While I Know It’s Futile to Critique Monster Hunter’s Campaigns, Wild’s Story Feels Like a Step Back from World’s

By any reasonable measure, I’m relatively new to the Monster Hunter series. I avoided the games for years because they were exclusive to handheld consoles I wasn’t interested in, and to be honest, they seemed to run terribly.

Monster Hunter World was my first experience with the series, and it made me fall in love with it instantly. Since then, I’ve been hooked. I’ve already logged over two dozen hours into Wilds, focusing on the main campaign before getting sidetracked by side quests. Unfortunately, that decision turned out to be quite disappointing.

Monster Hunter campaigns aren’t exactly celebrated for their storytelling prowess or innovative plots. They’re primarily designed to guide you through tutorials for the plethora of systems and mechanics you’ll be relying on for the next 100 plus hours. Essentially, they serve as an introduction to the diverse creatures in each game.

The campaigns generally follow a familiar formula: your team is hunting a mysterious monster whose presence is disrupting various regions. Along the way, you encounter interruptions from other monsters, eventually discovering the real cause behind your original target’s chaos. This leads to a final showdown, and once that’s done, you enter High Rank and the actual meat of Monster Hunter begins.

When comparing Wilds to World, the basic framework of the campaign is similar. However, the differences in the details can turn one campaign into an engaging adventure while the other remains forgettable.

The allure of World’s campaign was Zorah Magdaros, a monster so massive that it required an entire village’s effort just to slow it down. It was an ambitious attempt to introduce a new kind of battle to Monster Hunter, though not everyone was a fan. Combatting Zorah involved setting up complex defenses, loading cannons, and doing tasks that aren’t typically associated with the core Monster Hunter experience.

Personally, I appreciated these sections for breaking the routine of hunting one monster after another, and the game used Zorah’s journey to push the narrative forward. Each terrain Zorah traversed became accessible as a new area for exploration, allowing you to witness its impact on the local ecosystem. The game kept you in suspense about Zorah’s true intentions, infusing the chase with urgency and mystery.

Now, let’s talk about the Wilds campaign. There’s no overarching menace like Zorah. Arkveld, the main monster of this game, appears sporadically without much explanation, disappearing for hours at a time. It’s not even the final boss; that title belongs to a giant creature you only hear about shortly before facing it.

There’s no grand coalition of characters uniting to combat a common threat. At times, it feels like Capcom struggled to fit certain monsters naturally into the story, resulting in forced encounters during some missions.

It seems like a connecting thread between the different character groups was intended but never fully realized. Some NPC dialogues and cutscene lines hint at a deeper plot, but it never materializes.

Even the narrative around an ancient civilization and its weather-manipulating technology leading to its downfall is conveyed in an underwhelming manner, more suited to a lore book than the main storyline.

The issues with the Wilds campaign seem to reflect broader problems in the game itself. In trying to remove rough edges and make it more accessible, some of the series’ charm has been lost. It’s unclear if these were the right changes to make.

As the game evolves, the main campaign might soon be overshadowed by other elements of Wilds, but I’ll always be curious about what a true sequel to World’s campaign might have been like.