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I’ve been told for years by friends and colleagues that Monster Hunter is probably not for me. The dense, systems-heavy RPGs grind against my sensibilities. I don’t mind friction as a pillar of game design, but at a certain point, I find it makes games a chore to play. I recently got to play about five hours of Monster Hunter Wilds and I could see why some of my friends had nudged me away from Capcom’s long-running action RPG series in the past, but I also saw that there aren’t a lot of games that feel like Monster Hunter, and now I’m more curious about the series than ever.
There’s something tactile about Wilds that I don’t often encounter in video games. Every theatrical, exaggerated swing of a weapon is weighty, and every monster you strike behaves differently. The world is alive, not just in the vague “open-world game where things happen” way, but in that I constantly felt like I was moving through ecosystems that were home to systems I didn’t understand until I got my hands dirty scouring through them. I didn’t need a DualSense controller to give me haptic feedback for Monster Hunter to activate my senses.
Sporting a steampunk-ass outfit covered in belts and buckles, with gadgets and gizmos hanging off me jostling in the wind, I felt the weight of all my equipment. Scavenging for whatever might help me in a fight against a much larger, much stronger enemy and gathering supplies from the natural world around me, like honeycomb off a bee’s nest, made me more aware of my surroundings. Climbing up old, rotted vegetation after being chased away by a pack of untamed monsters was exhilarating and made me fear it would snap under my weight somehow and send me plummeting back into the beast’s den. It didn’t, but that kind of dense systemic chaos is what I came to expect from Wilds in my short time with it.
I have often looked for games that made me feel like I was truly struggling to survive against the elements, and because game progression usually entails becoming more powerful to the point where those obstacles stop feeling like a hindrance, I don’t get that sensation for long. Wilds surprised me because those moments of triumph didn’t come from levels and stats, but from learning more about a monster, understanding how to take it down, and executing on that knowledge, all the while knowing I’d have to learn a new strategy if I walked a few miles into another biome. Even as I learned how to fight and navigate the world over five hours, I still felt like I was barely learning the ropes as new challenges kept rearing their heads.
Wilds is, by design, incredibly intimidating, and even as Capcom has made some changes to the formula to help onboard new players, I still found the game unfriendly. Meaningfully so, as this unwieldy fight against nature is the whole point. You can very rarely just do something in Monster Hunter Wilds. Everything, whether it be forging new equipment or having that weapon perform at its best, requires some kind of time investment. Your blade will dull throughout a fight, and you’ll have to sharpen it in real time, likely while you’ve got some feral beast nipping at your heels. The hotkeys menu is cumbersome to navigate, and you can’t pause the game while you try to find your healing items. Wilds makes everything a challenge, and it feels so deliberate that I can’t help but commend Capcom for how it makes running for your life all the more stressful by emulating the experience of rummaging through all your pockets desperately looking for what you need at the same time.
This fiddly, life-or-death multitasking is the obstacle Monster Hunter Wilds expects you to overcome more so than any creature you might encounter. The legacy of Monster Hunter is one of struggle, scavenging, and surviving in a harsh, untamed world, and although Wilds makes a few changes to the series to be more newbie-friendly, such as letting your steed automatically head toward objectives (a godsend), the spirit of that legacy seems alive and well. The few hours I played Wilds as someone with no experience tested my patience, but they also made me more curious than ever to see how resilient I can be. Monster Hunter Wilds comes to PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S on February 28.
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Kurt Indovina
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