A Late Look: Monster Hunter: World - Article

by Mark Nielsen , posted on 24 March 2024 / 2,794 Views

Welcome to A Late Look, a series of article where I take a belated look at games from yesteryear that I missed out on the first time around. Not quite review and not quite rant, it’s more a casual assessment of what I – the gamer of the future – consider to be each game’s strengths and weaknesses in retrospect.

For this particular entry we're looking at Monster Hunter: World, the game that brought a previously-niche series to new heights in the west and which now reigns supreme as Capcom’s best-selling title by far. It’s worth noting that my own previous experience with the series is limited to Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, and that I’ll be looking at the game from a purely single-player perspective. Let’s get started.

Strength: Visuals & Monster Designs

One doesn't have to take many glances at Monster Hunter: World to see that it's a feast for the eyes. Even now, a generation later, Monster Hunter: World is excellent on this front, providing not only solid visuals and threatening monsters, but a plethora of different, lush environments to take in. Few other games can manage to make something so unreal look so real, and that alone adds a lot to the overall experience.

The real stars of the show, however, are of course the monster designs, which are also a strength of the franchise as a whole. Many titles aim to create monsters that blend both uniqueness and visual appeal, and Monster Hunter is one of the best in this regard, particularly because it integrates the visual characters of monsters with how they fight and function. The thick-headed Baroth has a cliff for a head and this is therefore both its strongest point defensively and one that it utilizes in its attacks. While this is something people have come to expect from the franchise, it shouldn't go unappreciated how much these interesting - and, at least to some extent, believable - monsters contribute to the appeal of the series.

Weakness: A Very Busy Game

From my perspective Monster Hunter: World is much more an evolution and expansion on previous Monster Hunter releases, rather than a reinvention, and to some extent this comes at a cost. While the zones of the map were actual self-contained areas in previous entries, with load times in-between, they blend together fluidly here, so you're essentially dealing with one larger, intricately interwoven map area. A lot of positive things can be said about this in regards to smoothing the experience and creating more interesting areas, but it also comes with the downside of a much harder-to-read map and tricky navigation. The areas themselves are also much more packed than in Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, and at any one time you’ll have more creatures, interactibles, flashing lights, and UI elements around you than before. While some of these are great elements in themselves (I love some of the combat interactibles like flashbugs and vigorwasps), it all adds up to a quite busy game experience.

This is perhaps even more prevalent outside of the hunts themselves, when looking for example at the absolutely massive amounts of items and crafting options, only a handful of which you're ever likely to use. An entire category - ammo items - has dozens of types and its own dedicated inventory that’s present for every hunter, even when only 3 out of 14 weapon types utilize it (as far as I’m aware). Essentially, it’s just very hard to ever get a full overview of things in Monster Hunter: World, both inside and outside of hunts. It’s not so much that there’s too much stuff in the game, but rather that you consciously have to tune some of it out that becomes the problem.

Strength: Various Gameplay Styles & Addictive Loop

One area that Monster Hunter titles never skimp on is the variety & uniqueness of the weapon types. You have your aggressive melee weapons, your heavy slow ones, several ranged options, and even a double-sided pogo stick of a blade that’ll have you flying around monsters like an acrobat. In fact, both here and in Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, one of the most enjoyable parts of the experience is trying out every weapon at the start before deciding which one(s) to focus on. In Monster Hunter: World I opted to switch between three or four different weapons and, while that might not have been optimal for fully mastering them, it added a great deal of variety to the experience.

And let’s talk about that base experience while we’re at it, because there’s something about the simple set-up of Monster Hunter - jumping from mission to mission, tracking down monster after monster - that’s just inherently satisfying and addicting. It’s a little like playing a game with only boss fights (aside from side-activities like gathering materials), and even while you end up doing some of them multiple times, there’s also some enjoyment in learning their move sets and behavior over time and perfecting how you take them down.

Weakness: Brutal Design

Now to be clear it’s not actually the difficulty of World that’s under critique here. In many games it’s partially the challenge that creates the enjoyment, and that’s at least to some extent still true here, but there are many ways to challenge a player, some more frustrating than others. In Monster Hunter: World, one of the really big elements that adds to the challenge is something I find very hard to enjoy: the taking away of player control. Stuns, monster roars, paralysis, knockbacks, there are countless ways to be left unable to act in Monster Hunter: World, whether it’s for one second or for five. Even some of the long, uncancellable weapon animations can be said to add to this, though that can be partially forgiven since players make their own choice of weapon.

The key point is that, with so many ways to lose control combined with the generally very slow ways of recovering health, stamina, etc. that also leave you defenseless, an unlucky sequence of events can very quickly turn you into a monster’s personal ragdoll and sometimes take you from full health to death without feeling like you had much chance to prevent it. It’s worth noting here that this is quite possibly less so the case in multiplayer, where you aren’t the sole attention of monsters, and indeed it feels like the series to some extent caters more to that type of gameplay, but I can only speak from my own experience trying to tackle the game single-handedly.

One other element I’d like to point out for its brutality is the resetting of the rather significant food buffs upon fainting. This essentially means that, while nearly all missions allow for three deaths before failure, the first death will put you at a major disadvantage and can therefore very easily snowball into more. A few other, smaller things could be mentioned here as well, but suffice it to say that while difficulty and frustration don’t always go hand in hand, in this case they're only a few steps away from synonymous.

Strength: Meowscular Chef

Criticism of food buffs aside, this feline and his flashy cuisine was like a much-needed instant therapy session between each mission. And really, it’s a cat that cooks; what’s not to love?

Conclusion

While it was a mixed pleasure overall - at times exhilarating, at others agonizing - I would have to say I enjoyed my time with Monster Hunter: World and found it to be surprisingly addicting. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that I was surprised by how little had changed from previous titles, given how this particular entry took the series to unheard levels of popularity, but while it retains both positives and negatives from them, at the very least it’s a stellar-looking game that brings more freedom to the hunt than any of its predecessors (Monster Hunter Rise could possibly be a different story, but that, my friends, is a game for another article).