I think It’s fair to say that Monster Hunter Wilds is a far more accessible game than World, and certainly more than anyone could’ve predicted for a mainline Monster Hunter title. Capcom invested a lot into streamlining so many aspects of this game (many of which I would argue needed it the least) while leaving some other features – which could’ve used some of that simplification – intact.
Regardless of where you land on the end result, however, it’s hard to deny how much Wilds encourages experimenting with different weapons, while actually facilitating the act of taking them into hunts.
I feel a lot better about the lack of challenge in Monster Hunter Wilds now that I have doubled my time with it since the review period. In a very general sense, my experience with the series is limited (I never played the 3DS games), but fights in World never made me feel like I was going through the motions, and though Rise’s gameplay was faster and less punishing, it demanded a different kind of staying-on-your-s**t. It was generally easier, too.
I stuck to the Hammer for almost the entirety of my time with World. I experimented with some other weapons – I pulled out a Bow when I joined busy hunts that left little room for my slow, lumbering mallet – but I rarely diverged from my main. Part of that was the result of World being my first Monster Hunter, so it took me a while to feel confident enough to be able to adequately make the Hammer work for me in different situations. I didn’t feel like adding more complexity to what was already a very complex game was a good idea.
World’s aggressive monsters didn’t leave a lot of room for messing around, and I often felt that taking up a new weapon 50 hours in would reset much of the progress I had earned. Picking up something new and spending several minutes in the training area to get the flow right felt about as intimidating as taking on Nergigante solo; I just didn’t want more friction between me and the carve.
I went into Wilds with that same attitude. I initially started with Great Sword, because Capcom developers said that the game is balanced around it. The Great Sword is a slow weapon; it was close enough in my head to the Hammer, so I went with it. I enjoyed it for four or five of the early hunts, before I switched to the Long Sword for the rest of my time with the game.
Now that I am in the endgame, I find myself making frequent visits to the Smithy to craft the base version of some of the other weapons I had been wanting to try out. Wilds doles out materials far more generously than World, so it was easy to make anything I wanted and go punish some poor Chatacabra or Congalala to see if the flow felt right.
And you know what? It made me see the game in a different light. Weapons in Monster Hunter are effectively different classes. The time investment required to reach the same level of efficiency with, say, a Switch Axe or Charge Blade as I have with the Long Sword or Hammer feels like creating a Titan in Destiny after you’ve been playing entire games as a Hunter.
Wilds’ less demanding hunts, however, leave a lot of room for you to be terrible with an unfamiliar weapon. And it’s starting to feel like that was intentional, because this is also the game that lets you carry two of the damn things into hunts and switch between them during the same fight. It wants you to more liberally use its tools to adequately tackle the different situations you find yourself in.
Couple that with the ease of getting materials – especially early on – and you get a Monster Hunter game that really wants every player to at least leave the game having experienced more of one of its best parts. For me, that was falling in love with the pizza cutter form of the Charge Blade, and finally taking the time to wrap my head around the Insect Glaive.