Monster Hunter Wilds' Biggest Surprise Is Its Shockingly Emotional Story
Two steps forward.
The Monster Hunter series has been a lot of things over the past two decades — a niche series hyper-focused on grinding, a brilliant spin on multiplayer and community building, and with 2018’s World a hardcore experience that permeated the mainstream. But with all those things, what Monster Hunter has never been about is narrative. These aren’t games you play for memorable characters and twisty tales, but for the thrill of the hunt — that tantalizing gameplay loop of slaying monsters, upgrading your equipment, and doing it all over again.
That’s exactly why I’m flabbergasted by Monster Hunter Wilds, and the fact that the biggest impression the game has left on me is with its story. It’s a narrative experience that isn’t just “good for a Monster Hunter game,” but genuinely might be one of Capcom’s best in recent years — filled with memorable characters, set-piece moments, and quite thoughtful themes. Exhibit number one on how Wilds is drastically altering the franchise. In this case, it’s absolutely a good thing.
Like pretty much every Monster Hunter game, Wilds is a completely self-contained experience — you don’t need any knowledge of the series to play it. In fact, Wilds quite deliberately feels like the best place for new players to start, thanks to a handful of streamlining decisions and quality-of-life elements. But this also means the game is free to do whatever it wants with its narrative, not bound by any rules or lore.
Wilds does a wonderful job of interspersing set-piece moments to break up the monotony of hunt after hunt.
It’s not fair to say previous Monster Hunter games haven’t had stories, they have. But that mostly amounts to the occasional cutscene, flavor text in dialogue, and the occasional lore dump. But crucially, there was really no narrative throughline to these games, it wasn’t the story that was pushing you forward but the hunting loop. Wilds makes some drastic changes to the series’ formula in the name of streamlining things, cutting out a lot of the busy work you have to do between hunts. You don’t have to put copious amounts of time and thought into prepping your armor, or refilling items, or gathering. That might come as a shock to longtime players used to it, but this more streamlined approach also lets Capcom integrate a much more thoughtful, meaningful story.
First and foremost, this is done in the general story presentation. Wilds has drastically more cutscenes and dialogue than any other Monster Hunter games, mixed in with moments of exploration where you get to wander around cities and talk to a wealth of different characters. The big thing is that Wilds’ story doesn’t feel fractured like past games. Even in Monster Hunter World, the story was there to complement the gameplay formula, but here it feels the exact opposite way. The hunts and structure of the game are intensely woven into the narrative pacing, with both deliberately going hand-in-hand.
In Wilds, you play as members of an expedition ordered by the Guild, the governing body of the world of Monster Hunter — and the organization in charge of hunting monsters. Years ago, a young boy named Nata was discovered at the edge of an uncharted region called the Forbidden Lands. You set off with a group of experts to bring the boy home to his people and finally, properly, chart the uncharted.
Each biome in Wilds has a distinct civilization that lives there, and has adapted to the region’s dangers.
Within the first hour, Wilds makes it abundantly clear that story is going to be more of a focus, with a bombastic opening that has you going on a high-speed chase through the desert while riding a giant lizard called a Seikret. Wilds is filled with high-stakes set pieces like this, which oftentimes introduce key monsters you’ll be hunting throughout the game. But with gusto, the game mixes all that with moments of quiet reflection that question your place in the world, the expedition you’re on, and the very nature of what hunting these creatures means. It’s not Shadow of the Colossus levels of introspection, but still takes some interesting steps toward looking inward.
A huge part of why this story works so well is the vibrancy of its cast, an inherently likable set of characters that genuinely grow and change together. It honestly feels a lot like a party-based RPG, like Final Fantasy, but you’re only playing a single member of the party. Each character has a clear narrative arc, from Nata grappling with the history of his people and the duty he’s inherited to the way your smith, Gemma, worries about other expedition members falling into the same self-doubt she suffered from years ago. For the very first time, your Hunter is also voiced by an actor, and they have a quirky but confident personality that really plays off everyone else well.
The big difference here is that you have a connection to the world and cast of characters that simply wasn’t there before — the act of giving your character a voice and party of companions makes you feel drastically more invested in this story. That’s doubly true when your characters are forced to confront cultures that are wildly different from their own. But this aspect is a bit of a double-edged sword.
Wilds deliberately creates a typical RPG party of characters, but shows all that through the yes of your single hearo.
The methodical preparation of past Monster Hunter games helped breed a theme of respecting the land and environment, especially when mixed with heavy exploration. You were essentially living off the land, and every Monster Hunter game made sure you thought about how that could impact an ecosystem. The streamlining of Wilds means a lot of those elements have been stripped out, but in its place is an overarching theme of culture clash, and how that doesn’t have to be painful. Each of the areas you visit in Wilds has very distinct cultures and traditions, and the game, time and again, shows the main party being thoughtful of those traditions. Whether it’s helping a city light their giant forge for a festival, or partaking in a traditional roundtable meal with an ancient village.
But crucially, it’s not just traditions and rituals, but how these cultures oftentimes think of the monsters you’re hunting as more than just wild beasts. That’s kind of the crux of the story, seeing these wildly different biomes and how people have adapted to live within them.
That’s what’s really incredible to me about Wilds — that it feels so thematically ambitious in a series that arguably barely even featured a story up until this point. It’s not perfect, of course, there’s some weird pacing and a lot of moments where you’re doing nothing but walking and talking, but it’s genuinely such a delightfully surprising element of the game.
Wilds really streamlines the core Monster Hunter experience, but that allows for richer, more intimate, storytelling.
I went in with zero expectations for getting a story in Monster Hunter Wilds, but it’s ultimately the reason I made it to the end of the game. These characters and the world they inhabit is inherently compelling, so much so that it’s simply a joy to exist in — whether you’re hunting a giant mutant bear, or sitting on a hill watching the tall grass wave in the wind.
This is what makes Wilds feel like a true turning point for the franchise, the way it explores a way to tie a meaningful story to its already ultra-popular formula. The whole idea of Monster Hunter is something ripe for exploration of complex narrative themes, and Wilds is a step in the direction of that — even if it’s a baby step.
Before Wilds I never wanted story in my Monster Hunter, now I can’t imagine playing another game without it. It’s like this whole time I’ve just been ordering a cheeseburger, and suddenly found out that I could have been getting a Happy Meal this whole time — the same food, now with a little treat. There’s no going back.
