I’m, by any lifelike metric, pretty new to the Monster Hunter sequence. I held off enjoying the video games for years, as a result of they had been locked to handheld consoles I didn’t care about – and so they frankly seemed like they ran like s**t.
Monster Hunter World was my first, and it’s what made me fall in love with the sequence; I’ve been a fan ever since. I’ve over two dozen hours into Wilds as I write this, and I made a decision to mainline the marketing campaign earlier than fussing about with sidequests. And boy, was that such a let down.
Monster Hunter campaigns aren’t identified for his or her narrative chops or intelligent setups. They principally exist to shepherd you thru tutorials of the various, many, many techniques and mechanics you’re going to depend on in your subsequent 100+ hours. Structurally, they function a tour of every recreation’s menagerie.
They all the time play out like this: your squad is on the hunt for a mysterious monster whose presence is affecting the areas of the world you get dragged into. On their path, you retain getting interrupted by another monsters, earlier than you lastly study what’s prompted your unique goal to blah blah blah. You attain the large fella, have a showdown with it, and the marketing campaign is over. You’re then launched to Excessive Rank and the precise recreation of Monster Hunter begins.
In a really broad sense, that description matches the marketing campaign of Wilds’ about in addition to it does World’s. The specifics, nevertheless, fluctuate enormously – and it’s in these lacking particulars that one marketing campaign could make for a compelling journey and the opposite barely registers.
The thrust of World’s marketing campaign is what made it nice. Zorah Magdaros was a brand new sort of monster, so colossal in dimension that it wanted a complete village of individuals merely to gradual it down. This factor is giant sufficient that you could possibly battle a number of monsters on its again and there’d nonetheless be room for extra.
Clearly, this was am bold endeavor for the staff; an try and introduce a brand new sort of encounter to Monster Hunter. Most individuals didn’t prefer it. Preventing Zorah Magdaros concerned a number of establishing elaborate ramparts to gradual it down; operating to load up cannons to chip away at its well being, and usually do issues which might be very in contrast to what you come to Monster Hunter for.
I, nevertheless, favored them exactly due to that. See, Zorah’s decidedly totally different gameplay segments not solely managed to interrupt any monotony of combating one monster after the opposite within the marketing campaign earlier than it may set in, the sport additionally used its journey via the world as a strategy to advance the narrative.
Each time it will transfer to a brand new space of the map, that half could be unlocked so that you can discover. And every time you probably did that, you’d see firsthand the impact it is had on the native ecology. The sport saved you at the hours of darkness for nearly the whole lot of the marketing campaign in regards to the true function of Zorah’s migration, however the chase gave the story some urgency and an attractive thriller to study.
Now, examine that to the Wilds marketing campaign. There’s no Zorah, no bigger looming menace. Arkveld, the flagship monster of this explicit recreation, exhibits up right here and there to do one thing the characters can’t clarify, earlier than it vanishes – and also you don’t see it once more for an additional hour or two. It’s not the ultimate boss, that honor goes to a sleeping big that you just solely study of its existence one mission prior.
There isn’t a sense of huge, totally different teams of individuals coming collectively to cease a typical menace to be discovered right here. Actually, a few of the monster introductions within the marketing campaign really feel like Capcom merely couldn’t discover a method for them to correctly go away the inexperienced room, so they simply type of insert themselves into some missions and power you to battle them then and there.
There’s a definite sense that one thing tying the totally different camps of characters collectively used to exist earlier than it was lower. A number of the NPC conversations, and even a few strains of dialogue in cinematics allude to, properly, one thing extra occurring – however you by no means get to see it.
Even the thriller of the forerunner civilization and their folks’s weather-manipulating tech finally bringing about their doom falls flat when it simply finally ends up being a story sporadically advised in cutscenes that feels extra prefer it belongs in a lore ebook.
There’s lots in regards to the Wilds marketing campaign that could possibly be seen as a microcosm of the principle recreation’s core issues. It does away with a number of the appeal; sands down the tough edges in an effort to make it extra accessible. However I’m not positive these had been the appropriate areas to focus on.
We’re seemingly going to principally overlook in regards to the existence of the principle Wilds marketing campaign very quickly as extra of the sport’s triumphs and misfires come to the fore, however I don’t suppose I can cease questioning what a real sequel to the World marketing campaign would’ve seemed like.
