In Monster Hunter World, you slowly break down the armor of a creature, track it from place to place, and after hitting it enough, it will eventually start limping listlessly to its nest where it just wants to lie down and take a nap.
This is starting to be how I’m feeling about the game.
I’ve gone through a few phases with Monster Hunter World. At first it was overwhelming, an avalanche of new systems and gameplay elements in a series I was totally unfamiliar with. But then I had a breakthrough, I understood enough of it to be competent, and really enjoyed the clear path to working toward upgrades through hunts and other objectives.
But now I’m starting to shift gears yet again. The game is starting to wear me out.
This doesn’t happen very often. I’m no stranger to long games, difficult games, or complicated games, but there’s just something about the way Monster Hunter World is structured that is starting to wear on me, and I think I need to set it down for a while.
One of the things that people say they like most about Monster Hunter is that every fight is a boss battle. I get the appeal of that to some extent because it’s not repeated in many other games, but I also now understand why it’s not repeated often.
The further I get into Monster Hunter World, the longer and more daunting these hunts become. Not just because they’re difficult. You usually will understand the mechanics of a new monster in the first 5-10 minutes of a fight, but the fights just become so long. You can learn how to block or dodge certain attacks from a monster, but it’s not enough to do it a few times, you must do it 50, 60, 100 times. You must chase this monster to six, seven, eight different locations, repeating the same combos to try and chip away at its invisible health bar.
These fights are dynamic, yes, and I really love the design of some of these areas and the monsters you fight. But the length is what’s starting to get to me. 20, 30, 40 minute individual fights can be exhausting, particularly in many instances when you cannot pause a fight for any reason, meaning you can lose a lot of progress and hard work if anything at all comes up in the real world. There is nothing more frustrating than having to walk away from a hunt that’s just about to conclude after a marathon chase.
Something feels off with the feedback loop to me as well. When you get more powerful, you can shorten fight times and go back and farm easier enemies, but then you feel weird farming a monster that’s many levels below the monsters you feel you should be farming, like you’re always a few steps behind when gearing. That means practically every new fight is longer than the last because you’re not usually going to be geared for it up front, and the more I play, the worse this is getting. This isn’t a difficulty thing, I rarely fail most hunts, it’s just about the sheer length of encounters.
Monster Hunter World has no real middleground. Either you’re doing these sprawling, epic boss fights, or you’re farming creatures that can barely touch you while picking mushrooms and bugs in exploration mode. There are no real “medium” fights anywhere in the game from what I’ve found, unless you go back to farm really early monsters when you’re now way overgeared for them.
Few games do this. Monster Hunter has been compared to Dark Souls a fair amount, but while both games have tough bosses, DS also has a huge variety of enemy encounters. And MHW may be a looter, but it doesn’t remotely feel like other games in the genre which are usually focused on waves of enemies with sporadic bosses, not pure bosses from start to finish.
I’m not saying I don’t like it. I am saying it’s a game that I find hard to stick with for more than a few hunts at a time because the way it’s structured is exhausting. It’s not a great feeling to beat down one enemy for 35 minutes, then realize you have to go and do it all over again because you’re still missing a single claw for your next armor piece. This is where the “clear farming path” cuts both ways. You know what you have to do to get what you want, but the journey to get there can be tiresome. And to me, it’s more about pure endurance than it is skill. You can master a fight and dodge every attack, but the health pools of these enemies will end up making every battle a slog.
This is why I don’t think Monster Hunter World is for everyone. I think there are many, many positives to the game, and I think it does a lot of fantastic things I haven’t experienced before in any other title. But because of its unique structure, I do think that unavoidably comes with downsides, and if you’re the type of person who frequently complains about “bullet sponge enemies” in games in this genre, MHW might be your worst nightmare in that regard.
I do want to keep pushing through the game, but I’m coming to realize that this is going to be slow going due to the nature of combat and hunts. For whatever reason I can farm thousands of enemies in Diablo rifts from dawn till dusk, yet after a serious hunt or two in MH, I’m wiped. I wonder who else might feel similarly.
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