Monster Hunter Generations

How returning to the past revealed the beating heart of the hunt.

- Alex Wiltshire

Pack ten mega potions, five pickaxes and five bug nets. Some antidote, shock and pit traps, and perhaps a set of tranquilliser bombs. Bowgun ammo and bow coatings, if they’re your weapons of choice, and cool or hot drinks, if you’ll need them. Next, sit with your fellow hunters to eat a meal. And then, only then, the hunt can begin. Monster Hunter is a game of rituals, of routines and rites which help you feel like a fearless master of the wilds, a hunter who can halt a wyvern the size of a house.

Few games quite capture the same sense of gently escalating proficiency, as you learn the many layers of mechanics that have accumulated around the series over its five core games, and many more remixed ports and expansions. Carting, traps, applying status effects, skill thresholds, body location weaknesses, where to find rare bugs, ores and mushrooms, habitat preferences, palico abilities, coatings, phials, oil, essences: Monster Hunter’s depths are broad and demanding. Even veteran hunters can be forgiven for knowing little of how many of the weapons work, or for needing to be reminded of the arcane relationship between a weapon’s damage output and its power, elemental bonus, affinity and sharpness. This is a game in which rituals help ground and disseminate the weight of knowledge it takes to climb the hunter ranks, from Low to High to G.

When Monster Hunter Generations was released in Japan in late 2015, 10 years after the first