Animation as Consequence in Monster Hunter
Monster Hunter has long been one of my absolute favourite franchises. While I initially sampled it with Freedom Unite back in the PSP days, I got really in to it on the 3DS which brought the Ultimate editions of the mainline 3rd and 4th generation titles. It had a learning curve — one that required me to unlearn some of the action game habits I'd picked up elsewhere — but I was excited by the opportunity to master a new combat system in a world that felt so brimming with culture and life. In my mind, that's really what sets Monster Hunter apart: the balance of high stakes action combat and low stakes environmental simulation. Even when polygon budgets were tight, Capcom paid careful attention to the smaller creatures in the environment, and NPC dialogue would allude to an enormous naturalist guild system that backed the quests you undertook. Left only the combat, I would have dropped Monster Hunter in favour of playing Devil May Cry or a Souls title, but nothing else really comes close to Monster Hunter in blending an environment that captures your attention with this sort of high stakes action combat.
And I'm not the only one. Look no further than the sheer quantity of fan art or official merch that focuses not on the human characters but on the monsters themselves. The adorable Wigglers, ferocious Tigrex, and frankly strange Gigginox each have their devoted fans, as does every other monster. Because Monster Hunter's setting is so endearing, even folks who don't enjoy getting blasted by G-rank elder dragons can enjoy the relaxed pace of collecting materials and slowly working up a collection of gear even in low- or high-rank.
While the gathering-focused side of Monster Hunter has always existed, as the means to create the equipment any experienced hunter knows can save your life, the way it works has heavily changed over time. Early Monster Hunter (by which I mean everything before Tri on the Wii) was very deliberate in its resource management. Collecting resources in the environment was slow but consistent, encouraging hunters to bring their harvesting equipment (the trusty pickaxe and bug net) on each of their hunts and learn the layout of the map in order to cleverly work their way towards the quest target while hitting the most valuable gathering nodes. You also had the farm, which was adjacent to your home base, where you could harvest a few valuable nodes or grow specific crops between quests, and merchants in your village that stocked rotating goods. This system works pretty well but feels a bit plodding in its pace. Sure, for the first 50 quests it can feel fun and novel to harvest your farm between every quest, but after 100? 200? 500? It becomes tedious.
In response to this, generations 3 and 4 experimented with some improvements to reduce the tedium. Gathering nodes within quests were random, encouraging players to pay more attention to their surroundings and adding some dynamism to gathering. Gathering speed was generally increased as well, reducing downtime. The farm in gen 3 was shrunken in size, instead leaning on merchants to fill the gaps and with gen 4 it was replaced entirely. By and large, it was easier to maintain your most crucial consumables like Mega Potions and Demondrugs, but it was harder to accumulate large numbers of more niche materials. For most players this was a wash, but for gunners in particular it could make ammo upkeep difficult before endgame. Not a perfect system, but it maintained the gathering and maintenance gameplay that encouraged hunters to learn the maps and gradually improve not only at the combat but at their preparatory rituals as well.
Come World, we saw major changes to every aspect of Monster Hunter. More than ever before, the environments were alive and interactive. No longer were small insects, fish and mammals just window dressing but were now creatures you could catch and collect to display in your home, and many of them had combat-relevant effects when interacted with during a hunt. Tons of new gathering nodes were added for use with the new Slinger, allowing players to shoot seeds and rocks at monsters or environmental features. Gathering itself was enormously streamlined, allowing players to collect materials just by running passed a node while pressing the interact button. Not only that, but gathering nodes would appear on your map and would be highlighted in the environment by the Scoutflies that World introduces to track monsters with. Materials in your inventory are automatically crafted into their consumable version, too. No need to remember that Herb and Blue Mushroom create a potion, World simply did it for you.
Most of these changes enhance the experience of Monster Hunter as a naturalist immersive sim. While previously players more interested in the setting than the combat would run out of things to do when their willingness to improve at the combat ran up against the difficulty of higher ranks, now those players had hours of content just collecting small creatures to try to find rare variants and particularly large or small variants (called "Gold Crowns" by players due to the symbol Capcom uses to mark them). For players who found the gathering itself tedious but enjoyed exploring the environments, the maps themselves no longer have loading screens and have an enormous number of gathering nodes with many little nooks and crannies, allowing those players to explore and organically collect more materials than they'll ever need as they do so. For combat-focused players, World builds on gen 4's simplified farm system that lets you multiply materials without the long animations of harvesting itself (the friendly local botanists will do that for you). It's really clear what Capcom was aiming for in World, and it's most of the way there, but I can't help but notice that in streamlining the environmental interaction, they've inadvertently undermined their own excellent setting and gameplay.
Press A to Roleplay
One of Monster Hunter's key strengths has always been its deliberate use of animation. Like FromSoft's titles or a fighting game, Monster Hunter has historically used long animations that are situationally cancellable. For instance, pre-World Monster Hunter had an animation for every time you swung a bug net or harvested from an herb node. Bug net swings took a bit longer and were therefore a higher opportunity cost, while herb nodes could be sped up by crouching, skipping the animation of your character standing back up. While yes, these animations increased the time it took to gather, it also slowed down the pace of the game and rewarded players who paid attention and learned the tricks of the trade, adding to the deliberate feeling of the game.
In stark contrast, World's harvest animations play while running, effectively adding a small cooldown to your ability to harvest nodes in short succession, but otherwise making harvesting instantaneous (outside of mining and special nodes like the cacti or conchs). This is, of course, far more convenient if gathering materials is seen as a chore, but gathering was a crucial part of the experience for over a decade. Given how much World has otherwise emphasized greater environmental interaction, it's ironic that they've simultaneously reduced the stakes of actually interacting with the gathering and crafting systems.
The issues with this simplification of environmental interaction are exacerbated by a similar simplification of other UX functions. Camps, where you begin each hunt, now provide access to your equipment and item storage. No longer are you limited by what you bring to hunt, so poor planning or realizing you forgot bug nets is no longer an impetus to remember the node you found for next time, rather its just a trip back to the nearest camp. Your minimap is no longer an abstraction with minimal information, requiring you to recall the hidden paths and gathering nodes throughout the level. Now, the map updates in real time to show every gathering node and path you've located. Even creating a new save has been abstracted from going to your hunter's home and taking a nap to just a menu option.
In aggregate these changes add up into this je ne sais quoi that doesn't quite feel right. I really enjoy exploring the maps in World, but I don't feel much joy finding new items, and gathering on my way to the target is mindless and feels more tedious than the far more time-expensive gathering of yesteryear. I find myself playing the UI during gathering quests — looking at the map while I move around instead of actually looking at my environment — and I've found that even after a couple hundred hours in World I get turned around or forget how corridors connect as I've never bothered to really learn the maps. I also don't really bother to check my inventory before loading in to quests, knowing full well that worst case I can get things from the camp and often I won't need them at all as I'll collect all the items I need for the hunt on my way. It's an odd feeling being able to get so quickly in to the action or even hunting deliberately in the environment for rare critters but also just not giving any shits about the bits of plant matter and insects rapidly filling my inventory.
Micro-consequences
I argue that changes like those to gathering come from a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes Monster Hunter so compelling. Yes, Monster Hunter is slow and grindy and requires players to manage often enormous amounts of materials — some of which require hours of play to obtain. But also, it's precisely because Monster Hunter is so rich with minor decision making, and each decision has clear consequence in terms of time and effect that obtaining those materials feels meaningful and fun. Much the way an MMO rewards effective planning and good play with strong items, Monster Hunter rewards players who learn how to be judicious with each little animated decision.
World's changes consistently work against this principle. You can now move while consuming an item (though it's counterbalanced with healing items healing gradually rather than all at once), many attacks have more cancel options, and weapons with historically high commitment attacks had some of their power moved to lower commit parts of their kit (Greatsword, Dualblades, Bow, Heavy Bowgun). Overall the game feels more fluid, but it also rewards my minor efforts less clearly and less meaningfully.
The strength of older Monster Hunter has a lot to do with its commitment to lengthy, weighty animation. Every interaction, every button press, has lasting obvious consequences. It sacrifices some responsiveness in order to maximize the impact of each individual button press. Noticed a mining node in a room full of Velociprey? If you commit to harvesting before dealing with them, good chance they'll knock you off the node. Got fed up with that Bullfango knocking you around while trying to fight Zinogre? You might just pay for looking away from the giant thunder beast and eat shit for your impatience.
Monster Hunter combat is very much about learning to maximize the impact of each of your animations, attacking only when you're punishing the monster's own lengthy animations, and waiting so you can dodge in situations where the monster is likely to chain attacks together. Learning each pattern and constantly spacing just outside of the monster's range to punish each of its attacks is euphoric and while it's most clear in combat, it's also true in everything Monster Hunter does. Whether you're harvesting crops, drinking a Demondrug, eating at the canteen, or jumping down a small cliff, Monster Hunter responds with a weighty animation rich with feedback. Just as you learn the spawn points of gathering nodes and all the little secret paths around each map, you also learn all the intricacies of how to cancel lengthy animations. Playing with friends, all gathering at a node and kicking each other to cancel the recovery of gathering, or placing a felvine bomb behind you while eating a Might Seed in order to cancel the recovery in your speedrun feels good, adds humor, and rewards understanding the game on a deeper level. World removing some of these idiosyncrasies may seem like ironing off jank vestiges of decades-old tech debt, but Monster Hunter's "jank" was the product of a strong commitment to these micro-consequences tied to each action. As World removes them, there is certainly a cohort of Monster Hunter players who are happy to spend less time on things they enjoyed less, and more who are able to look passed the changes, but the game does lose some of its identity.
Replaying World recently has been an exercise in mixed feelings. I've absolutely loved the upgraded Field Guide and collecting critters to show off in my base has been great. The world is mostly well realized (as one would hope given the title!), and new monsters are fun and expressive. But as I replay, I can't help but feel that I'd rather be playing a 3DS Monster Hunter instead.