The Jank is the Point
Last year, a few friends and I played through Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate and Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate front to back. Jaggi to Alatreon, Seltas to Fatalis. Monster Hunter has often been a go-to series for me when I want something to play on the go, but often that's a solitary experience. MH4U's original release was the last time I'd spent more time online than solo and remembering just how vibrant Monster Hunter can be while hanging with friends was a great way to kill an evening. We used the 3DS emulator Citra (or the various forks that followed its untimely death) and community-made servers and services like Pretendo to play together and despite a few technical issues along the way, had an absolute blast shooting the shit and grinding some materials.
More recently, I've been playing Monster Hunter World and finding its modernized interpretation of Monster Hunter every bit as tedious and lacking as I did the first time around. I wrote a bit about why. But with MHW failing to fulfill the Monster Hunter-shaped hole in my heart, I turned back to MH3U. Last year was my first time playing through all of MH3U's multiplayer content, but I didn't spend very much time in singleplayer and exclusively played hunting horn. This go around, I'm practicing my greatsword play and familiarizing myself with the weapon trees that differ from Monster hunter Portable 3rd, which is the version of 3rd gen Monster Hunter I'm most familiar with. So far it's going very well, but I've been struck by something that serves as something of a foil to what I had to say about World: the jank is the point.
One of the criticisms levied against Monster Hunter historically is that it's "jank". And, as any Monster Hunter fan would tell you with a smile, it is. Animations are lengthy and leave you vulnerable to enemy attacks, enemy attacks often send your character flying across the field or knocked on their ass for seconds at a time, and the game is absolutely full of little fiddly things that make you question if what you're experiencing is a bug. This leads new players to all sorts of (mostly very sensible) questions. Why does each piece of armor give some paltry number of skill points that contribute to milestones that unlock skills proper instead of granting you skills directly? Why can I only hold 20 nitroshrooms but 20 whetstones? Why are there weapons available that seem strictly worse than others despite taking arguably more time investment to get? All fair questions, and yet all issues that I think contribute to Monster Hunter's greatest strength.
A Duet of Verisimilitude
Monster Hunter is not the best action game ever made. It doesn't have the richest fantasy setting. Nor does it have the most satisfying gear grind (let alone buildcraft), and while its art direction is phenomenal and the monsters themselves are wonderful it isn't sufficient to carry the series. Monster Hunter is so special because it perfectly walks the razor-thin line between arcade pick-up-and-play action and a fantastical but crunchy simulation. It is simultaneously the goofy shoot-the-shit-with-friends game and the highly systems driven and emergent spreadsheet game. It is both the host to a myriad of the most well realized fantasy creatures in gaming and to talking cats that steal your shit just because they can. Monster Hunter is the action game where you can execute a speedrun that involves multiple frame-perfect evades that require thousands of hours to master, and the game where you accidentally send your friend flying off a cliff because you were a bit overzealous with your hunting horn combos. It is perfectly simulation|abstraction, perfectly serious|funny.
Much of this comes back to Capcom's willingness to use systems that are just slightly obtuse. The skill system isn't complicated, but it is a bit odd and takes a bit of learning. Combining items is a simple A+B=C formula, and yet they refuse to give you a hotkey to craft more coatings on the fly. These are decisions that deliberately maintain this delicate balance of contradiction. The skill system is heavily abstracted and yet it also serves to simulate the way little advantages add up to a critical mass. Combining items takes some menuing not because Capcom is too ignorant to realize players want to craft items faster, but because the UI abstracts the simulated action of your character digging through their bag and doing alchemy in the midst of combat.
In my previous article on World, I argue that World misunderstands Monster Hunter's defining characteristics and smooths off rough edges that are part of the core experience. This is the taproot that World severed. World breaks the delicate balance by making things like combining items and dodging enemy attacks too frictionless. Its art is far more realistic than any Monster Hunter before it, and yet it is far less compelling as a simulation because it abstracts key gameplay features far too heavily. You can only dodge to cancel the recovery of so many moves and still maintain the illusion of weight and consequence to swinging an enormous weapon. You can only combine items so quickly before the action itself fails as gameplay and begins to feel like a background procedure, only noticeable when it's most irritating. By trying to streamline these functions, World created a sense of apathy that I've never felt playing any older Monster Hunter and that is altogether foreign as I replay MH3U.
An Emergent Sense of Humor
One of the most endearing things that arises from Monster Hunter's balance of priorities is unplanned moments of comedy. There are plenty of comedic elements in the game by design, of course. The way you can launch your friends across the field by hitting them with a hammer's golf swing, the way Qurepeco (an otherwise low level bird monster) can call for a truly horrifying Deviljho and turn an easy hunt into a horror game, the NPC dialogue that often hints at NPCs' strange little projects, and that Capcom's phenomenal localization team uses to quip about localization jokes of the time. These are deliberately humorous games.
But beyond the humor baked into the writing and kinetics, the way Monster Hunter's systems allow for combining all these little elements into truly hilarious moments is something special. Knocking your friends around with your weapon is funny the first few times but grows old. Inadvertently knocking your friend off a cliff as you pummel a giant singing bird into dust with a musical coffin? Now that's comedy you won't find on a Capcom office whiteboard.
This sort of emergent comedy allowed by systems that are just the right degree of openended, and sticks in your mind long after play. Games like Helldivers 2 and Lethal Company recently exploded in popularity based in no small part on clips of players discovering all the ways that the simple prompts of "your munitions can kill your allies" and "run from strange aliens" invite hilarity that has the envy of comedy writers everywhere. It's the same phenomenon here.
In the case of Monster Hunter, many of the things that one might find "jank" are the same things that create these moments of joy. Yes, gathering honey can feel laborious and slow. Also, the first person who finishes gathering kicking the others to cancel their recovery is fucking funny. And sure, it's annoying when that scrubby chargeblade player keeps tripping you, but also when they launch you into the monster and you do a jump attack to mount it or cut off its tail, the entire lobby is popping off. All of these mechanics are frictional when a new player first encounters them, but they are the basis for these emergent moments, and offer value even beyond the sense of consequence and pacing that I discussed in regards to World.
The Water's Fine
When our group was playing last year, Wilds was on the horizon. Our group chat was always buzzing when a new trailer dropped and folks were excited, but there was also some trepidation. As we were winding down MH4U, Wilds was about to release. I had gotten my fill and knew from experience with World that Wilds wasn't for me, but the rest of the group hopped in. Not too long later, we started up Freedom Unite (the "Ultimate" equivalent of gen 2 Monster Hunter). Wilds had been deemed too easy, too light on content, and didn't offer enough substance to overcome those issues. Outside of a few Monster Hunter loving friends, this seemed to be a common sentiment.
If you're one of those people and found Wilds lacking, I'd invite you to grab some friends and try an older title. It takes some setup, but there are ways to play all the old Monster Hunter titles online, and communities like Hunstersverse and a number of discord communities around Citra or Pretendo have popped up to help folks without established hunter-friends find players. If you missed out on the launch of these titles, or weren't able to play with friends due to the lack of online play, there has never been a better time to pick up any older Monster Hunter title.
If you're new to the series, or haven't played an older Monster Hunter title at all, I'd encourage you to pick up 3U or 4U. They're both packed with stuff to do and if you embrace the initial learning curve you'll find games that reward your play with both satisfying combat and a steady stream of joyful goofiness. Yes, you'll spend your first few hours fighting Jaggis and gathering ore and honey, but if you spend a bit of time exploring you'll find there's more to those things than you'd think. That's the nature of Monster Hunter, there's always something new to see.
And yes, 3U has underwater content. It's fine. Except Abyssal Lagiacrus.
Special thanks to Milk for recording so many clips of our playthrough. His YouTube channel with more highlights and a fantastic Freedom Unite super cut can be found HERE.