The Rey Dau is a massive wyvern that uses electricity to enhance its wing strikes and has horns that transform its entire neck and head into a lightning railgun. The creature's presence alone is enough to summon lightning storms to the area, and a hit from its charged lightning attack can kill in a single strike. It's an unnatural, mythical, deific monster that is brought to life so effortlessly that you would believe it really exists.
In the deserts of the Windward Plains, you can find groups of Ceratonoth -- friendly, slow-moving herbivores -- huddled around the lone male of the pack. Male Ceratonoth have giant horns that protrude from their backs. In addition to being quite useful for finding a mate (probably), the giant horns of the Ceratonoth also act as lightning rods, protecting the resting females from the dangers of encroaching storms.
It's a scene straight out of a David Attenborough documentary, only more fantastical. Darwin himself would've loved to examine the various endemic species and their behaviors. Unfortunately for that particular pride of Ceratonoth, a Hunter's battle with the Rey Dau has moved into the middle of their resting spot, and not even a lightning rod can protect the whole clan from the wyvern's destructive attacks.
Music swells as the Rey Dau's horns pulse, ready to give off another bolt of electricity. As a Hunter you can dodge behind sand dunes to quickly heal up, before diving straight back into the fray. The Rey Dau's wingspan alone is about ten times the size of the average Hunter, and a couple of bad hits can send a Hunter packing back to camp. The slumbering Ceratonoth didn't stand a chance. As the smaller and more nimble human Hunter, your job is to dodge and roll between each of the Rey Dau's attacks while getting up close to strike it with your weapon -- all in the name of turning the beast into leather.
Monster Hunter is a game with a simple premise: you defeat large monsters to harvest their bodies and turn the parts into armor and weapons to beat even larger, more dangerous monsters. It's not quite that brutal, of course. You work with the local Guild, and your handler Alma always comes with you into the field. Monsters marked to be hunted are disrupting the local ecosystem, either after having moved in from far away, or after becoming a threat to the local wildlife or human populations. Restoring balance is the name of the game, but that often feels like an excuse for ridiculous and exciting action -- which is just fine.
You'd expect the story to be similar -- a convenient excuse to jump into electrifying monster fights -- and it is that, but somehow significantly more mundane. Dialogue in story missions feels flat and tedious. Characters will chatter away before a mission, you'll mount up on your Seikret (basically a rideable horse-chicken-dinosaur) to head towards the monster, and then the characters will continue to chatter on the way, often disabling your Seikret's ability to sprint. That would be fine, but the Seikrets navigate automatically when they have a target. This means that in story missions, where they always have a target, you essentially have control of the game wrestled away from you. As a result, each story mission feels like a taxi ride to a monster that you defeat, return to camp and repeat.
From sticking to the story missions, you wouldn't even know that Monster Hunter Wilds is an open world game, with several sprawling areas where you hunt beasts. You're disincentivized from actually exploring the world, which is where Wilds truly shows its cards. The dynamic of moving between Pop-Up Camps while hunting the ferocious beasties you encounter along the way is genuinely fantastic, but if you stick to the missions you're spoonfed, you won't ever get to experience it. It's not a prescribed part of the gameplay loop, and to find the fun, you almost need to fight against the game.
The real meat of a Monster Hunter game has always been in the endgame, where you fight increasingly dangerous and difficult monster variants alongside online pals. Fighting a monster one-on-one is a fraught and tense situation, and it's a massive relief to have friends by your side to even the odds. The Seikret taxis you to each monster, and a relatively experienced player will mop up story quests faster than in any previous game. Even though the monsters look ferocious, it takes a while before the story quests really ramp up in difficulty. The story isn't there to be enjoyed, it's there to be finished, and the faster you can finish, the better.
That's a pretty glaring fault, especially since the story takes around 30 hours to complete. It's a long time to be given half of the Monster Hunter Wilds experience, and I wonder how many players will make it out the other side. Experienced Monster Hunter players know that 30 hours is 10 percent of the time they'll probably spend with the game -- or less -- so it's not a massive burden, but newer players might not make it through the weeds of those initial hours, and give up before they ever learn what's so great about the game.
The story does a better job of tutorializing the series' mechanics than ever before, but the game drags the process out. You aren't even told to perform a Capture -- an alternative to monster Slaying -- until after the initial credits roll. It's a strange state of affairs. More casual players got lost playing Monster Hunter World, so it's easy to see why Capcom course corrected so much, but the story mode in this game is a dramatic overcorrection that will leave fans feeling a bit baffled until they progress further.
If it manages to make newer players understand and enjoy the Monster Hunter formula, then it's a positive move, but giving the player too much direction has also obfuscated a lot of the game's merits. What is the point in taking Wilds full open world, if not a single story mission genuinely asks you to explore it?
It's a baffling design decision that'll likely haunt someone at Capcom for the next few years. Those dedicated fans will absolutely play Wilds, and likely adore it, but they'll probably also be hoping for a more traditional Monster Hunter experience next, deep down.
If you're new to the series, Monster Hunter Wilds offers the smoothest introduction to Monster Hunter gameplay that any game has ever offered, but if you've put hundreds of hours into various Monster Hunter games, this will feel a bit too simple and rudimentary for a bit too long. Wilds is still fantastic and a future expansion will likely be a revelatory improvement, but the simplistic story -- both narratively and in terms of what you actually do -- feels like an unignorable blemish.
Platform tested: PS5