Speculation and Hopes For Next "Portable" MonHun

 

Hello. Seems I’ve kind of lied, I’m back. Much quicker than I really thought I would be. I’ve been playing Rise again, I made a new character, picked four weapons I like to use and have been using my Game of Life spinner to tell me which weapon to use each hunt. I bounce between it and Wilds and notice some differences, obvi, and just wonder what changes the next Monster Hunter may bring or what it might adept from Wilds, if anything. I was watching a Monster Hunter video on YouTube but don’t know what it was about now but the creator, author, narrator, was calling GenU and Rise “portable” games, because that’s what they technically are, and was referring to the next game as a “portable” game as well so I might refer to it as such in this post also. I was also hoping to have this post be kind of coherent and follow a linear train of thought but who are we kidding? I’ll try my best but some things may be out of place.

            World and Wilds had the turf wars but Rise (saw someone refer to Rise as SunRise and was like oh my god, that’s so good and obvious) didn’t use turf wars. Instead they let you ride on the monster to fight other monsters. Both are cool concepts. Turf wars are kind of nice because you can just sit there, sharpen a weapon, drink a potion, as the monsters do some cool scripted fight. Monster riding is fun as well but it does get old doing it every single hunt. Capcom eventually put in an option so you didn’t HAVE to hope on the monster, you could just continue to beat on it so it is nice to have the option. When playing Rise again it was kind of weird when I hopped on the monster and I couldn’t attack it. Personally I think I’d like the next portable game to go back to just doing normal mounting. I’m curious to see if they continue with the monster riding or if they’ll do something completely different again. The clashes and counters some weapons have in Wilds are cool too. I know great sword has a counter move but I don’t know if any others do. Basically anything with a shield has a clash and again, they are cool moments. It’s funny that you can hold a monster back with a sword and shield and just stab the monster a bunch, I really like it. Is that something that would make it into the next game? I don’t know. I’m almost thinking no, I’m thinking that might be a World/Wilds kind of gimmick. Another thing I like in Wilds that I’m certain will make it into future games is with the insect glaive while you’re aiming at the monster it shows you under your ridicule what color extract you will get if you send out your bug. That is obviously super helpful, no more guessing, your bug still has to actually hit the spot but at least you know what to aim for. Most of the time the orange extract is the chest of the monster but for some it’s on their back, it can get annoying.

            I much more enjoy the prep in older Monster Hunter games before quests than in Wilds. The story especially just kind of pushes you along like oh you defeated that monster? Good for you, let’s go over here annnnd OH LOOK something else to fight, go, go, GO! So I constantly am having my food buff go away mid hunt, I’m low on potions, though that’s not that big of a deal cause there’s all sorts of mats on the map. In Rise it’s just a routine. Go to the box, stock up on items, go eat some dango, go hunt. I’m gonna have to start forcing myself to do that in Wilds.

            I wish the player characters had some sort of personality or even different accents you could choose from. I know that’s like, a lot to ask for from a development point of view but when I’m playing with my friends and someone uses a life powder or something they all say the same voice line. I switched the game to French just because, listening to English voice lines over and over again always annoy me. Usually I’ll put games into Japanese but this time I felt my character was French, but even then they all say the same “merci.” Sometimes I think one of them adds “you’re the best” in there but still. In Rise during my original PC playthrough I got some of the DLC voices because they’re more of a personality then just a new voice. Again, in Rise I would play in Japanese, I have heard some of these voices in English on YouTube and I wasn’t a fan but they sound good in Japanese so I got them. Before I had “mood swings” and “cool girl” and they’re fun to have. The “cool girl” sounded like a gyaru which was good since that was what I was going for at the time. “Mood swings” is just fun. When fast traveling to a camp she makes these “shuu, pon!” noises and then when fighting monsters her personality changes as she spits venom at them. My new character in Rise is male and I got the “big bro” voice because the normal voices were just too boring for me. I don’t know if there will be any such DLC for Wilds, I kind of doubt it, but it would be nice if future games had personalities to choose from rather than just a handful of different voices and a pitch slider.

            I have the same issue in Wilds as I did in World for weapon requirements. Each weapon from the same monster requires the same materials. It’s super annoying for me personally because I usually like having multiple weapons from the same monster but in the portable games you could sometimes make two weapons at a time out of the different monster parts but not in the W/Ws. (How should I abbreviate World and Wilds, is that good, should it just be “Ws?” Whatever.) And not only that but the required bits for stuff is crazy. I’d have things wish listed and I’d get something and it comes up with like “1/18 fangs,” like holy shit. I mean these monsters drop stuff like crazy but even so. I see people on Reddit talking about the “meta” and artian weapons and people asking “should I make more than one weapon?” and it’s like why would you not? There are SO many different types of weapons and each one has a plethora of designs, why would you NOT make more than one? People will make a paralysis weapon and call it a day. Personally if I see an armor set that looks cool or a weapon that looks cool, I make it and its corresponding weapon/armor and call it good. In Wilds I’m working on maybe six armors, maybe seven, they are not meta but I do not care. I wear my rubber pants (Gypceros) for anything poison or that shoots lightning. Is it optimal? No but again, I don’t care. I’ve got the fire chicken, Lala Barina, the exploding monkey, Blangonga, the water apex thing and the Odogaron variant armor, along with Gypceros, right now. Pretty much something for every occasion.

            Okay, I think I’ve done pretty good so far so now I’m going to go into my weird personal… things. Not preferences, just my personal oddness, things that appeal to me personally for whatever reason. Okay, anyway, I, for some reason, judge games based on how well the water looks and I really think Monster Hunter Tri (or maybe it was 3U) was the start of that. I feel like I saw a commercial or an ad online for it or maybe just the intro to 3U’s demo and I remember thinking wow, that water looks REALLY good. I don’t know why it struck me as it did but when I was in GameStop and saw Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate on the shelf, I remembered really liking the water so I ended up getting it. Every Monster Hunter game since has had some pretty good water, except for Wilds. It might just be because the game isn’t very well optimized, it could just be I haven’t tried to really look at it since I’m just constantly in a storm or constantly being shuttled around by my raptor but I’ve just not been impressed by the water in the Scarlet Forest specifically. It’s the only one with water really. During the “time of plenty” or whatever the vegetation can be very vibrant and the water is a good blue, sometimes red, color but other than that it’s not very good looking water. I don’t know how else to describe it. The area with all the little waterfalls especially looks bland. Maybe I just haven’t spent enough time to really look at the environment, maybe I’ll just have to take a slow walk through the forest one day.

            I am glad the Wilds is selling so well. To me, when I hear that it makes me think okay, Wilds is making Capcom and the Monster Hunter group a boat load of money, so much so that they’re going to be fine financially so they can take risks with the next portable game and still be fine. Like even though the “portable” games haven’t seen the success of the Ws they can and will still make them because they have a huge safety net. My assumptions, obviously. So I imagine the next Monster Hunter game will be on the Switch 2 but hopefully not only on the Switch 2 as an exclusive. I would hope it would come to at least PC when released. So with that in mind, another, oddity maybe, of mine is that I tend to NOT like things that are super popular to the point where I almost go out of my way to not be involved/enjoy them. I don’t know if that’s part of why I don’t like the Ws as much as the portables, maybe it’s just a convenient excuse I give myself, who knows. It’s not like I prefer really really obscure things compared to the masses, I like things just not the same things as other people. For example, when Attack on Titan came out I knew during the very first episode that it was going to be popular. I grew uninterested during the episode where Eren was in jail and they were deciding to use him as a titan weapon basically. For me the show was imbalanced between talking and action. You’d have episodes of just go, go, go and then episodes like the jail one where they just talked, I couldn’t handle it. Also the plot was just very predictable so in any case I dropped the show. So. Maybe that’s my hesitation with Wilds and World? Maybe it’s the whole, I liked it before it was cool, kind of thing and I just find the people who don’t like the portables to not be “true” fans? Who knows I guess, it’s not like I play with randos anyway.

            Since maybe 4U I’ve noticed certain NPCs have their own kind of armor and it’s armor, armor. It’s not stuff from the monsters, it just looks like good old fashion medieval armor be it the Ace Hunters from 4U or Fiorayne and her knights or Olivia in Wilds. In the recent games you usually are able to unlock their armor but I don’t want to wear their armor. I want my own. I don’t enjoy how some of the NPCs will have the same hair options we have and after spending so much time in the character creator, sort of happy with what I’ve done, to go in game and see some NPC walking around that looks just like me so no, I do not want to wear the same armor as these people, but it did get me thinking. In Rainbow Six Vegas 2 I played that game a LOT. Like a lot, a lot. It was a little absurd. But when you get to the highest rank, elite, you unlock the ability to create your own camo for your armor and I quite enjoyed that. It wasn’t anything fancy but I made some camo I was happy with and it was mine. Typically I like wearing armor from the monsters, I like using the weapons from the monsters, I don’t want to use just random weapons from random materials, though I do like the Frozen Core hammer a lot, but if we got some “Ace” armor we could customize, I might be okay with that. Like maybe each piece of armor has a handful of different styles and each of those has a handful of different accessories or whatever. Enough to make it your own and maybe not look like everyone else. Like, I kind of don’t like layered armor personally. In Rise I did have the Chaotic Gore Magala but I would layer the Storge Helm and legs just because it looked fun but it’s from the family of monster so it was okay to me? I don’t know, I’m not much of a “fashion” hunter nor a charm type hunter. I use what the armor gives me, if it has a skill I like but isn’t maxed out then I’ll get a deco for that but beyond that I don’t typically try to add more skills. But custom Ace armor that doesn’t look like complete ass, I could get behind.

            Alright, I think that’s it for this one, what do you think? Do you think we’ll see some of these new gimmicks in the next “portable” game or will we get something new? Do you have an opinion on voice options vs personality options? How do you match up your armor and weapons and how do you feel about the water? Are there weird, obscure things you judge games on? Would you like your own Ace armor once you reached a certain hunter rank? Let me know below and I’ll be back sometime. Bye-bye!

            @AztecSauce                      Below image from a Reddit post that I hope I've linked correctly.