MONSTER HUNTER WILDS runs before it can walk, thank God
Quick, babe! Get the camera out!
You know what, maybe Mondays are where it’s at for this newsletter.
Last week I was grieving the middling reviews of Monster Hunter Wilds, frustrated at not only the fact that the game sounded disappointing, but also that it had ruined my gaming calendar. I had been planning for March and likely most of April to be Monster Hunter Madness, and now I had to… re-plan things? Ugh, kill me. Changing a single part of my schedule makes my brain enter fight-or-flight, so this was truly horrific news. But then magically on Friday, all of my meetings were cancelled. So what was I supposed to do, not buy the game? My bank account is now sad, but my heart is full. The game rips, and I’m pretty sure my therapy appointment today is about to get cancelled as well. In fact, at this rate I think the game is going to replace my therapist. He’s great, but he isn’t a Greatsword with a new countering mechanic. On top of that, the game now has a story, and I think I kind of love it? Monster Hunter is absolutely not built to have cinematic scenes and lots of dialogue, but the team went for it anyway, resulting in an experience that feels less like a “Serious Videogame Movie” and more like “the Mona Lisa has been shoddily bolted onto a motorcycle.” It rules.
This is a series known for having a very unserious aesthetic (humongous anime swords! Finding ways to make wildlife colonization fun!) while having an extremely serious gameplay loop (half of your time will be spent in windows and skill trees). But Wilds is making waves due to it being the latest victim of the dreaded Cinematic Mandate. Whenever a developer wants to dramatically increase their potential audience, a model is followed where their game is given high fidelity graphics and a cinematic story involving cutscenes1. This makes sense in theory, as there are some very successful examples, and story is a universal language for human beings, but the Mandate demands an enormous sum of money and is part of the reason that the industry is in a tailspin, often resulting in layoffs and games that feel too similar to each other. So whenever a game gets the Mandate, people naturally begin to worry. However, Monster Hunter is a franchise that already has a very established gameplay approach, so we can hope that the budget hasn’t ballooned that much. And I think the game that we see today is evidence of that, for better and for worse.
As opposed to the megahit that was God of War, here the studio seems to have avoided doing anything to polish the cinematic experience. There are beautiful pre-rendered cutscenes crafted by a storyteller with strong sound design and visual language, but then you get jerked back to the in-game dialogue where characters have stilted “game talk,” waiting to speak until a jarring amount of time has passed after the previous sentence. The writing also takes a dive in these moments, resulting in proper nouns being used so many times in a sentence that it approaches Netflix’s The Witcher levels of saying “destiny.” If you hear someone say “Goshugaroth,” the other characters are going to say it thirty times in the next ten seconds. “Do you know of the Goshugaroth?” Ten seconds later: “Did you say Goshugaroth? I often Goshugaroth with my Goshugaorth in the Goshugaroth. Ah, Goshugaroth!”
Normally this would infuriate me, but the quality of these cutscenes is so outstanding that the opposite has happened: I love the game more. The team has hired someone who has breathtakingly strong instincts, and has clearly been encouraged to go wild nuts, regardless of whether the rest of the game can even handle it. When these scenes are good, they are good. The opening is set on a landscape of destruction where the only sound is a child’s breath as they watch their world fall apart. Characters clash with literal titans using camerawork that makes you feel like you’re watching a John Wick movie. The story beats are about a child’s traumatic experience and their journey of feeling vulnerable before finding out how to become empowered from that very vulnerability. So when that all falls away and the connective tissue of “Goshugaroth” rears its ugly head, I feel the passion of a team that insisted that they keep their game as unique as they could, while letting a strong storyteller do what they could at the same time.
Bolting the Mona Lisa onto a motorcycle might cause the painting to fall apart, but it’s still the Mona Lisa on a motorcycle. Hell yeah.
Be Nice
Chants of Senaar - A mysterious, hooded figure must learn the languages of five different civilizations and help them find unity.
Why it didn’t work for me: When a story is essentially one big mystery, then the ending and reveal of that mystery gets a lopsided amount of responsibility for making the story work. Senaar is very fun, but the end reveal is so bad that it spoiled the game for me, taking away from everything. It would have been better if they didn’t even have a reveal and chose to just make the game remain abstract throughout the whole experience.
Why it might work for you: The gameplay itself rules, taking from the Obra Dinn and Golden Idol playbooks to give you a puzzle that takes every part of your brain to solve, while being just easy enough to make you feel smart. I would honestly recommend this game to everyone as long as you know that the ending sucks going in.
Oh, Good
Avowed - Made by the outstanding Obsidian studio, responsible for narrative heavy hitters like Fallout: New Vegas, Pentiment, and Outer Worlds, they’ve now decided to make an anti-Skyrim. It reduces the gigantic RPG down to its bare elements, which sounds incredible to me, someone who has never played Skyrim due to how much goddamn time it would take up in my life. The love for this game is from all the right people and I can’t wait to get into it. It just might be, uh, a while till I do.
A very confusing phrase for anyone unfamiliar with videogame parlance. A “cut scene” normally indicates a scene left out of a movie, but in a game it’s the scene that made it into the game. When used during a Garner dinner, it means we’re moving onto a new conversation topic.