When I first talked to Grib about the new Monster Hunter, it was similar to talking to him about racing games before he actually liked cars. “The cars look like real cars,” he’d say. “You drive them around on tracks and roads.” One day later, his Hunter was Hunting some kind of octopus thing and now he’s gone batshit for it. Kiko has never played one, but he’s got a storehouse of skill he developed playing Bloodborne and a lot of that is gonna map. I’m comfortable saying that Monster Hunter is, itself, a genre.
Long before it had its ascendance in the US we were getting projections of its intense power as its concepts were being picked up by other games. In the same was there is such a thing as a Comedian’s Comedian, or your Favorite Rapper’s Favorite Rapper, I think this is a game that designers are inspired by.
It’s just, sorta… like itself. As the series goes on, they routinely add things that smooth off some of the rough edges of the experience while persisting in byzantine interfaces and offering a multiplayer experience that probably requires a video to fully comprehend. You must be this tall to ride this ride. These things are simply the price of admission, because nobody else is gonna give you this game. Monster Hunter as a community has true OGs, the ones who are going to find a campaign like the one they’ve delivered here easy and on the short side. But it sold eight million copies in three days, and Steam by itself had 1.3 million concurrent players. It’s Capcom’s fastest selling game of all time, as a result or in spite of its weird kinks, and this is the same Capcom that makes Street Fighter, Resident Evil, Devil May Cry… they have a roster of legends and somehow this thing is the company now. A new class of OGs are being minted as we speak.
(CW)TB out.