3.5/5 ★ – Nestunt's review of Monster Hunter: World.

It is safe to say that Monster Hunter is a pheromone… Sorry. A Phenomenon! They keep saying that word in the game. The total series’ sales exceed the 45 Million units mark, with ‘World’ being Capcom’s best-selling game in its history. And despite having premiered in 2004, those are still some staggering numbers, particularly for this last entry. Best-selling in a company that has a portfolio of historied franchises like Resident Evil, Mega Man and Street Fighter, is indeed impressive. That being said, after playing through 65 hours of a Monster Hunter game for the first time in my life, I have to say: I don’t understand the hype. Sure, the technology they use to make the monsters move and behave, in ways that even a biologist like me can find believable, is captivating. Add to that size. And who doesn’t like to face ‘realistic’ looking Giant dragons/dinosaurs? Still, there is something about the visual art in this game that bugs me the wrong way. Sorry! Rubs. Rubs me the wrong way. You collect a lot of insects. A LOT. Once again, I respect what they did with the environments and the level design, conveying a sense of naturally grown habitats and ecology, without ever being lush or saturated for the sake of recreating the spectacle of a choreographed wildlife documentary. And that’s precisely where my disappointment comes creeping in. The fabric of their textures always felt too plastic. I usually take issue with some Japanese studios’ tendency to apply a porcelain-looking filter to their renders. Here, they go on a complete different direction – character models, monsters and terrains, all resemble too much those kinds of toys that are aimed at the realistic segment. I like those toys, but it didn’t look right in a game where you have a broader tray of resources to work with. Additionally, even if I liked the aesthetic of the level design, the architecture of those areas was clearly drawn having in mind groups of players and not a single-player only person like me. This prior paragraph could be a recurrent theme throughout the review, but I am not going to punish a game for a structural characteristic that I knew before buying. At the same time, if you built the game with cooperation in mind, why force players to play the missions alone until unlocking a cutscene? I digress. Another trait of natural habitats that they managed to recreate, without falling to the usual tendencies of fiction world-building, was the ambience of sounds. More often than not, audio departments mistake biodiversity with cacophony. With the exception of birds, a few mammals, and mating seasons, ecological hot-spots are more silent than one might think. Only when conflict arises, do animals make their presence known. And Monster Hunter sound editing and mixing nail it. Acoustically, you feel the weight of silence when you are looting these layered locales and, suddenly, the vocalization of a giant breaks through the dense canopy when a monster detects your presence. This effect never loses impact and you really feel that you are disturbing the natural order of things, like shattering glass in a harmonious host. On the other hand, the Music was never much memorable, with a few tracks able to complement the audiovisual magnitude of some Monsters. For many years, I’ve wanted to experience an entry in this franchise. In 2004, it immediately grabbed my attention because their take on knight vs monster was different and cool, but for some reason or another I never dove in. Years passed, and the interest factor changed from coolness to curiosity, I needed to understand why was this selling like gangbusters. Still, never took the plunge. Then, more recently and something that seems to have become a trend, people started to compare this franchise controls and combat to Dark Souls (2011). Now, I really needed to know. And let me tell you, not only do people need to cool down with those comparisons, but also Monster Hunter is very different from Souls. It was always different. I just think it turns out to be a weaker product. A better comparison is Nioh (Team Ninja’s 2017 game), a product that managed to encapsulate the best of loot gameplay with the best of animation priority combat. Monster Hunter World is a loot game, first and foremost. Yes, it shares with Souls some principles of animation priority in its combat mechanics, but it clearly isn’t its focus. Dark Souls is all about mastering the combination of spatial awareness with stamina management; without that, the level of your gear becomes almost irrelevant. In Monster Hunter, all you are doing is working towards better gear. Not experience. You don’t gain experience like in other RPGs. And that would be an interesting design choice to discourage players from grinding. You rapidly understand that the gameplay loop the designers expect you to engage in is: Blacksmith; look at what he requires for improving your weapons and armor; and then go on hunts for particular monsters that will give you those materials. Essentially, the materials are the experience points that generate raises in attack and defense, through gear. Interesting concept. Where this progression system falls short is that you end up having to grind if you want meaningful improvements for said gear. And if, like me, you find grinding a lazy design choice to artificialize length and depth, this game only becomes impactful if you resort to it, which is a ridiculous paradox. Particularly in a game centered on giant monsters. If you don’t grind, the controls, animations and audiovisual punch of each hit are never weighted or choreographed in ways that could make the slog of an ‘underleveled’ confrontation feel like a power fantasy; and if you do grind, the control/animation/punch problems are still there and you’ve seen these same monsters so many times that they lose their specialness. I was hit with this wow-factor 2 times during all those hours. It was just before facing the final boss of the story. Not the boss per se, but 2 of the three sub-bosses you have to beat beforehand. Their designs and fighting conditions were really neat, and I wish the game had more encounters like that. It’s a very small number of eventful situations, like I said, in a game with GIANT MONSTERS. More, I am even suspicious about the good time I had in those 2 battles, because I grinded before them. The end was being foreshadowed, so I set my eyes on some powerful gear and did side quests until I got the materials I needed. In the end, those 2 fights were great, but to generate those conditions I had to do boring stuff. That’s almost a zero-sum game. The story is near-absent from this. It has a nice message of ecosystem balance and the importance of carnivores in maintaining said equilibrium, but it’s not trying to go much deeper than that. And that’s OK. This is not a game for that. As a result, acting and dialogue were also a bit uninspiring. To conclude, Monster Hunter World is sprouting with interesting concepts and great ideas, from gathering intel by venturing into unknown but ecologically well-implemented environments, removing health bars and having to pay attention to realistically-looking monster behavior to understand how well you are doing, to taking care of the redundancy of having experience points to raise attack and defense and also have gear that increases those same stats. However, the gameplay loop and progression systems that are at the core of this gaming experience weigh all those promising conceptualizations down to an insipid and repetitive world where you don’t get to live an adventure, but a job.