Monster Hunter Wilds’ biggest struggle is working out what it wants to say about nature

Monster Hunter Wilds is a blast. As someone who’s been around since the series’ PSP days, I do think it’s on the ‘slightly too easy’ side, but the combat has never felt better and there’s a serious commitment to telling a fun little story before hitting the endgame grind. That said – if these games are getting wordier, the series' key creatives should sit down and discuss what they actually want to say about nature and hunting.

Following a much better onboarding early on and some story-heavy hours before the credits roll and the narrative continues with HR and Tempered hunts, Monster Hunter Wilds fully embraces what it’s all about: smacking wyverns on the head with massive hammers and slicing and gunning beasts with extreme prejudice. Despite the beautifully rendered environments, the Monster Hunter series has always been a violent affair. How do you reconcile that with a progressive environmental message? Uh, you kind of don’t.

I’ll be first to admit it’s a tricky river to navigate. On the one hand, you need to squarely deliver on the basic premise of hunting down a ton of monsters to craft cool hats and big swords. On the other, you want to say things, important things, because expensive video games that only run on vibes are a dying breed. Also, you want to recruit more players to make the money numbers go even further up, and people like stories. It’s all a trick, of course; the end goal is to make gamers focus on the solid hunt-loot-craft loop which is Monster Hunter’s core identity.

Looking at the first-month data, it seems that Capcom has hugely succeeded one way or another. Was a cutscene-heavy main quest the secret sauce the series had been missing to capture more folks’ attention? Er, probably not, especially when Wilds’ narrative is such a bungle once you mull it over for a bit.

Past conversations

Pre-World Monster Hunter is largely plot-less. You only got a small description for each quest and some half-cooked narrative bit about why you need to eradicate a big animal. It was possible to learn more about the world, lore, and role of the hunters if you put in the time, but the general assumption was they were a defensive force that protected cities, towns, and small settlements from too-aggressive giant animals.

In 2018, Monster Hunter World came along and took itself slightly more seriously by telling an actual story, cutscenes and twists included. This is where problems started to arise. The New World is being changed by the Elder Dragons, and there’s also a spiked beast named Nergigante that’s messing with other Elder Dragons. It’s all one big chain of anomalous events, but time and again, we’re told they’re natural events. They just don’t happen very often. By and large, humans, Wyverians, Troverians, and Lynians’ (the four sentient races in this world) relationship with nature was always depicted as sustainable, so you can see where this is going. The expedition that arrives to the New World doesn’t seek to establish cities or ravage the land for resources, so that was fine at least.

Since World needed big story beats and even bigger threats, such natural cycles were treated as impending catastrophes that needed to be stopped and essentially turned the hunters into superheroes. ‘Humanity’ began to interfere in its own way, oblivious to the natural order of a just-discovered continent and making up excuses to slay creatures that were doing their things. Oops.

What did we learn today, kids?

After Rise taking things in a more classical direction, Monster Hunter Wilds doubles down on the ‘saving nature from nature’ angle, with more cutscenes and slow-walking sections this time around. After several scary monster encounters and investigations to learn about the ‘White Wrath’ beast, there’s a perfect plot twist which places the blame on the ancient Wyverian civilization and a source of energy that caused ruin. Though it couldn’t retroactively fix the friction found in World’s story, it was the perfect way to make Wilds both have high stakes and justify the ongoing slaughter of every monster that does monster things across the Forbidden Lands. “The habitats are off; we need to correct past wrongdoings.” Good enough.

The thing is... the story arc just keeps going after the credits roll. With the previously ‘broken’ environments now restored to their former richness and old species making a return, hunters can go back to their regular activities. Fabius, a prominent figure of the Hunter’s Guild, makes a big statement to his assistant about how hunters will always fix what’s broken and whatnot. How do you correctly decide what needs to be fixed (killed) though? See, this wouldn’t be an issue if Monster Hunter’s humanity closely resembled our own (we’re bad at preserving environments), but that’s not the case.

Past this point, Gore Magala shows up to ruin everyone’s week with its virus and other surprises to put extra pressure on the hunters. The story also continues to violently swerve between Nata being sad about having to kill monsters which have gone off the rails and every change in the environments being treated as something in need of correction by Fabius. Why can’t we just have forgettable excuses like protecting the roads or cattle again after wrapping up the ‘a civilization fucked up, actually’ angle that half-works?

By placing a greater emphasis on story and answering the whys and hows which were generally avoided in the past, Monster Hunter might’ve written itself into a corner. If the series ‘needs’ to evolve and become more self-serious because the powers that be want to take ambitious swings, writing that has something coherent to say would be a good starting point. As it stands, Wilds’ discourse on nature is muddled and can’t soar above the actual video game’s needs.

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