Despite Knowing It’s Silly to Complain About Campaigns in Monster Hunter, I Can’t Ignore How Wild’s Falls Short Compared to World’s

When it comes to the Monster Hunter series, I’ve always considered myself something of a latecomer. I held back from diving into these games, partly because they were confined to handheld consoles that didn’t catch my interest and, quite frankly, the visuals seemed lackluster. Everything changed for me with Monster Hunter World, which served as my gateway into this captivating universe, and I’ve been hooked ever since. As I pen this, I’ve clocked in over 24 hours on Wilds, having prioritized the main campaign before exploring the side quests. And boy, was that a disappointment.

Now, let’s be real: Monster Hunter isn’t exactly celebrated for its storytelling prowess or intricate plot twists. The campaigns primarily serve as lengthy tutorials to ease you into the game’s myriad systems and mechanics, which you’ll likely be engaging with for 100 hours or more. Essentially, they’re your guided tour through each game’s diverse monsters.

The storyline generally unfolds like this: your team is tracking down a mysterious creature whose antics are disrupting the regions you’re exploring. Along the way, you end up dealing with various other monsters until you finally figure out what’s been causing all the trouble. Eventually, you encounter the big baddie, have your epic showdown, and once the campaign wraps up, you’re introduced to High Rank, where the true Monster Hunter experience begins.

In a broad sense, Wilds’ campaign follows this formula, much like World’s. However, it’s in the specifics where World shone and Wilds flounders. The campaign in World was propelled by an intriguing premise: the colossal Zorah Magdaros. This beast was so massive that an entire village had to mobilize just to slow it down, creating a new kind of encounter within the series.

While many found this element cumbersome—given its reliance on building fortifications and managing cannons, which diverged from typical hunting—the Zorah Magdaros sequences were, in my opinion, a refreshing change. They broke up the monotony of monster after monster hunts, and the beast’s journey brought an unfolding narrative, unlocking new areas of the map as it moved and impacting the local ecosystem visibly. The game maintained an air of mystery around Zorah’s journey, imbuing the story with urgency and intrigue.

Wilds, on the other hand, lacks such compelling dynamics. Arkveld, the marquee monster, appears sporadically, performing actions no one seems to fathom, only to disappear for stretches. It’s not even the final challenge; that spot is taken by a great slumbering beast only introduced in the last mission.

There’s no sense of disparate groups uniting against a formidable common foe. Some monster introductions feel awkwardly shoved into missions, as if Capcom couldn’t think of a smoother entry for them. There’s an impression that a crucial plot element was trimmed, as hinted at in fragmented NPC dialogues and cutscene snippets, yet we never see it unfold.

Even the potentially intriguing mystery of the forebear civilization and their weather-controlling technology collapses under its own weight, reduced to lore fragments scattered through cutscenes rather than a living, breathing story.

Wilds’ campaign illustrates some of the main game’s broader issues, stripping away charm and unique features in an effort to appeal to a wider audience—though perhaps not in the areas that needed it. As we delve deeper into both the game’s successes and shortcomings, the Wilds campaign is likely to be forgotten. But I can’t help but ponder what a true successor to World’s campaign might have looked like.