Every time I think about how much I like Monster Hunter I have to think about how World's cutscenes, and monhun cutscenes in general, are some of the only ones so awful to make me, a narrative designer, skip without watching even once. But it's so hard to articulate specifically what makes them so unbearable to me. The cutscenes aren't offensive or anything; it's just a grizzled man gravely saying "Zorah Magdaros" fifty times in a row and then saying "thank god the hunter is here" and firing a canon. Maybe it is the INSISTENCE that there be no stakes, no context, no characterization, ONLY a producer's brain trained on american action movie dialogue. What's both off-putting and fascinating is how they recite that dialogue like a ritual incantation, as if by saying Jerry Bruckheimer cliches an action movie can be summoned into existence. I mean this is with little exaggeration every other line of dialogue from a recent trailer:
"We need to shake them off!"
"There's too many of them!"
"Cover me!"
"I'll handle it."
Instead of trying to tell me I'm so amazing for playing a video game, I would simply like to play a cool video game! You already succeeded! This isn't helping with any of the problems! In a game that's about the monsters, you feel cool for fighting the monster. The monster's beauty becomes your beauty, its strength your strength. Rather than try to make the world revolve around me, I'd rather they simply fostered a deep and almost spiritual respect for nature and our place in it. Even if all you care about is making more of a solipsistic player fantasy, would that be served better not by gilding my actions with more unnecessary embellishment, but making me feel like there is a real impact to what I'm doing? The embellishment should come after the hunt, where I get to see the meaning of what I did. I just want to see everyone in the village getting to eat a big tail with the little bone. Have some some little geek infodump facts about the latest godzilla i have to fight and its irreplaceable ecological niche. I'd like to see the people who I love happy, safe, and well fed, retire to be a transsexual fertility goddess, and when I die have my body offered back as tribute to the monsters I slew in life. Is this really too much to expect from a video game?
in reply to @mammonmachine's post:
I'm with u on this...the only dialog I need from MH is the crestfallen guy in MH1 who nags you saying you'll never manage to be a hunter, that you'll just die pathetically. BITCH YOUR WRONG
yeah! don't gas me up...make me work for it to prove them wrong!
I really loved Rise’s monster intro cutscenes as Noh theater, a little scene of the ecology in relation to the monster you first encounter, with an overarching poetic narration. That’s what I love about the series, a sense of wonder and scale of a world that is so much bigger than you. That and goofy quest text like “my husband is a little too interested in this monster, plz hunt it for me”
The unskippable cutscenes of MH World bothered me way more than they probably rightfully should and I think you hit on part of why they did. Monster Hunter has never had a game plot that's ever deviated from 'this one dang monster is causin' problems and YOU gotta help us!' so forcing me to leave games with friends to sit and/or RP walk to see these scenes now more drawn out and expensive really annoyed me.
I way more like individual characters and like world building/flavor text of the setting of Monster Hunter, theres so much more to take out of it from that than any ever contrived storyline of your hunter. Guild Marm is the best.
Making them unskippable was such a strange decision. I think I can understand the impulse, of course, you never want people to be skipping your hard work, but he result feels insecure. As if they felt defeated, suspicious, or lacked belief that people would like this game. Which is understandable because it is difficult and unique and not like other games, but I think the number one place I have seen every creative work stumble is when they feel like they have to pivot from what they actually want to be to a thing they think others want from them.
The game is at its best when its nerding out over its love of monsters. I just want it to not feel ashamed of itself!
the intro cutscenes for monsters in Rise also annoyed me; they're all formulaic New Monster beats up Old Monster, and it feels like they powerscaled nature. At least in MH4, the cutscenes gave every creature some kind of dignity, since they're only shown beating on your hunter.
It's crazy to me that Wilds seems to be leaning in even harder on Traditional Video Game Setpieces when I've never seen anybody actually ask for that; my fondest memory of seeing the new breed of fans brought in by World's graphics was having sushi with somebody who got so hype about the designs that they pulled their phone out and mid-meal showed me pictures they'd taken of different monsters' tail cuts to talk in more detail about their biology and the ways the textures subtly reflect what a cross-section would actually look like