An Excellent Return to Form: Monster Hunter World First Impressions

I’ve had Monster Hunter World in my physical possession since about 6 pm Friday, January 26th. As of this writing, even accounting for 7ish hours of sleep a night, a couple days at work, chores, and so on, I’ve clocked in over 33 hours. And I’m still technically in early game, not having even reached high rank quests yet. To say I find Monster Hunter World, the franchise’s first home console release in years, enjoyable, even despite some lingering missteps, is an understatement.

World is the franchise’s much anticipated and very hyped return to consoles (with a PC launch slated for the fall), and even though I played a lot of the beta, the full game is a wonder. The field areas are gorgeous, layered and maze-like, with so many little secrets to explore. Annoyances of previous entries have been fixed or streamlined. The difficulty curve has been lessened, and the game finally has some semblance of tutorials. Pouch items can be set to autocraft upon gathering materials! No more “two sets of armor for every monster”! There’s so many side quests! Finally, a free explore mode! So many pets to capture and place in your room! And more!

Your field notebook becomes indispensable, especially when helping others with a hunt

If you’ve played previous MonHun games, some of the changes might bother you because oh no now the game has some slight easiness added, but you’ll get used to it, and end up loving a lot of it. Like a singular, infinite use whetstone, that doesn’t take up precious pouch space. Or a constantly accessible field notes books full of monster weaknesses and breaking what parts will yield which monster pieces. Or scoutflies that will lead you to a monster instead of aimlessly wandering around and hoping to paintball it. Or how the weapons feel (the gunlance is a viable option now!). There’s plenty here for veterans to enjoy, and I can’t imagine going back to a previous entry without some of these quality of life enhancements.

EGG QUEST

If you’re new to the series, or have been burnt by it before, there’s never been a better entry to jump into. Capcom has taken a lot of care into making the core gameplay less daunting for new players to get into, from adding tutorials you can reference to extra HUD elements to show you controls and making combat less clunky. There’s so much reference material a new user can read up on ingame during your downtime, and things like eating and changing equipment out in the field really make the game the most user friendly it’s been.

However, don’t mistake these improvements to mean perfection. The clunkiness of battle might still be a turn off, despite 14 different weapons available to you. The lack of a true open world has irked some, but personally I just enjoy that I don’t have to load area zones. The core game loop is still essentially “hunt a monster to gather parts to make gear to hunt bigger monsters”, with no player stat building. There’s still plenty of things the game doesn’t tell you or obscures from you until you stumble upon them. Trying to play online with your friends can be a headache and a half, with a convoluted lobby system that might take you 10 minutes EVERY TIME to navigate through. You might hate the idea of a quest having both a time limit AND a limit on the amount of “deaths” you can have, a mechanic at the very core of Monster Hunter. Some of these things I hope Capcom fixes in future updates, but others are just Monster Hunter Things, and if they bother you, no amount of overhauling the game’s systems will make World click for you.

I honestly could go on for hours about this game. And trust me, I want to. But in the interest of being a first impression, I’ll just do a rundown of things I’ve really enjoyed in my time in World so far.

SO MUCH TO DO! I appreciate that World has expanded upon some of the more recent entries’ inclusions of more varied side quests. Sure, you can’t do a story quest again unless you’re helping a friend, but between optional quests, investigation quests, limited quests, arena quests, and free roam expeditions, grinding for gear and items is a breeze and you’ll not be want for things to do. I especially enjoy expeditions while setting some of the bounties you can complete for extra rewards, giving you infinite time and infinite faints to gather items and fight large monsters without fear of failure.

Quality of life improvements: minor things, like setting pouch items to automatically craft when you pick up the required materials, or an singular whetstone you’ll always have on your person, or being able to move around while you drink a potion, or not waiting for an animation to play every time you pick up an item have really made a huge difference. I didn’t think some of this streamlining would improve the MonHun experience so much, but it really has.

The little things veterans have enjoyed are still here: Poogie is back! Roasting steaks out in the field remains! Editable guild cards to trade with others! Palico safaris! Silly gestures! Drinking and arm wrestling your friends! Monster Hunter has always injected some fun and silly things into the game, and World takes none of them away. And we all know you might need a bit of lightheartedness after a particularly grueling hunt.

I don’t plan to be done with World anytime soon. And I’m sure World won’t run out of things for me to do. With loads of quests already available, and more on the way, Capcom plans to keep players busy for a long time coming. I cannot recommend giving this game a shot enough. I totally understand if after a couple hours you don’t get into it, but there’s never been a better Monster Hunter to at least try. If this is what the future of the franchise will be, I wholeheartedly welcome it.

-Janette G

*This impressions piece is based off of the PS4 version of the game

If you're not prancing with your friends before a hunt, what are you doing?

Stay tuned for more Monster Hunter World content from us in the coming weeks! Monster Hunter World is available now for Playstation 4 and Xbox One, with a PC version slated for this fall.