After a half hour of dodging fire, chopping tails and running through a jungle sniffing footprints, I brought my heavy blade down the mighty Anjanath and he roared one last time before falling dead. As I cheered with unbridled triumph, I came to a great realization: Monster Hunter World had its hooks in me.
I really haven’t been able to put it down since, which was surprising as my first foray into Capcom’s long adored action-adventure JRPG series. But I’ll be damned if I don’t consider Monster Hunter World to be the most addicting and gratifying game I’ve ever picked up since my first Dark Souls playthrough. And it isn’t just the gameplay that has me obsessed, it’s the many sights and sounds that radiate throughout this, well, World. The bright and colorful forests and foes of Monster Hunter look jaw-dropping in high definition. Every map is a sprawling sandbox filled to the brim with collectible items, cute critters, interactive terrain and of course the large lumbering dinosaurs and dragons you have to face. The orchestral score perfectly switches from soft and introspective while you’re wandering, to bombastic and intense when you fight, to jubilant whenever you complete a quest. All of it amounts to an environment that feels vibrant and engrossing.
Like every Monster Hunter before it, the majority of World is spent – you guessed it – hunting monsters. You do this in a loop of posting quests, preparing for them, tracking the monster down, fighting it, getting rewards and then coming back to base to make better gear to help do it all again. It may sound repetitive, but Monster Hunter World is filled with such personality and charm that it never feels boring. When you eat food to buff your stats, you get to watch a cutscene of happy cats prepare your delicious steaks and soups. While you wander the terrain looking for your target, you can catch fish or other small creatures to be your pets. And wherever you go, you have a trusty cat companion who helps you in battle and endlessly spouts feline puns – which is worth the price of entry, alone.
But obviously the stars of the show are the Monsters themselves. There are a total of 30 large monsters to hunt (plus several more are supposed to be added as free DLC over time), and each and every one of them have their own distinctive aesthetics, attack patterns and personalities. There’s everything from the mild-mannered Kulu-Ya-Ku that wanders around seeking eggs and large rocks, to the vicious Odogaron that picks fights with literally anything and everything it comes across, to the nefarious Nergigante, who grows invulnerable black spikes as the fight progresses and tackles with abandon. Each fight will have your heart pumping out of your chest as you narrowly avoid death while trying to target the monster’s weaknesses and break off their horns or tails for rare components. And depending on the map, you’ll always presented with dynamic options to taking out your foe, be it chances to use your grappling hook and mount the monster or various ammunition for your slinger to stun or blind the monster. The end result is a string of memorable life or death struggles that can last anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes on average, each. With such epic fights, every failure feels personal, but every victory feels more monumental than most any video game boss battles. By the end of it all, I guarantee that you’ll have your own favorite monsters to encounter and you’ll have your own Moby Dick-style sworn nemesis. Looking at you, Bazelgeuse…
Another returning staple of the series are the 14 different types of hunting weapons. All of them have their own strengths, weaknesses, combos and even unique mechanics, which makes swapping between them feel less like swapping out an assault rifle for a shotgun, and more like swapping out entirely different games. The Dual Blades offer the fast, buttonmash hack and slash of God of War; the Charge Blade and Switch Axe feel reminiscent of the transforming trick weapons in Bloodborne; and anyone who liked utilizing multiple arrow types in Horizon: Zero Dawn will feel right at home with the Bow. Impressively, each and every weapon is viable and effective in their own way, which adds to the replay value whenever one weapon starts to feel stale. But more importantly, it’s encouraging to all new-comers to the series. No matter what kind of video games you like to play, Monster Hunter World has something just for you.
However, even though the game is brimming with enough charm and options to lure people in, there are enough obtuse and ill-defined mechanics that could turn people away, or at least get on their nerves as they continue to play. Even though you are given all 14 weapons right away and you have a training room to try them out, Monster Hunter World never actually tells you the intricacies of each weapon, such as how to best manage your spirit gage with the Longsword, or how important it is to land true charged strikes with the Greatsword. Other things such as weapon sharpness modifiers, afflicting status affects and what the hell “affinity” actually means can only be deciphered by hours of trial and error, watching deep dive YouTube tutorials or getting lectures from people already familiar with the series.
Also headache-inducing are the multitudes of menus and inventory screens that you have to manage. There’s a lot out there in the world you can gather and use to craft items, and they build up fast, and sorting through them all can be a significant chunk of time. And health items don’t automatically refill nor do crafting items automatically go to your box from your pouch, so you’ll need to spend some time making sure everything is in perfect order every single time you return to base. Then there are the investigation missions to hunt more monsters that pile up like crazy and have no good method of organizing and clearing out, not to mention the loads other vendors in the hub world that you’ll need to talk to on a constant basis. None of these ruin the game, but they all felt like homework that needed to be done before I could actually set off on my next hunt.
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Admittedly, the story is not the game’s strong suit, either. Monster Hunter World has you take control of a hunter in the Fifth Fleet of the Research Commission, who are tasked with heading out to the wild and untamed New World to find out why great creatures called Elder Dragons are migrating there. You are waylaid by one such lumbering dragon known as Zorah Magdaros, but find the Research Commission’s fortress, Astera. From there, it is up to you and your fighting cat companion to help defend the fortress from the roaming monsters in the nearby forest and continue your pursuit of the Elder Dragons. And… that’s about it, really.
The characters here don’t have realized personalities or growth – none of them even have names! The two characters you spend the most time with are known only as “The Handler” and “Field Team Leader.” The game also never gives you a particularly captivating narrative reason as to why you need to be slaughtering every creature on the continent other than “we need to research the Elder Dragons and these other jerks are big, dangerous and just generally in the way.” And then ironically enough, while understanding the Elder Dragons are supposedly the point of the entire expedition, Elder Dragons are the only subset of monster that you are forced to slay each time as opposed to taking the more pacifistic and rewarding route of capturing it with traps and tranquilizers. Maybe in-universe, “research” is just a widely used euphemism for “mercilessly slaughter just for sport.”
But all that being said, Monster Hunter World seems to know that the story isn’t anything more than a framing device for the action. Each quest always amounts to just monster hunting because it’s all we would want to be doing anyway. It actually feels liberating that the game’s primary “Assigned” missions don’t carry utmost urgency, with the game actively encouraging you to play it at your own pace. There’s ample amounts of optional quests and investigations to let you replay against monsters you’ve already fought and score some sweet loot, thus allowing you to craft better weapons and armor to stand a better chance against at whatever big fight is giving you trouble. And given that every monster has their own set of weaknesses and elemental abilities, as do the armor their parts create, you will always feel satisfied expanding your wardrobe and becoming a more effective hunter. Every weapon and every piece of armor you can craft in the game has its own great value, thus every hunt of every monster feels rewarding and worth the time you put into it.
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This system of crafting and upgrading your gear also ends up being the crux of your end-game play. Monster Hunter World is an absolute dream for any power gamer out there who loves nothing more than strategizing how to optimize a character build for maximum efficiency. On top of defense stats and resistances, armor pieces have different skills that add various benefits, such as increasing chances of landing critical hits or preventing being stunned by monster roars. Additionally, as you level up post-final-boss, you unlock even more outlets to obtain and stack these skills, such as decorations, charms and augmentations. It quickly becomes a puzzle to try and figure out what items you have at your disposal to yield you best results in combat. Then it becomes addicting to make your own wish list of required items and set out on slaying the various beasts that could potentially yield materials for these items.
And of course, you never need to go on all these quests alone! Monster Hunter World allows you to join online sessions with your friends or other players to take on the great beasts together. Or if you’re ever feeling overwhelmed, you can fire out an SOS flare, which can let any good samaritans out there swoop in to give you a hand. Taking on the monsters with a group gives the game a whole different feel, as the monsters have increased health and aggression during multiplayer, forcing you all to work as a cohesive team and strategize who’s attacking where and when instead of just outright ganking the poor thing. It truly is remarkable how both methods of playing Monster Hunter World – solo or as a group – feel equally viable, fun and unique. With the former giving off mano a mano, David and Goliath vibes, and the latter feeling like a coalescing of A-team style specialists.
Online play is another slightly clunky area, however. It would have been nice for Monster Hunter World to take a cue from Destiny and make the social space actually show everyone who is in it and make a more organic way for people to squad up. As it is, Astera feels rather barren of real human activity, and needing to wait until someone posts a quest (and in some cases, plays enough of it to watch a mandatory cutscene) before then joining it feels more stilted than it needs to be. Sure, there’s the Gathering Hub which lets you see and interact with other player characters… but from there you can’t access your bounties, inventory, smithy, etc. – all of which, again, you need to visit on a constant basis. So visiting the one social space that feels actually social is a burden more than anything else.
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Yet given that and all the other annoying nuisances, when you play Monster Hunter World enough, eventually everything clicks in place and you just enter this blissful flow state. You’ll be hounding for what rewards you want next and picking out the appropriate missions, getting prepared with your chef cats and armory, setting out into the world and exploring, taking down monsters in thrilling combat, carving them up for rewards and then rinse and repeat ad infinitum. Every fight is just as exciting and memorable as the last, and you’ll be laughing alongside any friends you take along the way. It’s the kind of total absorption that maybe only comes about once or twice a year, and we’re all spoiled to have such a game this early in 2018.
In short, if there’s one word to describe Monster Hunter World in its entirety, it is “massive.” It’s a game about exploring a massive world and taking down massive monsters in order to forge a massive amount of weapons and armor. And during every minute of it, you’ll be having a massive amount of fun.
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Platform: PS4 (Reviewed), Xbox One, PC release upcoming
Release Date: January 26, 2018
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