Having given it some thought, and having 100%'d it, Monster Hunter Wilds might be my least favorite game.

I'm an old hunter. I started with Monster Hunter Tri back on the Wii and I love that game to bits. But I'm not some jaded old gen guy who hates everything new; Monster Hunter World is another of my favorite games, and though it had its issues, namely the story and pacing, the game was still Monster Hunter at its core and I still enjoy playing World to this day. I'm saying this as context when I say that Wilds was one of the worst gaming experiences I've ever had.

Almost nothing about this game works. I say almost because there are legitimate improvements in Wilds worth recognizing; the ability to use your binoculars to check the sizes of monsters is something that should have been in the series years ago, as is the ability to skip the 60 second end of quest timer. These are good changes. Unfortunately, they're subsumed by a cavalcade of baffling game design choices.

Let's start with the least of my issues; the pacing. To the game's credit, the pacing of the game is, at first, pretty good! Monster Hunter has always had issues with getting players into fighting big monsters and this one does it the fastest, and after the intro you're already fighting a boss. However, afterwards the game's pace rams straight into a brick wall and doesn't pick up again until the third act.

Until then, you are railroaded on these truly - and I do mean this - TRULY boring walk and talk scenes where nothing happens and the characters talk about the most boring things imaginable. If these dialogue segments were written well, I wouldn't have minded so much, but almost every bit of dialogue in this game is stilted and uninteresting to listen to, much like the story. It's not the absolute worst story I've ever had the displeasure of sitting through, but it is still a boring, melodramatic mess that cuts into time I could have been spending slaughtering the local ecosystem for new boots, and while yes, the cutscenes are skippable, the frequent walk and talk scenes are not and you have to sit there on your mount as the characters around to drone on about nature or whatever. Have fun!

Let's get into why this game really grinds my gears. The gameplay of Wilds was gutted from previous games. Hard. Monster Hunter's combat has always been about proper positioning; knowing where you should be to hit a monster's weakspots while not getting killed yourself. It was simple, it was engaging, it was unique and it was fun. Monster Hunter Wilds introduces new mechanics that remove all of that; Focus Mode and the wound system can effectively stunlock monsters to the point where they are a non-threat and almost laughably easy to kill. You don't need proper positioning when the answer is always aim for a wound and pop it with focus mode, which means you can basically just wail on a monster and kill it in five minutes. What made Monster Hunter's combat so unique has been replaced by hack and slash gameplay and I think that is unbelievably disappointing.

Continuing from monsters being a non-threat in this game, returning monsters from older games have been slowed down significantly or gutted of their moves to the point where they're hardly the same monsters anymore. Even new monsters have attacks that just leave them wide open for several seconds, and it comes off as unnatural and video game-y, which is ironic considering the story of Wilds. This is a nitpick, but for as much as folks like to rag on Capcom for reusing assets or recoloring monsters in older titles, this is the game that feels the most like I'm just fighting the same monsters over and over with different body shapes.

Wilds is also painfully easy. I was killed one time during the entire low rank campaign, and it was because of a camera issue. Monsters simply do not do enough damage to you throughout low rank to justify getting new armor past, like, the midway point, it's pathetic. Preparation, a key component in older titles, has been streamlined to the point where it's almost unnecessary. Your cat friend can heal you, cure you of all statuses the instant you get them and buff you, removing any urgency you may have getting poisoned or burned. Luckily the cat can be turned off, but the random endemic life that does the same will always be out in the open for you to use, removing the point of half of this game's items.

This is the big one: Your mount will automatically take you to your quest target, removing the need to learn your environment and understand a monster's behaviours. This is one of the core components of Monster Hunter and it was completely removed: Actually HUNTING the monsters. Now you just always know where your mark is, you go to it and you hunt it. Yes, it's more convenient, yes, it's easier to get into playing the game but it removes so much nuance and charm and uniqueness the older games provided to the point where Monster Hunter Wilds doesn't even feel like Monster Hunter anymore.

It feels like just another action game, its individuality and personality torn to shreds and its mechanics broadened to make Capcom as much money as possible from as many people as possible. And it worked. Capcom will never learn from this because it sold like hot cakes. They will never make another Monster Hunter game again, but they will keep making games like Wilds devoid of what made Monster Hunter, well... Monster Hunter.

And I think that is a genuine shame.

I'd rather give this a neutral rating but since I have to decide I'll go with negative. I enjoy the game and will keep playing it but there are some things that just keep bothering me. The expansion may be able to address some of those but not everything can be fixed. I'd say post Title Updates Wilds has the better endgame than the base games of its modern predecessors but that wasn't exactly a high bar to begin with. Is the game worth a purchase? Honestly Rise and Sunbreak together offer all in all the better experience if you don't mind graphics and multiplayer. However if you're looking for multiplayer and your rig can handle it I'd take Wilds over World and Iceborne.

For the things that bother me:
- Graphics: it's true they patched the performance to some extend but there are things they couldn't patch like the blurriness, the fog and the brutal post processing. The game lacks visual clarity and as consequence it can be hard to tell what's going on. Their pinnacle of design is literally an all grey zone with terrible lighting where you fight a grey monster.

- floaty controls: Capcom has multiple motion cap studios and it shows. They felt like they had to animate everything but as consequence your character feels unresponsive thanks to additional intermediate animations. It's especially bad after getting hit when you're on the ground and try to get up just for some struggle animation to play. People would say old generations were clunky and had idiotic extra animations but even with things like the superman pose the controls itself were crisp and not as muddy as they are in Wilds. While it doesn't affect me frame gen will introduce additional input latency making it even worse.

- Weapons: Some are good, some are bad, at least one is so awful you could just remove it. I hated the counter focus in Rise however there you had alternatives. In Wilds they are forced upon you. I don't even get the point of 14 weapons when everything is a counter stick. A lot of people will point out that focus mode killed positioning but as someone who plays a lot solo I never need to position anyway as I'll just wait for the monster to attack me and then counter it. For me the biggest loser is the Insect Glaive even post patch as Capcom doesn't seem to know what it should be. Hammer is now "what if we turned that youtube hammer slowmotion Tigrex video into a weapon" however offsets become pretty awful once the monster have high hp and buildup resistance and outside of them at least slower weapon have a hard time dealing damage. I wouldn't even say hammer is gameplay wise bad cause I enjoy it but all the extra steps you have to do just to get the same damage as other weapons in total is frustrating. All in all if hunters weren't so absurd strong maybe monsters wouldn't require all this extra crap either.

- Seikret: They wanted a combination of Palamutes and Wirefall but made both strictly worse. Palamutes were more interactive and they weren't forced upon you. You could always bench them and use Wirebug movement as alternative. Something similar isn't possible in Wilds at all and maps are clearly designed around the Seikret. The worst is the Seikret pickup is just bad. In order to pick you up the Seikret has to physically run to you from its current random location while having collision with the monster, can be knocked over by monster attacks and will jump over ledges so the pickup will always fail at a ledge. How long this takes and in what direction the journey will go? WELL you will see. It works in the early game but once monster deal damage it can flat out cart you if you accidentally use it.

- Ecology: I don't care about corpses rotting. I don't care about the pack monster interactions that requires you to stalk them for 10 minutes. Endemics were a nice touch in World but you would see them while traversing the map. Captured endemics you could place in your room and interact with. Here the Seikret strikes again as it walks you just past all of them with the maps not being designed around seeing endemics anyway unless you search for them. You catch them? They are just an entry that's it. I don't want ecology to be removed as whole but it should be a nice to have and not the main focus. The game is called MONSTER HUNTER and not some pseudo realistic bird watching simulation.

- Maps: the desert is unnecessary big with anything other than the north-eastern area being awful to fight in thanks to slopes resulting in sliding and mini jumps when dodging. Forest and Oilwell are OK but Cliffs and Wyveria are two awful maps as they are cramped, visually monotonous and full with ledges, slopes and other crap.

- Too much random grind: this used to be a franchise about killing monsters and using their skin for armour and weapons. The materials being random drops was plenty honestly. Sure some parts were hard to get but hunting the monster again and again was the game. Now? Random decorations, random talisman, random weapon parts, random weapon bonus, random weapon set bonus. You want to try a new weapon? Too bad now go through absurd amounts of randomness cause the crafted weapons cannot compete with the randomised ones. An appealing grind has progress but here you just bash your head against the wall and hope you will eventually get what you want which can be never.

Capcom, for the love of god. I can overlook poor performance. The balancing, The game IS fun. But when you hit me with communication errors and disconnect me from multiplayer hunts every quest, there is nothing else to say. For the first time in my life, as a hardcore player of this franchise, I can't recommend the game, and advise everyone to stay away.