#so I’m relying on gameplay footage and wikis

[pinkiepig]

Guys I think they just stole my fcking heart 👹 (more wips cause I’m impatient yuh yuh yuh)

[aslosteyes]

Monster Hunter World is a Breath of Fresh Air

I got into Monster Hunter Freedom on the PSP while I was still in High School. Education in this country blows chunks so it wqsn't hard for me to end up a better monster hunter than student, even without sacrificing my grades (MOST OF THE TIME, RAY)

So I played a LOT of MHF, and when it came out, the sequel. I never cared that I got into the series after it had made its entrance in 2004 on PS2. It didn't feel like walking on set without knowing what was up. The game was obvious: Hunt Monsters. But the story was almost absent.

As I played the games, various incidental and totally optional NPCs would drop little hints about the world. The elders that handed me my quests would feed me a little more info, and the culture became more clear. In this world, monster hunting was an ecological and survival necessity. Monsters provided MATERIALS, which were used to craft everything from armor and weapons to ingredients at the cafe, to farm upgrades (we'll get to you, FARMS)

This gave hunting and even grinding a sense of real purpose. A function beyond simply meeting the player's needs. It also provided the village with protection, or supported a food need, or a construction project. It also lays the groundwork for another idea: Everything is run on this economy of monster hunter-ing.

I know, I know. "Duh it's a video game called MONSTER HUNTER" idiot, what did you expect." But calm down. Hear me out.

Let's look at a thematically similar work for a second: Pokemon.

In Pokemonland, the whole world is built around an economy of pokemon trainers. But there are many questions, in fact, that the games will skip over or refuse to linger on, like Miltank being a source of meat, or your character needing to eat, or rest. If anything, your pokemon have more needs than the player character.

This is. . . weird, right? Compare this to Monster Hunter. You need rations or steak to keep your stamina up, which allows sprinting and other actions. But it gets worse. Over time, you will eventually lose chunks of your stamina bar. Oh shit right? What do you do?

Eat motherfucker!

It's intuitive as hell and although newer MH games will tell you explicitly, I grew up on having to figure this out. Used games wheeee.

But let's circle back to that: Rations and Steak. How do you get those?

From hunting. Rations are a village provision, a temporary item that you return if you don't use it. They appear in a blue box at the start of the quest and disappear from your pockets on your way home.

As for steak? -insert footage of Aptonoth Murder and Cooking-

. . . Any vegetarians mad at me right now? I love you, I'm sorry.

The point is that this world doesn't bring up and drop uncomfortable realities of its society, it kinda confronts them. And this gets more intense when we address the hunter's manual.

One might expect such a manual to contain lots of lore or something. Nah. Instead it has charts of weak spots, notes about carves, and maybe some info about the biggest and smallest you've hunted, or a sentence about the monster (Black Diablos)

This tells you a lot, but curiously, it leaves out a lot too. I'm sure they could've listed its attacks too, or maybe given some info about where you find them, but instead they went wide and vague and kept the manual purely practical. It just has the information a hunter would want going into a well-understood fight, rather than containing an entire wiki's worth of data and tips. The manual is here for reference.

Monster Hunter also handle multiplayer hunting. Party noises.

Monster Hunter also does something weird. It makes you go find the monster you are hunting, and in modern games, like World, there can often be other monsters on the same map with you. This makes the process of Stalking the monster an important phase of the fight, with choosing your opportunity to strike and coming well prepared being central components of gameplay.

The monsters themselves deserve a little snippet too. Wildly diverse across a host of games, though not as numerous as Pokemon, Monster Hunter is more similar to Monster Rancher: Both have deeper monsters. In Monster Hunter, the monsters have behaviors. They have habits and forecasts. Like Dark Souls, learning the fight is often the bread-and-butter of combat, and being able to act quickly and manipulate the UI rapidly are vital strengths when it comes to using your tools.

Which brings me to the FARM and the tools. They have added a lot of tools to Monster Hunter in my career. Mantles, Slingers, Pets. But all of them have felt just fine to me.

The farm is a place in a bunch of Monster Hunter games that you rely on to produce goods in regular quantities. It's the easiest way to generate a surplus of things like herbs and honey for mega potions or ivy and spiderwebs for nets to make pitfall traps. And again, all of it requires your personal effort to get the process started. In the early games you had to have one to make some, when it came to growing shit on your farm. Nowadays it's way easier, and I'm glad, honestly.

But remember those farm upgrades I mentioned a minute ago? Yeah those are back now. And they represent the expansion of the village's infrastructure. A eerily problematic workforce of Palicoes, Felyne's, or whatever else they've called them, happily serve their duties on the farm and assist you at the cafe. And hey, maybe they just like the jobs, but uhhhhhhh they phased this weird disparity out of the newer games, to an extent. Being mascot characters I guess Palicoes are subject to a certain amount of "adorableness" but it still rubs me weird. In World Palicoes are your chefs, your companion, and your housekeeper (and adventurers) but you mostly encounter them in the wild, in little tribes you can befriend for assistance.

These details aren't a complete list by any means, and whenever I play a Monster Hunter game I notice cool new little details like those. Little integrations of story and gameplay that make happy as a player and make me feel like part of a living world. Monster Hunter stands in stark contrast to a lot of AAA titles that lead you by the nose and try to teach you absolutely every mechanic thoroughly. It's a breath of fresh air to have a game let me learn at my own pace.