Comparing the Worlds of Monster Hunter, Old and New

I have a confession to make: I like Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate more than Monster Hunter World. Yes, it’s clunkier, yes, it’s grindier, yes, the mechanics aren’t as developed as World and are a little bit busted, but I don’t really care. It’s still a great game mechanically, and crucially, the world of 4U is, in my opinion, much better than World (heh). So today I want to go back, and look at why one game failed where the other succeeded, at least for me.

The best place to start is the premise, so, let’s start there. Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate has you meeting up with a caravan of various folks, from a guild representative to a merchant to the old, wizened leader. You journey from town to town, seeking answers to mysteries, people to help, and just plain old new experiences for you all. There’s an adventurous spirit to it all, with no true goals often in mind. You’ll meet plenty of new people, see plenty of new places, and of course fight many monsters. What this setup does for the game is keep it freewheeling and open, and even if you don’t care for the story, travelling between multiple towns is great visual variety that helps ground the world greatly. There are people living all over, in every place, and it gives you a much better idea of these zones you hunt in as part of a world, rather than a disconnected chunk of environment. You can’t see all of it, because making content for a game is hard; but you can be made aware of it and feel like it matters, feel like the world around you is a whole world.

Monster Hunter World opens on the setting of the New World, a new continent that you and a group of hunters aim to explore and understand. The premise of a new place to explore holds a lot of promise: the promise of a fresh start of sorts, with new monsters and places to see all over. It sounds exciting, and for a while, it absolutely is! The environments teem with life, feeling more like an actual ecosystem than ever, and the places you visit are indeed breathtaking and look amazing. A lot of work was put in to making the world feel natural, feel truly like the wilderness, and when you’re out in the thick of it, it’s so easy to be taken in by it all. For a while. The longer you play, the more cracks in this start to show, and it’s mainly in the premise: an unexplored continent. All this place has is base camps and wilderness, ultimately, and while this might seem irrelevant, in a series where you can spend so much time at home and out hunting, it matters a whole lot. Without any development of the world in the plot, the starting base and one other one is all you get, making the world feel devoid of any life besides hostile life. And without towns or settlements to show more of the region, these environments you hunt in start to feel unnatural, just an arena to fight in. Yes, there are landscapes and such, but when you spend dozens and dozens of hours in these areas, the total lack of environmental lip service to there being more than them starts to wear on your feeling of the world. Through that, then, the impressive naturality starts to feel fake, as all the animals are always in the same place, all the bugs in the same clusters. Monster Hunter World comes off much more as a diorama of a world, rather than a small part of it, because of all this.

In the context of the plot as well, 4 Ultimate feels much… nicer than World, to put it simply. You travel the world helping people and finding secrets, and that is it. People just live in small towns, and monsters are a force of nature often causing problems that you must deal with. It’s got this fun-loving, jovial atmosphere to it that never once feels off or dissonant, because really, all you’re here to do is help, unquestioningly. It’s a simple setup, yes, but it’s a safe one and one that never gets in the way of the game, one that anyone could feel good about.

World, on the other hand, is all about… conquering a new world, a new continent, and exploring it for humanity. So, it’s not quite so bad, it’s obviously nothing like colonialist countries in the real world, but you can see from that blunt description that while mostly OK, there’s an undercurrent of discomfort running through World’s premise that never really went away for me. You are, in a sense, killing creatures in a place you don’t necessarily need to be, and that’s… well, it’s a little uncomfortable! “You need to kill this creature because it’s attacking my home that I’ve lived in for years” feels more morally OK than “you need to kill this creature so we can expand further”.

Is this a big deal, ultimately? Well, I wouldn’t say so, it’s at most implied discomfort in the backdrop of a much larger game than this. But to me, it’s a misstep in games writing, making your motivations and actions feel slightly worse in a game that is clearly not trying to evoke those feelings. World, as a whole, feels a slight bit more toned down and serious than past games, and I consider that a problem in such an arcadey setup where you kill the same monster over and over again. A humorous tone, as was in past games, helps take the edge off taking that literally, and just lets you have fun in the world, suspend your disbelief a bit better. World still has humor, no doubt, but with it backing down just a little in how funny it is, it also leaves more space for that dissonance, and make the hunting feel a little worse. Not much, but it’s still something.

Ultimately, what the fundamental problem with World feels like is that it pulled back on scope, pulled back on the humor, and it did both of this for likely understandable reasons (increased difficulty of making console content, tone shift with art style shift respectively). But without anything to replace these small but pretty important element of past games, World feels just a little off. Not a disaster, not even a failure, but slightly worse. And for someone who really, truly loved the world of games past, well, that’s slightly sad, I suppose. Here’s hoping that the developers find their feet more in this new era of Monster Hunter, and we get better and better worlds as we go.

Thanks very much to my lovely patrons, and a very special thanks to Alexandra, Acelin, Ashley Turner, Cadejo Jones, CampaRampa, Christy Kamori, Dolores De Beauvoir, emma space, Hazuki Tower, Kelli Mariella K, Lex, Lizzie July, Madeline Hunter, mauvefox, PixelJade, Sara Kennedy, several rats, themasterofcubes, Sinon Lynx, Sunny Morgans, and Willowisp Illustration.