By any measurable standard, I’m pretty fresh to the Monster Hunter world. I avoided these games for quite some time, primarily because they were stuck on handheld consoles I had little interest in. To be honest, they also seemed to perform poorly.
My first dive into the series was with Monster Hunter World, and it was the experience that hooked me. I’ve been a fan ever since. As I pen this, I’ve spent over a couple of dozen hours in Wilds, focusing on the main campaign before getting sidetracked by sidequests. Sadly, that choice left me quite disappointed.
Monster Hunter campaigns are not celebrated for their storytelling prowess or creativity. They generally exist to guide players through the myriad systems and mechanics you’ll lean on for the 100+ hours you’re about to invest. Essentially, these campaigns offer a grand tour of each game’s roster of creatures.
The typical progression goes like this: your team is searching for a mysterious beast whose presence disrupts the world’s regions you find yourself in. While on this pursuit, you’re persistently bothered by other monsters, until you finally identify what’s been causing the initial havoc. You reach the big guy, face off against it, and then the campaign wraps up. That’s when you delve into High Rank, and the real Monster Hunter adventure begins.
Broadly speaking, this description suits the Wilds campaign as much as it did World’s. Yet, it’s the details that differentiate a captivating journey from an unremarkable one.
What made World’s campaign stand out was its driving force. Zorah Magdaros was a groundbreaking type of monster, so gigantic that a whole village needed to rally just to slow it down. It was so vast that you could battle several monsters on its back with room to spare.
This was an ambitious project for the developers, an attempt to usher in a new kind of Monster Hunter experience. Many players, however, didn’t enjoy it. The battles with Zorah Magdaros involved constructing intricate defenses to slow it down; rushing to load cannons to chip away at its massive health bar, which felt quite different from typical Monster Hunter gameplay.
Personally, I liked these segments precisely for their novelty. Zorah’s unique gameplay elements broke up the monotony that could set in from battling one monster after another, and its journey served to propel the narrative forward.
Every time Zorah reached a new section of the map, it opened up fresh territories for you to explore. As you ventured into these areas, you could witness the impact of Zorah’s passage on the local ecosystem. The game kept its cards close about Zorah’s migration motives, weaving a sense of urgency and intrigue throughout the story.
Now, when you look at the Wilds campaign, the absence of a Zorah-like figure is palpable. The game’s flagship monster, Arkveld, occasionally appears to cause some inexplicable disruption before disappearing, reappearing only after an hour or two. It’s not the climactic boss; that role belongs to a dormant giant you only learn about shortly before your mission with it.
There’s a lack of the collective effort to counter a shared threat in this narrative. At times, it seems like Capcom struggled to organically introduce some monsters into the storyline, so they merely appear in missions and force you to confront them on the spot.
It’s evident that a connective thread among various character groups might have existed before being cut. Some NPC dialogues and cinematic lines hint at a deeper storyline, but it’s left frustratingly out of reach.
Even the tale of an ancient civilization whose tech that controlled weather led to their downfall feels disjointed, more fitting for a lore compendium than a cohesive story.
The issues with the Wilds campaign mirror some of the core problems in the main games. It sacrifices some charm; it polishes rough edges in a bid for accessibility, but perhaps not in the areas that mattered most.
In the end, the Wilds main campaign may soon fade from memory as the game’s highs and lows become more apparent. Yet, I can’t help but ponder what a true sequel to World’s campaign might have offered.
