Why I love hunting Monsters

After my post about Monster Hunter Tri I thought I’d write up a little something about why the Monster Hunter series has such a warm spot in my heart.

I guess it all starts back on the PS2, I bought monster hunter on a whim, it’s title appealing to me with its straight faced seriousness. I could tell it was a game about hunting monsters, in my book that’s all good. I remember running around on my own exploring the Forest and Hills map (I didn’t own a PS2 modem so multiplayer was never on the cards), I mined ores, brewed potions and fought some of the small monsters. The combat felt really unique since back in those days you used the second analogue stick to choose your attack and depending on your place in the combo different moves could be chained together, this made it feel like you were actually swinging a weapon around by having to memorise patterns to pull off the right attacks and someone with more knowledge of a weapon would be able to accomplish more with it.

I’d played for quite a while before I came up against the mighty Yian Kut-Ku, a pink wyvern with a distinctive yellow beak. The Kut-Ku was a massive hurdle for me as I played the way I played most actions games, attacking constantly and hoping it died before I do, which led to a quick demise. It was after fighting him a fair few times with my giant great sword that I tried to fight him with the more nimble sword and shield, this suddenly revealed to me the mistake I had made. Fighting monsters needs skill and precision, there are times when you have to run around for a minute to let a monster calm down after a particularly powerful attack, you need to wait for openings and target weak points. At the time this was a massive change in the way I played but it has also shaped most of my gaming experiences since, I now value speed and agility above anything else and now my characters dart around their game worlds as cold and calculating acrobats of death.

I never got very far on the PS2 but Monster Hunter was eventually ported to the PSP which I picked up along with one of my housemates and the two player co-op was phenomenal, coordinating your efforts to take a monster down is amazing fun. One player might use a bow-gun to fire paralysing bullets so you can remove a monsters tail with a longsword, which in turn reduces its effectiveness in combat as it can’t hit anything with a little stump.

I love that in Monster Hunter there is no levelling up, your hunter is still a normal person by the time you are fighting mountain sized dragons, but the armour and weapons you create keep you safe and make you a deadly warrior. This appeals to me as it ties you into the world, you aren’t a god or a superhuman, you are just a normal person which makes the feeling of accomplishment greater.

To me Monster Hunter is a series that manages to make fighting countless monsters into something other than a grind which in itself is magic beyond that which most of the games industry has yet to understand. By making all the large monsters a challenge regardless of your power level they are never a simple fight meaning that you can’t just run in and slaughter something without a thought. This means that each battle is something planned and considered, each victory is worked for and earned. To me this is what makes Monster Hunter so satisfying, finally figuring out how to down the deadly Rathalos or bizzare Khezu is something that fills you with a feeling of accomplishment.