After dedicating an embarrassing amount of hours to Monster Hunter World over the past four weeks, I’ve technically reached endgame and spent enough time exploring what there is to do to be able to write up my feelings about this game. Typically, I talk these things over with my friends or rant on my Twitter instead of writing a post for these things, but because my friends enjoy the game so much and because some of my followers are trying really hard to avoid spoilers, writing these things into the void is the most utilitarian way for me to get these thoughts off my mind. For those unaware of what Monster Hunter is about, it’s a pretty simple concept. You kill monsters and take their parts to make better gear so you can fight stronger monsters. If I had to give another game similar to the Monster Hunter concept, I’d offer up World of Warcraft and Vindictus as two games that share a lot of general features with monster hunter. I think the similarities between Vindictus and Monster Hunter are pretty obvious, but not many people have played Vindictus, so I figured I’d offer up WoW, where I think the sense of gear progression and content progression is pretty similar to Monster Hunter.
Overall, my thoughts on the game are pretty critical, but I will mention that there was a point where I really enjoyed the game. In fact, it’s hard to imagine putting 90 hours into a game that I never enjoyed. The best feature by far is the progression in the early and mid-game of Monster Hunter. What I mean by progression is both improvements in your ability as a player and the way in which beating monsters unlock stronger monsters and stronger weapons. The way in which these aspects of the game drive you forward feels extremely rewarding. For me, the coupling of gear/difficulty progression with getting familiar with my weapon made learning the game comfortable. I had come from a pretty traditional fantasy action RPG background, so I was familiar with the general approach to fighting in games like these, but it took some time to get used to the damage upkeep mechanics and such. If I were to go back to the comparison to WoW, this would be like if you could level to max by doing a bunch of unique dungeons once or twice instead of the insanely boring quest grind that high-level leveling requires. This generally positive progression experience was able to carry me through about 60 hours in the game, which I generally enjoyed a lot.
There are a lot of things I don’t like about Monster Hunter, and their negative effects compound to leaving me easily frustrated every time I open the game.
This actually probably one of the least obvious things initially, but it becomes really annoying as you progress through the game. The interface for the game is just generally awful. Specifically navigating menus is terrible, a lot of things are unclear, a million tutorials attempt to patch the unclarity but end up just wasting my time, and managing enormous lists of things (like investigations and the high rank armor list) becomes absolutely terrible at some point. Maybe so much attention was put on the fights and the environment that developing a modern UI would have stretched the development team too thin, but a significant part of Monster Hunter is upkeeping various things outside of hunts and the terrible interfaces make that aspect of the game awful.
Monster Hunter artificially lengthens itself by reusing old fights and assets with tweaked numbers and gimmicks. I initially felt this when I hit High Rank (HR), where you are forced to redo several easy fights that have been slightly changed and numerically adjusted to your current gear strength. I was okay with the reuse when I hit HR because I reasoned that there would eventually be some HR-exclusive content that I would quickly reach and get to learn and have fun again. This did happen, but there also wasn’t nearly as much new content as I expected. There were two recolors of some of the hardest Low Rank (LR) fights, a monster dedicated to ganking you and carpet bombing your hunts (fun concept, really annoying in practice), three new monsters in a new zone that heavily reuse assets from previous fights (the fights play out somewhat differently though), and five elder dragon fights. This might seem like a lot, but for me, I beat all of these fights solo in order to reach the credits at all.
And for my purposes it is at this point that the game ends, because after credits there is absolutely no new content. You are literally redoing fights where monsters deal amplified damage just to get gems and augments to do more damage to do the same fights faster. The tempered fights are not really worth it to fight for any other reason, and if you want gear you might as well just redo the (at this point) easy standard HR fights with investigations you have collected. Monster Hunter essentially forces you into a grind similar to the grind speedrunners for many games have to go through to get good at specific segments. What is fundamentally missing from Monster Hunter World is end-game exclusive content or significant variations (environmental and such) on hunts with excellent rewards that incentivizes min-maxing for damage and playing as a group. Tempered fights are not tankier than regular fights and are not built around being played with a group, so you may as well do them solo if you did the original fights solo. Somehow even chalice dungeons in Bloodborne are more interesting than any of the HR investigations, and chalice dungeons are by far the least engaging part of Bloodborne. The analogy here for WoW would be the Mythic+ system and raiding, where there is a systematic way to progress that leads to long raids and hard dungeons that require excellent coordination to complete. That is not the case in Monster Hunter whatsoever.
This all wouldn’t be terrible if there weren’t a couple compounding aspects of the fights that make grinding them generally unpleasant. The first aspect is that, if you are appropriately geared for a fight, it should probably take you 20-30 minutes. This would be fine, if not for the second aspect, which is that most monsters have fairly few moves and/or the AI for the monsters frequently leads to a cyclic structure to fights. So what you are really doing for 25 minutes is dodging the same five moves in four different locations of the map and getting damage in in the meantime and otherwise just chasing the monster around. After doing a fight a couple times these patterns should seem stale to most people, which makes the remaining 20 times you fight the monster really annoying. In fact, in some cases the fight is just so long that you’ve learned the entirety of it by the time you beat it once. The third negative aspect of fights is that many moves are shared by several monsters, especially ones with similar bone structures. Thus, the variety across the game is reduced even further. Overall, everything about the game really makes the grind that eventually happens less fun and varied, and it just really kills my motivation to go for any gear set at this point.
I don’t generally hate all the Monster Hunter weapons. In fact, I think it’s nice that most of them occupy a pretty unique space among all weapons (the ones that don’t are mostly the bowguns). My main issue is that there is a lack of a reliable DPS vanilla weapon class. Most of the high damage weapons have some DPS upkeep, combo, or counter mechanics, but it would be nice for somebody like me if there were a vanilla weapon class that could do reliable damage off of a simple dodge and basic attack during openings strategy. The closest thing to this is sword and shield, but you are legitimately tickling the monster if you don’t do your combos on that class. It is for this reason that I think comparing Monster Hunter to Dark Souls really does not work. Dark Souls incentivizes careful evasion and simple opening abuse, where as Monster Hunter encourages the hunter to play greedy for damage and trade in some cases with the monster. It is just not a playstyle for me.
I will continue to play Monster Hunter intermittently, mostly to hunt tempered elder dragons with friends, but the joy I had in playing the game solo initially is definitely lost. Maybe the endgame raid-tier fights will come with the DLCs, but I am not keeping my hopes up. I think this game is overrated and unpolished. I actually think Monster Hunter would work better as a game you play for an hour a day or something, so you space out your hunts and delay the onset of boredom. Maybe this approach would allow the DLC to drop right as you reach endgame and then the DLC helps offset the lack of endgame content. But it is honestly mindblowing to me how some of my friends manage to play Monster Hunter World for six to eight hours a day after reaching HR 50. I just can’t get as excited about it as they apparently are.