Phosphor [&]

It's a game where you hunt monsters.

No, I'm serious. The Monster Hunter games realize this fantasy and this milieu in a way that very few big AAA titles realize their fantasy and milieu. The action-adventure and action-RPG design vocabularies are pretty calcified, and a lot of those games have themes but those theme are loosely draped over a skeleton that's structurally the same as a lot of other games.

In Monster Hunter, you hunt monsters, meaning that almost nothing about the game is the way that it is just because of genre expectations. Monsters are huge and threatening, and fighting them is a protracted battle; it's a game made almost entirely out of intricately designed boss fights. But your entire kit of affordances is designed around this, intended for fighting giant monsters.

Preparation is a big component of hunts, from buffing yourself to carrying traps and other anti-monster items to equipping armor that specifically negates a given monster's tricks. It's a game about using resourcefulness and clever tactics to take down enemies that are much stronger than you.

At the center of all this are the monsters themselves. A huge part of the appeal of the series is just in the creature designs, which at their best are incredibly cool but also just thoughtfully in conversation with everything from fantasy tropes to paleoart. Anjanath is a great example: a fire-breathing t-rex could have been kind of trite and obvious, but they gave it a vulture-like feather pattern and a sort of permanent fire-sneezing hay fever.

The monsters have behaviors, ecologies, intentions, roles. They're the most reactive, interactive, and richly designed enemies I've ever seen in an action game. Because an individual monster is the centerpiece of an entire hunt, they can have all of these systems running through them making them seem more alive than any conventional action game boss.

Cut off Rathian's poisonous tail and it can't hit you with it any more. Fire a burst of stunning pellets right into the monster's eye and it'll launch itself; do this with the right timing, and it'll smack its head right into a wall. Jump onto the monster from a tall ledge and you can ride it like a buckling bull, exploiting the fact that it's trying to throw you off, sometimes by swinging its own body at walls to try and catch you.

So these fights don't feel like straightforward damage races, they're not a game of trading blows, of dodge-hit-dodge. You have goals, you have ideas, you have tactics you're brewing up as you fight. You're building up towards things: getting the monster stunned or trapped, breaking one of its body parts. Sometimes you're just trying to let an angry and aggressive monster tire itself out without getting hit; in this game, the monsters themselves also have a stamina meter, of sorts.

This is all tied together by the other major unique thing about Monster Hunter, the weapons. The fourteen weapon types in MH are essentially the series' character classes; each one has completely unique affordances and a totally different playstyle. What makes them brilliant is that they are all powerful in their own ways, and they all allow for a great deal of skill expression... but it's different flavors and types of skill expression. Some weapons have resources that you manage, or different states they can move between. Some weapons have a very broad toolkit, letting you choose between different approaches based on the moment. Some weapons, conversely, are extremely good at doing one thing, and their utility blooms from that one thing. Some weapons emphasize uptime, letting you chip away at the monster bit by bit as long as you can continue to avoid being hit; others emphasize knowing the monster's openings and picking your spot, giving you big chunks of damage as a reward.

I really, really love those games, and I think they only seem daunting. Monster Hunter World is no more complicated than Elden Ring or God of War, it's just very different. It refuses to be like everything else, and so it has that extra learning curve because you can't always rely on familiarity. Even the game's basic loop is different, with a mission-based structure that's unlike the contiguous world of a typical action-RPG. But coming to grips with it has been intensely rewarding for me, the ind of rewarding I've only gotten from a handful of other games; games like Dark Souls or Symphony of the Night or other genre touchstones. Except MH isn't a genre touchstone; it's almost inimitable. I can count on one hand the number of imitations and I could be missing three fingers.

You really should try it if you like action games at all. It's honestly never been a better time to get into World or Rise.

So right now, if you start a new save file in Monster Hunter World, the game will give you access to equipment that is very overpowered for when you can access it (known as the Guardian armor set and the Defender weapons; in Rise, there's similarly Defender weapons and the Black Belt armor set). These are intended to, basically, let you blitz through game progression so you can play the expansion. Given that co-op, while still optional, is a major feature of MH, it makes sense to speed new players towards the content boundary so they can play with their friends.

The upshot of this is that MHW now functionally has an easy mode, or really a couple of easy modes. You can make the game's early combat extremely forgiving to focus on learning the ropes, or you can cut down on how long it takes to get through those early game hunts so you can progress faster. The (monster hunter) world is your oyster.

As far as a general mindset for getting into this game: You're a hunter, and you kill things that are much bigger and scarier than you. This means preparation (engaging with the game's various buffing systems, traps, the slinger, etc) matters; tactics matters (thinking about terrain and thinking about using it, for example to mount the monster); and for the most part you are using the monster's size against it. MH combat cares a lot about positioning; over time, you'll learn where you're supposed to stand to deal with different attacks.

In particular, monsters tend to have a sort of 'axis' that orients their attack, which is almost always along their spine. Which is to say, it's usually safer to be on the monster's side, and more dangerous to be right in front. Monsters do have lateral attacks like side tackles, but they tend to be weaker and more limited.

At the same time, those zones of danger tend to be where you can hit vulnerable parts of the monster like the head or the tail, so there's a tradeoff there.

The biggest shift in how you play, coming from other action games, is that this is not a game about iframes. Your dodge roll does have some iframes, but its main utility is in exiting hitboxes entirely. This is also not a game where your attacks will snap you to the thing you're trying to hit; just like in Dark Souls, when you hit the attack button, your character will do the attack on the spot and it's entirely possible to whiff. Again, positioning is the heart of the combat in this game, and once you start learning that part, everything else unlocks.

A few other mechanical things about this game:

• Many of the ways you have to affect the monster are essentially meters that you fill up by hitting the monster in specific ways, causing certain things to happen. Hit the monster on the head with a blunt weapon, and you're gradually building towards stunning it. Hit the monster's tail with a sharp weapon and you're gradually building towards cutting the tail. So don't be confused if stuns, mounts, topples and so on don't happen instantly; they will eventually happen if you keep going.
• Monsters will run away from you! Eventually their anger will abate and they will try to escape to another area of the map. This is integral to the flow of fights in MH; these enforced breaks give you time to resharpen your weapon, take stock, catch your breath, heal, and so on.
• Many of the weapons change (sometimes drastically reduce) your mobility when you're wielding them. Sheathing your weapon to regain mobility is integral to combat in MH; don't think that you should have your weapon out at all times. Some weapons care about this more than others.

Finally, here's a rundown of (some of) the different weapons and what they do, driven by their experiential qualities and those 'flavors of skill expression.'

• The sword and shield is the designated beginner weapon, but it's both very powerful and brilliantly designed. It is more familiar to use (if you've played other action RPGs) than other weapons; it doesn't have meters or other special mechanics, it limits your mobility very little, and so on. But it's also just a toolbox that lets you do everything. The shield can block in a pinch, but you mostly use it as a bludgeon; the ability to shield bash makes this the only blunt-severing hybrid weapon. This breadth means that exploring the different S&S options will naturally lead you to engage with lots of different systems in the game.
• The longsword is another easy-to-use weapon; it's actually the default starter weapon in Rise. But it has an emphasis on countering monsters, with an extensive set of parries. Parry timing in MH is exceedingly simple to understand: attacks that parry have a (usually, visually obvious) parry window; if you would be hit by an attack while in that parry window, you instead perform the parry. The longsword really is a weapon for read-and-react skill expression; but unlike parrying in a lot of games, it's not a weapon about sitting still waiting for the monster to hit you. Rather, all of your attacks can combo into parries, allowing you to seamlessly flow from offense to defense, rewarding prediction and rhythm but not passivity.
• The greatsword is probably a daunting choice for most newcomers, but it functions as the very far end of the slow-and-ponderous spectrum. It's a good pick if you really want to see the deep end of how unlike anything else MH combat can be: you spend most of the fight with your weapon sheathed, your attacks can take seconds to fully charge up, and so on.
• The lance is the queen of uptime, a weapon designed to stick to the monster like a horrible human tick and just keep poking and poking and poking at it. You have an extremely beefy shield that can keep you safe from most attacks, in turn enabling relentless aggression. A lot of other weapons are about landing big attacks; the lance is about consistent execution. At its best, lance play is a very flow-y experience.
• The insect glaive is, secretly, a weapon for the kind of person who spends hours staring at fighting game hitbox diagrams. It gives you the unique ability to launch yourself up into the air, using the glaive as a vaulting pole; once airborne, hitting the monster lets you stay airborne. This means you are thinking about dodging and counterattacking in all three dimensions; it really is perfect for sickos who enjoy getting to intimately know hitboxes.
• The bow is a ranged weapon, but its optimal range is actually very short; too short to really be out of danger. Bow play is about dancing around the monster, weaving bow shots together with dodging. Lots of weapons in MH have sort of a game of chicken that you play between landing big attacks, and just getting hit yourself. The bow just places you right at the edge of danger, all the time, and asks you to spin around it; it can be tremendously fun.