Who needs sleep anyway? – A Monster Hunter’s tale

I’ve been playing Monster Hunter World a lot lately. Like seriously, I am at that “barely able to keep my eyes open to write this article because I needed to finish grinding for that last Nergigante part for my Switch Axe” tired. I think every gamer knows the feeling. That feeling of deep self-hatred, where your eyes burn and your head aches and you’re a bit shaky because you had to finish one last loot quest before bed. It’s not the kind of self-hatred that makes you never want to do it again though.

It’s that looping self-hatred, because although you're using all of your will power to stay awake and although you’re on your fifth cup of coffee for the hour and although you’re contemplating how to hide your colleague Dave’s body because he just won’t shut up about how well his two year old sits on the potty, you’ve got your new rarity 8 weapon sitting in your item box, waiting for you to use in what will inevitably be another long, self-hatred inflicting night of loot grinding. Yes, that’s right. We’re doing it again tonight. Who needs sleep, right? I mean, Einstein apparently only got about two hours sleep a day and look at how much he got done.

A few days ago, I thought I’d write an article about why, a year and some change after it’s release, I’m still grinding Monster Hunter World. I was going to talk about the intricacies of it’s looting and upgrade system, how each player has a vastly different experience and how every time you feel like you’re “gitting gud”, the game throws a bigger, stronger, different color monster at you, proving to you that you still need to “git gud”.

That was before my mate, who is about 40 Hunter Rank’s higher than me sent me a party invite…

35 hours play time (and an entire weekend) later and I’m not so sure that I have it in me to write “that” type of article. That type of article where we talk about how amazing a game is. Where we shower it in admiration and tell the audience how enjoyable it is.

THIS WILL NOT BE ONE OF THOSE ARTICLES.

Damn Monster Hunter World. Damn it to heck. Damn it to the part of heck that games go to and never come back from. In fact, damn Monster Hunter World to the ends of time and space and damn it to a place where it doesn’t exist so that I can get back my sanity. Oh, my sleep drenched sanity, how I miss you. How dare a game be THIS good!

On a serious note though, I don’t think I’m allowed to write an article based on being tired, so I suppose I’ll have to muster up some of that sanity I was talking about, just for one second, to talk about why I am still playing Monster Hunter World a year after its release.

Its endless – no really, it never ends:

One of my good mates describes Monster Hunter World as follows – “The story mode is the intro, anything after that is the actual game and you don’t start having fun until level 50”.

Never a truer word was spoken. What Monster Hunter World lacks in tutorial, it makes more than up for in story mode. It’s the games way of going, “We’re going to force you to do every type of quest and fight every kind of Monster, so that you experience every drop of the world before you even start playing”.

Some assholes on the internet have bragged about their Hunter Rank 999 (No I’m not jealous) and even they may not have consumed all the content that the game has to offer. Its literally thousands of hours of "fun".

That sweet, sweet loot:

When you fire up the game, you spend at least 50 hours grinding for every bit of armour you can unlock. All the way from that first (god awful) Great Jagras armour, to the tippity top, when you unlock things like Deaths Stench armour. You feel like you’ve made it all, seen it all and slayed with it all. Then you get High Ranking armour. A second tier of armour that is Capcoms way of saying, “Oh, you thought you were done? Lol, have some rarity 7 eye patches kiddo”.

It’s as if Capcom made the game going, “Let’s make them think that they’ve seen almost everything, but then we’ll add a second armour rank and add more weapons and just keep giving them more content to show that we are superior to every other dev on earth”. And they did exactly that. You can probably unlock everything the game has to offer, but WHO HAS THAT MUCH TIME??

At 150 hours, you might have all the fully upgraded variants of your favourite weapon and have rarity 8 decorations for them all, but that’s one weapon and 150 hours of play time. Now multiply that by 14 (that’s how many base weapons are in the game) and then have every armour variant and decorations for those and and and… Do you get it now?

There... Is... So... Much... Looting…

It’ll test friendships:

If you’ve played the game, you’ll probably already have an idea of what I’m talking about. Here’s a scenario for those who haven’t played the game (and a little tip for new players):

When a monster is asleep, the first hit that you land is double damage. So naturally, any seasoned player knows that if you’re playing with a guy who has a Great Sword, LET HIM HAVE FIRST HIT! But alas, not every guy in a party knows that. I can’t lie, no one is without fault. I have rushed a monster with rarity 2 dual blades and taken that first shot in a non-critical area, when my mate had a fully upgraded Katana waiting and ready. Needless to say, we haven’t really spoken since…

Monster Hunter World is brilliant at getting people with completely different playstyles to work together. That first time that you smash a Diablos in a special arena quest in under 10 minutes with your mate is indescribable. There are no words for that level of bonding, because like everything else in the game, you’ve grinded to get there. You didn’t just start off bashing monster’s faces in like a god squad. There were faints, faints and more faints that got you to that level of teamwork and it finally paid off. Now you’re more hardcore than the Expendables (except with tempered dragon armour and 400kg swords) and no one can take that away from you.

No two players have the same experience:

This is something that is a big focus for a lot of new games; “There are 500 different endings and 257 of those are decided by what you choose to have for breakfast”.

Monster Hunter World is different though. You see, you start off making simple choices – what armour do you go for? Leather or Chainmail (MHW’s version of “what do you want for breakfast”). Simple enough right? Not too hard… (Ominous ellipses for effect).

Then they go, “Cool, now that you’ve spent ten minutes weighing up the pros and cons and decided on armour (that you will only use for about ten minutes), we have given you a selection of 14 unique weapons that all have a vastly different playstyle and have a very big impact on what type of experience you will have in the world”.

Again, not too much of a biggy. You can chop and change at will, so no stress. Until you learn that each weapon has several weapon trees, which in turn have several strengths and weaknesses. If you choose a Bone Tree Switch Blade and upgrade the Jyuratodus branch for example, you get the water effect, which would then give you an advantage against fire element monsters. Simple right? It would be, except that not all weapons have the same weapon tree variants and don’t carry the same skills at the same level as some of the other weapons, which means that you’ve just spent 100+ hours upgrading a weapon and learning it’s play style, to be told that you’re now going to fight a monster that has no weakness against any of the tree variants you just spent 100+ hours crafting (and we’re back to the looting discussion).

Yip, Monster Hunter fu**ing World.

In summary, I love to hate Monster Hunter World and at the same time, hate myself for loving it so much. Capcom have literally made a game that is hell, because it gives you so much heaven. To make matters worse, we can expect the Iceborne expansion later this year (release date to be confirmed) and given that we see massive content upgrades being handed to us for free every few months, I think that its safe to wager that we are in for something huge.

Goodbye sleep…

Shot a lot!

Gray (Editor)

GT (PS): n2ut14

IG: graybland14