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Monster Hunter Has Been Tamed

Monster Hunter Wilds has been out for a few weeks now and after destroying the hardest fight in the game with only around 35 hours it has really set in just how easy Wilds feels. With my desire to keep hunting I booted up Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate for the first time and ages and it's night and day how different they are. What surprised me was that 3 Ultimate wasn’t quite as hard as I remembered, it took me until Rathian for me to finally cart. But despite the actual difficulty of the fights not being anything significantly more challenging than in Wilds, it never felt like a pushover in the same way Wilds did. I found that I was actually thinking and making decisions throughout my replay of 3U on about every step of the way. Every single mechanic and feature felt like it mattered and was important to engage in. In Wilds I was just running from fight to fight hitting monsters with a hammer til they stopped moving on mindless instinct. The problem isn’t just that the fights in Wilds feel like pushovers in comparison to the previous games, it's that you never have to think.

In Monster Hunter Wilds, things like money, resource points, and resource gathering have been de-emphasized so much they might as well not exist. I never once had to think about what I was spending and using the entire playthrough of the game, by the end of the game I had literal 100s of potions in my inventory that I legitimately don’t know how I earned. In 3U every potion and item has to be deliberately crafted, it isn’t hard to gather the materials to do it but that takes time and effort. Both games give you supply items to help you out in hunts, but 3U gives you a small amount of temporary items to give you an edge while Wilds gives you a huge helping of potions and will occasionally restock itself throughout the fight. In 3U beating a fight without using many items is a relief because it meant I didn’t have to take the time, money, or resource points to go get more. Other aspects of preparation have been streamlined down too, if you forget to eat you simply just cook during the hunt. Forget a couple potions or traps you meant to bring? Don’t worry you just go in the tent and grab them from your main inventory.

While the generosity of the game rewards and streamlining have eradicated the gathering part of the game, every other thing that doesn’t involve smacking a monster has been eradicated by your steed. The Seikret will come to you when you whistle no matter what and can move quite fast. Once you are on your Seikret you can press up on the d-pad and it will literally walk itself to your hunt for you. All monsters are magically tracked on your map now which would already be a huge change, but you literally don't even have to bother navigating your way to them. Whether it's finding them or chasing them down after they run away you can literally follow them without even touching your controller. It would be one thing if they just took you to the monster, but calling in the Seikret works as a very strong get out of jail free card. There is no limit to how many times you can call for it, I started instinctively calling for it every time I got hit because why not? Why even let the monster get the chance to put you in a bad position when you can run away on your bird faster than the monster can chase you. You can drink potions and sharpen your weapon while on it so topping yourself off is basically free. You don’t have to take advantage of natural openings to recover anymore, just do it literally whenever you feel mildly threatened. It breaks the game with such little effort it is almost comical. The solution to every problem in the game is to hit the monster, dodge roll away from attacks, and call in your bird when you get hit. These three things are the only things you will ever have to actively think of doing in Monster Hunter Wilds.

This doesn’t even include many other small things that stack up in the player’s favor. The environment only seems to help you fight this time around, small monsters used to pester you, interrupting you from attacking or using items while you were too focused on the main monster. Now they only seem to attack the big monster no matter what. The new Wound system makes it so Monsters spend more of their time toppled and stunned than ever before allowing you to get lots of free hits in. Attacks almost never bounce off in Wilds even when at pretty low sharpness levels. This even hurts the natural need to upgrade your weapon, in 3U bouncing off is common enough that anytime I got a weapon with a new level of sharpness I felt heavily rewarded for taking the time to make it. In Wilds I often even wonder why sharpness is in the game, whetstones are unlimited now, you rarely bounce off of monsters, and it's trivial to sharpen a weapon if you have to with your Seikret.

And that is the true core of the issue, so many aspects and mechanics in Wilds feel like they are in the game because it is part of being a Monster Hunter game. The gathering, the tracking down, the status effects, and more have been streamlined down significantly but they are all pretending to still be a part of the game. There to make the game seem more complex and deeper than it is, to make you think that there is more to the game than there is. Seriously, the paintball is still in the game despite all monsters being automatically tracked at all times, and there are many items and equipment skills in the game like this. Wilds is too afraid to leave behind the things it doesn’t care about and it is a weaker game for it. I don’t hate the idea of a streamlined Monster Hunter, heck after slogging through the story I enjoyed how little time was wasted in high rank. Just fight after fight after fight with friends was a blast, but the game is afraid to fully embrace that this is what it wants. Monster Hunter Wilds doesn’t want to be Monster Hunter, it wants to be multiplayer Punch Out and refuses to commit.