It gives scale momentum and force and a strangeness that I had forgotten was part of seeing new, big things. More importantly, Monster Hunter: World will color every future game that tries to bring “scale” to bear in both marketing and design. It is repetitive, and I suspect that will wear me down sooner than later, but for now, I still have some curiosity to satiate. Instead, I lost an hour to learning how to use a new weapon, and even those old hunts held a few surprises. I spent last night capturing some gameplay footage, and expected to find a chore. In Monster Hunter: World’s case, there has, surprisingly, continued to be something for me. And I mean that as someone who often sees my friends excited for something and convinces myself that maybe, just maybe, there’s something there for me, too. If that doesn’t sound good, then I’m not sure there’s much here for you beyond the opening low rank missions. Worse, once I unlocked the “high rank” quests, I received an all-at-once dump of new side missions (spread across familiar quest types), a dozen or more new equipment recipes, and an overarching main story objective that required me to repeat the same hunts I’d been doing for the first 25 hours, but with remixed enemy placement and higher damage by some of the monsters. Once I learned the ins-and-outs of all four areas (at least, all four that are in the low rank quests), Monster Hunter: World showed its hand and began to drag, at least in single player. The life of the hunter, unlike the life of the hero, is repetitive. There are other problems, too, separate from one’s taste for that particular theme. Through the full set of low rank quests, Monster Hunter: World embodies exactly this colonialist fantasy: the pillaging of natural resources, the violence against native people, and the rhetorical establishment of the colonizer as civilized and rational. Distant regions are places where bounty can be gained, both literal and metaphorical. For as long as the modern West has colonized-the act with which it marked itself as “the West”-it has reduced the lands in its margins to hunting grounds. But it’s also strangely honest.īut this association is older than the Trumps. Instead, each cutscene is a speedbump in my interest. It’s frustrating, because another narrative frame may have drawn me in. Monsters are great to study, but they’re better for parts, and they better not get in your way. But more importantly, it’s because any ecological message it tries to convey is undercut by the the larger narrative and mechanical thrust: You are here to conquer and claim. Partially, that’s because the game struggles to characterize its primary players at all-it doesn’t help that no one except your pet cat (who is customizable and extremely cute) has a real name. You can watch a video version of this review right here:Īs an “A Class hunter,” you’ve traveled across the sea to “the new world,” where a major expedition has tracked the “elder dragons.” Through the 30 hours I’ve played (which includes all of the “low rank” content), you explore the continent and hunt some monsters in your quest to uncover why the dragons made that trip, getting a light lecture on the circle of life and the beauty of nature on the way. It does that by blending scale with other things: the dynamic and surprising movements of its creatures the intricate and clever level design the visual variety of both its monsters and landscapes, reflecting a willingness to depict both the majestic and the grotesque (often right up against each other). It offers scale that moves, that surprises, that frightens. Thankfully, through its first 30 hours at least, it does more than just “impress” with size. The point is, the scale could be the only thing Monster Hunter: World trades on. And yes, there is the sheer, terrifying scale of Monster Hunter’s signature complexity, too: statistics, items, equipment, cooking, weapon movesets, assignments, upgrades, expeditions, trade missions, horticulture, bounties, crafting, charms, ranks, elemental weakness, NPC partner affinity, map zones, and somehow more still. Its creatures begin at “bus-sized” and rise to living landmasses, and all of them dwarf the player’s character. It has large, complex environments that clamber up into tangled jungle canopies and tumble down into winding carrion burrows. Monster Hunter: World could, by all rights, add itself to this lineage and call it a day.
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