STEEMPOP // Monster Hunter: World Should Bore Me; Instead It Haunts Me

Monster Hunter: World Should Bore Me; Instead It Haunts Me

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I shouldn’t have even bought the game given the condition of my free time and stacks upon stacks of hobby materials laying around, easily enough to crush your standard hoarding grandmother. I am the worst person. I tell myself constantly "I'll find the time" or "eventually I'll have time off" or, even worse, "maybe I'll just not keep buying nerd shit" and I am always a goddamn dirty liar.

Video games are an especially egregious offender to my free time

because they do, typically, always carry a good money spent to time invested ratio for your dollar, especially in the current "open-world" climate where developers are emphasizing making worlds you'll want to spend dozens of hours in and (hopefully) come looking for more of once they release some Downloadable Content (DLC) down the road. And I love me a big, fat pixel world to explore and have for decades once teenage me became infatuated with Japanese Role-playing Games (JRPGs) in the advent of the original PlayStation system. The thing about my intrigue and borderline obsession with these substantially realized worlds, though, is that my investment in them is usually based on how well integrated they are into the main story of the game and/or how well they help fill out the spaces in between the story beats as you explore them for all they are worth.

Monster Hunter: World is a giant Jurassic Park simulator

Where in between going head to head with winged or scaled or feathery beasts the size of a house you invariably overfill your inventory allotment with bugs, mushrooms, and flora until you wonder what you are doing with your life. I shouldn't have got the game because, even from the outside looking in and with no prior experience with the series, I knew there was absolutely no such thing as a story with this game. As I was alluding to above, I play video games mostly for the story, occasionally for mechanics, and even then with the latter, it is a case of myself playing a mobile game where for a handful of minutes at a time I’m just trying to stimulate my brain. Yet despite that, and because I tend to get very much wrapped up in the Twitch zeitgeist of what’s new and hot in the gaming community, I bought a game that is sort of an open world but yet has only the slightest whisper of a story and is designed for players to repeatedly hunt and kill/capture massive beasts over and over and over again to make stylish weapons and pieces of armor so you can go hunt and capture more beasts.

And I goddamn love it.

First and foremost, I honestly more than fifty percent bought and loved the game after about fifteen hours of playing it for one main reason:

YOU HAVE GODDAMN CAT SIDEKICKS YOU GET TO CUSTOMIZE AND MAKE WEAPONS AND ARMOR FOR TOO!!

Disclaimer about that last statement and my enthusiasm for it; I am a grown ass man who pushes around many heavyweights in a given week, so mind your ridicule unless it's clever. But yes, I love me some kitty, though also relevant to this line of conversation and building on my back-story above, I can be lured in by mechanics over story in a video game as long as those mechanics are top-notch, and I think after a good amount of hours spent with Monster Hunter: World, I can say I highly enjoy the mechanical loop that the game presents.

The Loop

And what I mean by that "loop" is the cycle of things you have to go through to start realizing the world of MH:W. At first, it seems like a mishmash of “what the shit is that number for?” and “how the hell do I get that weapon development chain to open up?” and “how the #$@% do I even team up with people?” but things slide into place pretty easily if you remain patient with the game and, quite frankly, if you’ve played video games before and just know how these types of systems tend to work. Monster Hunter: World doesn’t necessarily do anything I haven’t done in a video game before, but it combines so many systems and stats and categories into one giant hodgepodge of a gaming checklist and just counts on you to put two-and-two together and make them work while it nudges you into the basic action mechanics via the story that is two-cups-attached-by-a-string level of complexity. Seriously, all I know about the actual events of Monster Hunter is that the people inhabiting its world are essentially the Mountain Dew “Extreme” addicts from Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle in the almost aggressive willingness to possibly die horribly from fighting and then being consumed by animals that would give King Kong a run for his money . Thankfully, the game itself far outstrips its meager framework within all of three missions in the Story part of the game.

Trial and Error

As the game opens itself up to you, it becomes a case of "trial and error" becomes "essential and non-essential." I can see why the game is overwhelming to some; it does itself no favors by just handing players several dozen items to be picked up, running meters of points and currencies, several types of weapons to try, armors to develop, crafting combinations, and on and on and on. And, admittedly, some of my enjoyment has probably come from barreling through the game just assuming years of gaming knowledge will fill in the gaps and knowing off the bat I wanted the person-sized sword that turns into a motherfucking ax as my weapon and not spending any time experimenting with the rest. But within, say, ten missions, I knew what inventory filling plants I can ignore and which I need to stockpile constantly, you find that you don't need much "research" to know how to kill these things past one introductory mission hunting them. And weapon crafting is, well, weapon crafting. You have to find and grind out the same shit over and over again once you know what you like and you’ll be overwhelmed with options because there’s just so much to kill. If Monster Hunter: World is really guilty of anything, it’s not so much “overwhelming” the player, it’s drowning the player in superfluous and letting people go down paths they really don’t need to be wandering while they try and find the right one that leads to a goddamn T-Rex that occasionally breathes fire and jump-glides around on a set of leathery wings.

Some would argue, I assume, that the last part is the real beauty of the game: It can be as in-depth or as simple as you want it to be given the breadth of equipment and items. Personally, I think "wasting" players time by not entirely outlining the essentials on top of the basics is a way to disgruntle people, but I also feel after a handful of hours of MH:W the basics are 90% of what you need and that you can get to the heart of what makes the game super fun. And that is merely tracking down your hunts, using your quirky weapons to try and pull off rewarding combos, and running like a drunken asshole with their pants on fire when you mess up and are about to get stomped on for your transgressions. Putting aside some of the kind of lackadaisical mechanical presentation, the vast majority of this game’s appeal is doing some dirt with your comically sized weaponry on these beasts, and everything about it is excellent. Watching their patterns, trying not to over commit on your swings, getting your world squashed by some super attack you did not know they were capable of as they take some damage and on and on. There may be a lot of clutter around this core, but the focus stands dinosaur head and shoulders up over that muddle.

Also, at your home base, there’s a GODDAMN PIG named POOGIE that will MOTHERFUCKING HEADBUTT YOUR FACE FOR PETTING IT WRONG!

Poogie’s the best.

Wrap Up

As my title to this piece states, I honestly shouldn’t be enjoying this game as much as I am given my predispositions to video games at this point in my life. Or, at the least, I probably should have had some fun with it and bounced off of it by now given that it is entirely bereft of what I do go for with my video game time. I usually want sweeping storylines and environments to wrap myself in, detailed characterizations to drive the story bits home, and it helps to have a solid combat and inventory system to go along with these, though I will accept "passable" as long as the first two items are excellent (like, Witcher 3 excellent). In Monster Hunter: World you have some anime ass weapons, a shit ton of monsters, and, of course, your totes adorbs Palico cat assistant, story be damned and, man, you better be willing to grind this stuff out. It's glorious. I don't know how this game has warped my twenty years in the making gaming preferences, but I wish I were closer to a hundred hours into this game than I am the twenty I've logged so far.

-Humphrey Lee

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