I am, by any realistic metric, fairly new to the Monster Hunter series. I held off playing the games for years, because they were locked to handheld consoles I didn’t care about – and they frankly looked like they ran like s**t.
Monster Hunter World was my first, and it’s what made me fall in love with the series; I’ve been a fan ever since. I have over two dozen hours into Wilds as I write this, and I decided to mainline the campaign before fussing about with sidequests. And boy, was that such a let down.
Monster Hunter campaigns aren’t known for their narrative chops or clever setups. They mostly exist to shepherd you through tutorials of the many, many, many systems and mechanics you’re going to rely on in your next 100+ hours. Structurally, they serve as a tour of each game’s menagerie.
They always play out like this: your squad is on the hunt for a mysterious monster whose presence is affecting the regions of the world you get dragged into. On their trail, you keep getting interrupted by some other monsters, before you finally learn what’s caused your original target to blah blah blah. You reach the big fella, have a showdown with it, and the campaign is over. You’re then introduced to High Rank and the actual game of Monster Hunter begins.
In a very broad sense, that description fits the campaign of Wilds’ about as well as it does World’s. The specifics, however, vary greatly – and it’s in those missing details that one campaign can make for a compelling adventure and the other barely registers.
The thrust of World’s campaign is what made it great. Zorah Magdaros was a new type of monster, so colossal in size that it needed an entire village of people simply to slow it down. This thing is large enough that you could fight multiple monsters on its back and there’d still be room for more.
Clearly, this was am ambitious undertaking for the team; an attempt to introduce a new type of encounter to Monster Hunter. Most people didn’t like it. Fighting Zorah Magdaros involved a lot of constructing elaborate ramparts to slow it down; running to load up cannons to chip away at its health, and generally do things that are very unlike what you come to Monster Hunter for.
I, however, liked them precisely because of that. See, Zorah’s decidedly different gameplay segments not only managed to break any monotony of fighting one monster after the other in the campaign before it could set in, the game also used its journey through the world as a way to advance the narrative.
Every time it would move to a new area of the map, that part would be unlocked for you to explore. And each time you did that, you’d see firsthand the effect it’s had on the local ecology. The game kept you in the dark for almost the entirety of the campaign about the true purpose of Zorah’s migration, but the chase gave the story some urgency and an enticing mystery to learn.
Now, compare that to the Wilds campaign. There’s no Zorah, no larger looming threat. Arkveld, the flagship monster of this particular game, shows up here and there to do something the characters can’t explain, before it vanishes – and you don’t see it again for another hour or two. It’s not the final boss, that honor goes to a sleeping giant that you only learn of its existence one mission prior.
There is no sense of large, different groups of people coming together to stop a common threat to be found here. In fact, some of the monster introductions in the campaign feel like Capcom simply couldn’t find a way for them to properly leave the green room, so they just sort of insert themselves into some missions and force you to fight them then and there.
There’s a distinct sense that something tying the different camps of characters together used to exist before it was cut. Some of the NPC conversations, and even a couple of lines of dialogue in cinematics allude to, well, something more going on – but you never get to see it.
Even the mystery of the forerunner civilization and their people’s weather-manipulating tech ultimately bringing about their doom falls flat when it just ends up being a tale sporadically told in cutscenes that feels more like it belongs in a lore book.
There’s a lot about the Wilds campaign that could be seen as a microcosm of the main game’s core problems. It does away with a lot of the charm; sands down the rough edges in an effort to make it more accessible. But I am not sure those were the right areas to target.
We’re likely going to mostly forget about the existence of the main Wilds campaign very soon as more of the game’s triumphs and misfires come to the fore, but I don’t think I can stop wondering what a true sequel to the World campaign would’ve looked like.