Playing Monster Hunter Wilds should have been a huge moment for me, as anyone who reads my coverage here at Windows Central knows that Monster Hunter is one of my favorite videogame franchises of all time.
Ever since I played Monster Hunter World back in 2018, I’ve spent the last seven years becoming more obsessed with this series, tracking fantastical creatures and crafting the coolest gear from their hides with my friends alongside me.
Overall, I spent 2,000 hours on the Xbox version of Monster Hunter World alone before spending 300 hours on the PC version with mods. I accumulated 300 hours of Monster Hunter Rise and Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate gameplay and even played dozens of hours of the turn-based spin-off series Monster Hunter Stories, and I consider it a superior alternative to Pokémon on PC.
So when Monster Hunter Wilds was announced, I was ecstatic. Each reveal of a new monster and additional gameplay presentation had me hyped beyond belief to see what this next-gen follow-up to Monster Hunter World had in store — until I finally played it.
This editorial contains significant spoilers for the story, Low Rank, High Rank, and endgame content in Monster Hunter Wilds.
Opinion: Monster Hunter Wilds left this hardcore fan bored and disappointed
As I progressed through the game with Executive Editor Jez Corden to help test out the multiplayer features for his review of Monster Hunter Wilds, my heart sank. A good chunk of what made this series so enjoyable and unique to me from its preparation and difficulty was stripped away, leaving it as an average open-world RPG at best and a hollow clone of Monster Hunter World at worst.
At first, I wasn’t going to share my personal disappointment with the game, avoiding the labeling of a know-it-all “fanboy” who finds everything easy after defeating Fatalis in Monster Hunter World: Iceborne.
However, after seeing Monster Hunter Wilds accumulating near-perfect (and some perfect) review scores across the Internet, claiming it’s the “best game in the series,” I can’t hold my breath anymore.
As a fan of the series, I never wanted to write this kind of editorial because I wanted to like this game, and I generally hate writing all-negative articles. But its flaws are too glaring to ignore, and it’s time to show Capcom some tough love for the sake of the franchise’s future.
Here’s my story on why Monster Hunter Wilds disappointed me and how I believe it can be improved in the future.
All ease and no work makes me a dull hunter
Let’s cut to the chase, starting with the difficulty of Monster Hunter Wilds, or rather, the lack thereof.
The Monster Hunter series gameplay loop is about preparation to hunt vicious, challenging monsters capable of ending your life in a few claw swipes or fireballs.
This preparation would range from learning the nuances and move sets of the series’ 14 weapon types, gathering crafting materials to make traps, healing potions, and buff items, and hunting smaller monsters so you craft gear from their hides to help you survive battling bigger monsters.
Then, when the fights start, you will need to learn how to position yourself so your attacks don’t miss. After that, you can study the monster’s attack patterns to avoid being crushed into the dirt.
However, in Monster Hunter Wilds, there is little to no need for preparation because 75% of this game is simply too easy. Some of this ease comes from the game’s new mechanics like Focus Mode, Wounds, and the Seikret mount, while others come from the game’s poor balancing of the enemies you fight.
Focus Mode allows you to redirect your melee attacks mid-animation so you don’t miss. Additionally, it lets you perform special Focus Strikes, which apply massive damage to a monster’s Wounds and special weak spots that appear frequently throughout a fight.
The problem, however, is that attacking Wounds with Focus Strikes completely trivializes most of the fights because they constantly knock down monsters and shave off a large portion of their health.
Plus, Wounds appear and refresh too rapidly, so you never run out of chances to stun-lock enemies.
Not to mention, there’s no risk in using Focus Strikes because it causes monsters to flinch, leaving players safe to use follow-up attacks if they land, unlike the Clutch Claw from Monster Hunter World: Iceborne, where the monsters could easily knock you off even if you latched onto them.
Even the insanely powerful Wirebugs from Monster Hunter Rise had limited numbers of uses before they started recharging with various cooldown timers, depending on their strength.
Another new mechanic that oversimplifies combat is the Seikret mount. This raptor-like creature will be able to pick you up after getting knocked down with excessive ‘invincibility frames’ that allow you to freely heal or sharpen your weapons while riding to avoid monster attacks without consequence.
Now, while the Seikret isn’t as overpowered as having two Palamutes in Monster Hunter Rise locking enemies with status effects, it’s still an extremely powerful feature that has no downside.
Thankfully, you can freely ignore using Seikret and Focus Mode, for the most part, as they are mostly optional game mechanics to help ease in newcomers.
However, even if you completely disregard these mechanics, the creatures of Monster Hunter Wilds still feel so weak and boring to fight, and I’m not just saying that because I’m a series veteran who tackled some of the hardest encounters in previous games.
I’m saying that because I have repeatedly been struck by monsters in this game, and they did little to no damage to me even when I was wearing Low Rank gear that I barely upgraded purely for fashion rather than function.
At best, the strongest attacks from most enemies did maybe 15% of my health.
For those who don’t know, quests in Monster Hunter games are divided into:
- Low Rank Quests – Easy quests which function as the game’s tutorial.
- High Rank Quests – The game kicks up a notch and starts throwing new challenging foes your way while upgrading the stats of monsters you fought in Low Rank to see if you have the skills to survive without training wheels.
- Master Rank Quests – Host the toughest monsters in the game, but they usually add Master Rank in a DLC expansion.
But, in Monster Hunters Wilds, the monsters have so little health and attack power, even by the standards of Low Rank enemies seen in modern games like Monster Hunter World and Monster Hunter Rise.
In those games, Low Rank enemies had way more HP and attack power, which necessitated upgrading your gear and mastering the gameplay mechanics so hunts wouldn’t take forever.
Monsters like Anjaneth and Nergigante in Monster Hunter World and Magnamalo in Monster Hunter Rise can give players a run for their money in Low Rank if they haven’t upgraded their gear or taken advantage of each game’s mechanics, even for a series veteran like me. Sadly, it’s a situation that never happens in Monster Hunter Wilds.
The weakened monsters don’t just have reduced stats but also their hitboxes (the invisible aura on all characters that determines if an attack will affect them.)
Hitboxes of enemy attacks in Monster Hunter Wilds have been reduced so heavily compared to previous games that half the time, monsters will unintentionally miss you.
At first, I thought, “Oh, these are just Low Rank monsters I’m dealing with, and the semi-hard monsters will come later in High Rank.” Unfortunately, this non-existent difficulty pertained even in High Rank Quests.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that I was able to consistently slay over half of the monsters in High Rank in under 10 minutes per hunt with the same Low Rank gear I used to complete the Low Rank story quests.
To make sure I wasn’t going crazy, I intentionally took damage from monsters to see how much damage they dealt, seeing them barely make a dent in my health bar with Low Rank gear.
I felt so disheartened to see returning monsters like Blangonga and Gravios, who were a nightmare to fight in past games, be practically reduced to a joke in the latest entry because of their reduced stats in High Rank and this game’s Focus Strike + Wound mechanic combo.
The only time I felt any modicum of challenge and compelled to upgrade my gear out of necessity was when I encountered the endgame Tempered monsters, which Capcom spoiled the surprise of at a PlayStation Presents: Play!Play!Play! event.
Tempered versions of Jin Dahaad, Arkveld, and Gore Magala hit fast and hard, equipped with twice as much health as 90% of the monster roster to survive more than ten minutes.
I felt that I’d finally found some semi-decent challenges to crave my satisfaction for the hunt — too bad I had to sit through over 40 hours of brain-dead battles to get to this point.
Not to mention that 50% of the danger these Tempered Monsters posed (and those of Monter Hunter Wilds’ entire monster roster) is tarnished by the game going out of its way to constantly hold the players’ hands out of an assumed fear that it might scare away newcomers.
When your character is about to die, your health bar will flash red like an erratic heartbeat monitor, and your Palico companion will scream at you with giant subtitles constantly saying “Watch out!” alongside similar annoyances.
These warning signs exasperated just how weak a majority of the game’s enemies are because they rarely popped up, and they constantly spoil the surprise and fear of whether an enemy’s attack will kill you or not.
After all, what’s the point of being afraid of a monster’s attacks if it’s not going to give warning signs in the UI? When you take away the fear, you take away the adrenaline. And when you take away adrenaline, you take away the thrill of the hunt, which is what Monster Hunter is supposed to be all about.
Additionally, these warning signs are so annoyingly distracting because they take up huge portions of the screen. Not only did they obscure my vision, they broke my immersion in the heat of battle.
Not to mention, these warnings felt so condescending, as though the game thinks its target audience can’t tell a giant beast the size of a semi-truck that breathes fire is dangerous, so it needs to constantly backseat us to make sure we don’t get hurt.
Thankfully, I was able to dump my Palico companion back at the Base Camp so its subtitles warnings wouldn’t clutter the screen.
However, there is no option to stop the health bar from flashing without removing the health bar completely from the UI.
My takeaway is if I had to completely ignore nearly half of this game’s mechanics to feel any sort of risk, danger, and challenge for 75% of the game, then the developers have lost sight of what it means to create a compelling action game, let alone a Monster Hunter game.
High Rank and endgame woes
My grievances with Monster Hunter Wilds don’t stop at its main gameplay loop but also at its Endgame.
Past ‘vanilla’ versions of Monster Hunter games didn’t have much endgame content after beating the main High Rank questline and had to wait for title updates or Master Rank expansions via DLC (e.g., Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak) or definitive edition re-releases (Monster Hunter 3: Ultimate) to bring it in.
Monster Hunter Rise, in particular, infamously ended with a “To be continued…” where players didn’t get to slay the game’s endgame monsters, Narwa and Ibushi, until later through free title updates.
Monster Hunter Wilds takes it even further backward because it doesn’t even have a High Rank exclusive final boss.
Without giving too much away, there is a special unique monster you fight in Low Rank as its final story boss — and you never get to fight it again in High Rank.
Instead of a grand final battle against an epic, Elder Dragon-level threat you only see in High Rank like Xeno’jiiva in Monster Hunter World, Nakarkos in Monster Hunter Generations, or Dalamadur in Monster Hunter 4, you just fight Monster Hunter Wilds’ flagship monster Arkveld again as its ‘final boss,’ and it’s such a letdown to end your base game’s High Rank questline on.
The endgame does have other things to do, like crafting unique weapons with parts found from killing Tempered and Layered Armor to satisfying your fashion.
Still, it’s not enough to cover up the fact that High Rank is bare-bones on content, as you’ll be fighting the same monsters again with only a couple of new additions and no true final boss to speak of.
On top of that, you ‘armor-build meta’ chasers out there will be sad to know that the Equipment Skill system has regressively become quite restrictive.
In previous games like Monster Hunter World and Monster Hunter Rise, the endgame revolved around collecting Decorations you could slot onto your gear to make them powerful and grant you unique passive buffs for extra survivability.
In Monster Hunter Wilds, however, you are only allowed to fit half of the game’s Decorations onto weapons and the other half onto armor pieces. This is to accommodate the game’s weapon swap gimmick attached to the Seikret mount so you wouldn’t have to go back to Camp to change weapons.
However, thanks to a majority of this game’s enemies being so easy to defeat I never felt the need to swap my weapon and it made the equipment skills unintentionally come off creatively stifling as a result as we are no longer allowed to fit in any Decoration we want on anything armor piece or weapon.
Is Monster Hunter Wilds salvageable?
So, after all that I said, you might think I believe this is one of the worst games ever made, right? Well no.
As much as I hate this game’s flaws, it does have some great qualities and a lot of potential.
It has some of the craziest monsters I’ve ever seen in Monster Hunter, and I like that the story is finally exploring the Ancient Civilization, which has primarily been a background element in previous games, and a majority of the weapon types’ new moves that are not tied to the Focus Mode are fun to play with.
I also enjoyed fighting the Tempered Jin Dahaad as it is one of the few giant ‘Siege’ type monsters in the series that’s actually a fun fight instead of a boring punch bag that doesn’t fight back, like Lao Shan-Lung from Monster Hunter 1 or Zorah Magdaros from Monster Hunter World.
Also, a majority of this game’s issues can be solved through balance patches in future Title Updates, which I hope will arrive as soon as the first Title Update that will add Mizutsune in Spring 2025.
I can almost certainly predict that Capcom will add a High Rank version of the final boss from Low Rank’s story questline, much like Monster Hunter Rise added in Allmother Narwa in one of its Title Updates.
These balance patches could vastly increase the monster’s health so they would survive longer and increase their attack power so they would pose a threat to the point where they would kill players in a few hits, even in Low Rank Quests.
This difficulty buff would necessitate the use of the game’s unique mechanics and reward players for taking the time to constantly upgrade their gear and prepare items so they can survive, even hunting the most basic monsters.
In addition, Balance Patches could nerf the power of Focus Strikes, so while they would still deal heavy damage, they wouldn’t stun or flinch a monster and would be free to counterattack the player.
This would encourage players to be more careful with their Focus Strikes, learn when a monster has a safe opening to strike their Wounds without getting punished, and have the player feel accomplished for their patience.
Another balance adjustment Capcom could make is to make Wounds appear much less frequently and only after dealing a significant amount of damage to a monster without stopping. If a player stops attacking or doesn’t destroy the Wound in time with a Focus Strike, then the Wound will heal up and the player will need to start opening it again.
Granted Tempered Monsters and certain ‘special’ monsters in the story have Wounds that already work like this, but I want this to apply all Wounds on all monsters.
That way when a Wound does appear, it will feel like a special event that rewards the player for being aggressive while risking their life to earn that special window to unleash their Focus Attack.
Balance patches could also add options to make the health bar remain normal even as a monster is about to kill you. They could also give us the option to remove subtitles from the Palico screaming warnings so we don’t have to leave it at camp.
Not knowing which attacks are lethal or not will encourage players to stay on their toes and incentivize them to learn the monster’s attack patterns so they will be able to survive and become better-skilled hunters for it.
Granted, some issues are highly unlikely to be fixed by Balance Patches, like the restrictive Equipment Skills system since it’s tied to the Weapon Swap gimmick or Monster Hunter Wilds’ convoluted multiplayer system.
One can only hope, right?
Monster Hunter Wilds’ is shackled by fear, but only through tough love can we set it free and fulfill its potential
I could go on with other aspects of the game I didn’t like, such as its bland/annoying cast of characters, forcing players to play solo, being allowed to join others in multiplayer, the lack of a proper Gathering Hub for players to convene online, the environments generally having a grey, muted color palette, and its underutilized open-world maps.
However, those were points already covered by Jez Cordon in his Monster Hunter Wilds review, and to me, they are small nit-picks in the grand scheme of things compared to Monster Hunter Wilds diluting the series’ core gameplay experience because it’s too afraid to let its players experience any real danger.
If a hunt has no risk, elements of the unknown, or danger involved, then your victories will mean nothing because you never had to work hard to earn them.
I’m not saying Monster Hunter Wilds should bring back artificial difficulty quirks from the older games, like having players standing still while drinking potions or giving monster attacks hitboxes the size of a football field.
Just having faith in the player’s skill to overcome adversity on their own terms, whether they’re a veteran or a newcomer, would be appreciated.
After all, if brutally challenging games from beginning to end like Elden Ring, Dark Souls, and Lies of P can find mainstream success without holding the player’s hand, why can’t Monster Hunter?
Then again, everything I said in my rant could be rendered irrelevant in the future if we indeed get balance patches that address these issues within Titles Updates or its inevitable DLC expansion.
Who knows? By the time this article is published, it might receive a day-one patch that fixes everything I’ve just complained about.
If that happens, I will gladly accept the ridicule and be proven wrong if it means it can make Monster Hunter Wilds a better product.
If you end up enjoying this game despite its flaws, then don’t let my opinions stop you because there are genuinely fun moments to be had (especially when playing with friends).
I’m just frustrated that this game could be so much more than the flawed, average one it is now.
This game has the ingredients to become one of the best Xbox games and best PC games of the entire Monster Hunter series and become a beast more distinguished than Monster Hunter World. However, it can only happen if we let Capcom know how we truly feel about it with construction criticism.
Only then will developers know how to improve this game and ensure its chances of enjoying long-term success for years to come from both hardcore and new fans alike.
Monster Hunter Wilds, the next-gen successor to one of Capcom’s best Xbox games and best PC games, Monster Hunter World, is scheduled to launch on February 28, 2025, for Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC via Steam.
