Monster Hunter Wilds offers a dizzying array of weapons – all 14 types can be found before you may have any idea what you are doing. You should utilize the Great Sword, Long Sword, Sword & Shield, Dual Blades, Hammer, Hunting Horn, Lance, Gunlance, Switch Axe, Charge Blade, Insect Glaive, Light Bowgun, Heavy Bowgun, and Bow as soon as you begin hunting. That is an entire lot of options, and when you’re a relative newbie to the series like me, it’s considered one of several early game selections that may trip you up before you even begin.
I avoided getting overwhelmed within the character creator by making my Hunter seem like Kaladin from Stormlight Archive, and my Palico seem like Liv the Dog, my greyhound.
Meeting Monster Hunter Halfway
This can be a series that has, previously, defeated me. I played two dozen hours between Monster Hunter World and Rise, and fell off each before I saw anything that might realistically be described as ‘late game’. It wasn’t a lot the issue that I didn’t gel with because it was the sensation that the core loop was all that was really there to tug me along, and I just never got to a degree where I felt in sync with its rhythm like so many Monster Hunter fanatics appear to.
This time around, Capcom is doing an entire lot to get players like me to make it further. There is a greater emphasis on story, with quest lines and characters being a part of the motivation to exit and hunt. There is a more open world to explore, reasonably than isolated maps. The sport eases you into the complexities of its mechanics, step by step adding recent characters with recent roles to your base camp so that you needn’t learn every little thing all of sudden. All of this feels designed to get people like me — individuals who gave up on these games long before rolling credits or stayed away entirely — to provide it a try.
With Capcom grafting so many olive branches onto the familiar tree, I figure I want to fulfill Monster Hunter Wilds halfway. I’m doing that by resisting the need to get needlessly overwhelmed. For me, meaning taking a look at that bristling array of armaments and picking one, and just one, and sticking to it.
One Weapon Is Enough
I’ve played enough Monster Hunter (and been around enough online discussions concerning the series) to know that a few of these weapons are a bit of trickier to make use of than others. The Hunting Horn and Insect Glaive seem cool — and the Insect Glaive was the one I attempted first in World — but I do know that, for a noob like me, the Long Sword is my best bet. Good range, good speed, and never too different from, well, an everyday sword. It’s the video game weapon I have been using since I first picked up Ocarina of Time as a child. I get the fundamentals.
The thing is: simply because the Long Sword is familiar and considered one of the more approachable weapons in the sport, doesn’t suggest it is simple to master. There are a whole lot of different attacks you possibly can do, and keeping all of them straight while you’re about to get set on fire doesn’t all the time come naturally. But I’m much less more likely to master several weapons than I’m to master one. So sticking with the Long Sword, as a substitute of swapping around, is my best probability at getting good at the sport.
As I make an effort to stick to the sport long-term, I’m realizing how unique Monster Hunter is. Sure, fighting games offer you a bunch of characters to play, but those characters are designed for use against one another. They’ve different strengths that you could learn to make use of to take advantage of other characters’ weaknesses. It’s rare that a game gives you this many options with a view to exploit the sport’s weaknesses. As a substitute of the familiar rock-paper-scissors fighting games ask you to work through to beat your mates, Monster Hunter asks you to bring a rock, a paper, or some scissors onto the battlefield and see when you could make it work.
To increase this metaphor even further, you understand how people will sometimes play rock-paper-scissors by picking considered one of the three and sticking with it for the entire game? That is what I’m about to do. Prepare, White Wraith. I’m coming for you with an enormous ol’ pair of scissors.
