Gigantic reptiles are lounging on warm rocks as yellow grass sways in a gentle breeze.
You may be a monster hunter, feller of beasts with a razor-sharp sword, yet a companion has encouraged you to first stop and observe this flora and fauna. Press a button to gaze intensely at these lustrous creatures, learning that it is a gaggle of females gathered around a spiked, larger male. As the camera zooms in, tiny critters scuttle past your feet toward their next meal, a carcass in the distance.
The majestic scale and teeming ecological detail in Monster Hunter Wilds can make it feel as if you are playing a fantastical version of a David Attenborough documentary.
But there is no ignoring the title of this celebrated Japanese series: These are foremost monster-slaying games that have cultivated bloodlust for more than 20 years. The franchise’s inherent tension is that the allure of battling prehistoric behemoths and exploring their detailed, entwined habitats leaves a sour aftertaste when you are carving up the remaining cadavers for loot.
“There is a bizarre feeling at the center of Monster Hunter,” said Jacob Geller, a critic and YouTube video game essayist. “Unlike most other video games, it’s made pretty clear that the creatures you’re killing are not evil, and so it does feel undeniably bad hunting them.”
More than any other entry in the series, Monster Hunter Wilds, which was released for the PC, PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X|S on Friday, reckons with the interplay between the exceptional beauty of these animals, the ecosystems they are part of, and the player’s core task of dispatching them.
“Nature can be abundant and beautiful,” Yuya Tokuda, the game director, said through an interpreter. “Then, in a second, it can be wild, harsh and even violent.”
Early in the game, players may come across the serpentine Balahara wrapping itself — python-like — around the leonine Doshaguma. These unpredictable encounters are undiluted video game magic: heavyweight showdowns between A.I.-driven creatures that are almost unsettling in how convincing they are.
Just as soon as one beast is downed by the other, the player will probably leap back into the fray with a freshly sharpened blade. Deal enough damage to the Doshaguma, and it will begin to limp. With emotive animations, the animal will even retreat back to its lair.
With each Monster Hunter game — Wilds is the sixth mainline installment — the life science elements have become increasingly believable. Energy is passed upward through a food chain, from the smallest plant and insect to the largest, most fearsome apex predators. Be it a vivid Mesozoic rainforest or a vast cave network where oil rises to form deep pools of silty oil, this principle holds true.
When a smaller herbivore dies on the Windward Plains, a diverse region filled with dunes, grasslands and gnarled rock formations, its body does not just vanish, as is usually the case in video games. It can break down into a pile of bones. Carrion birds might come and pick at the meaty flesh; smaller insects might arrive to have their share. There is also a chance that the body could seep into the ground, with unusual mushrooms sprouting in the same spot.
The level of detail is inspired by scientific concepts such as whale fall, when the descent of a whale carcass to the ocean floor can sustain a local ecosystem for years.
“The ecosystem is happening around the player, whether they’re interacting with it or not,” Tokuda said.
The rendering of virtual ecosystems, conjuring up all the complexity of nature itself with a computer, has been a longstanding dream of video game creators. In 1992, SimLife let players create habitats in which animals ate, evolved, reproduced and died. Twenty-five years later, Rain World depicted an intricate and dynamic food chain of eldritch beasts in a dilapidated 2-D megacity.
Advancing hardware technology means the wildlife in Monster Hunter Wilds is more than just strikingly pretty and behaviorally realistic. The player can now move seamlessly between human encampments and the creature biomes that hold monsters like a terrifying lightning-dragon called Rey Dau.
The game’s star, beyond its collective of ferocious monsters, is a young boy called Nata. He is a refugee, estranged from his community that lives in the depths of a realm called the Forbidden Lands. Crucially, neither Nata nor his people hunt the gigantic beings. Yet the child’s perspective avoids the colonial trope of nature-loving native. He embodies a sensibility that many relate to in this era of climate upheaval: a fear and awe of nature.
Like our own planet, the migratory habits of creatures such as the scaled simian Ajarakan have been disrupted. Seasonal shifts, referred to in the game as the Plenty, Fallow and Downpour, are out of sync. Yet the twinkling ecology, which is so imaginative as to rival that found in Studio Ghibli’s great nature-inflected works, never less than dazzles, even when it takes the form of a leviathan intent on making you its breakfast.
The emotion Tokuda hopes to foster in the player is not glee at killing these creatures, or even necessarily regret, but a sense of duty. This is achieved through a bureaucratic wrinkle in the fiction: As part of a monster-hunting guild, you have been granted a license to operate in any given area. Before combat, Alma, your levelheaded handler, analyzes the situation before authorizing a particular kill. Does this monster pose an immediate threat to humans? Does it exude a disproportionately detrimental effect on an ecosystem?
“Taking the life of creatures in the world, there’s a responsibility that you have to shoulder,” Tokuda said. “It’s not something to be taken lightly.”
Tokuda’s enthusiasm for the dynamics of life, death, decay and growth is palpable, perhaps because he is the proud owner of a dozen pet reptiles.
“My house in Japan is essentially a miniature version of the Ancient Forest from Monster Hunter: World,” he joked, referring to the 2018 game. The trick to ensuring that his pets survive is similar to making a Monster Hunter game believable. “You essentially have to replicate an ecosystem in miniature,” he said.
This may explain why Monster Hunter Wilds feels so authentic. For Tokuda, nature’s many interlocking elements are “not just set-dressing” — evocative yet ultimately shallow. “They are part of a plausible ecosystem,” he said. “That really is my main goal.”
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