural” behaviour the more glaring the machine’s overall purpose becomes. Generally speaking, I think Capcom could feel less guilty and/or resist the urge to conservation-wash their simulation. This is fiction, and while fiction can be harmful or reductive, it’s often a way of figuring ugly things out. Not being a Japanese speaker, I’ve never had much luck getting Capcom to talk about whether they’ve learned anything from big game hunting or safaris, but there’s surely a great interview there.
It’s also just entertaining to watch the game try to make sense of its own morals. I’m recycling a joke from several RPS Slack meetings, but I think it would be fun for Capcom to go full Edge Doom review and let the monsters talk. Doubtless they would say things like “Oh golly, I’m overpopulating my habitat!”
Brendan: “This will have ramifications to the food chain!”
Edwin: “Quickly, thin my numbers so that the ecosystem can survive.”