Monster Hunter Wilds has been taking the gaming world by storm, and for good reason. It is the most innovative and exciting Monster Hunter game yet, offering a strikingly immersive open world filled with challenging monsters to face, resources to gather, and armor sets to craft. There's so much to love about Monster Hunter Wilds, including its narrative, which has to be the best in the entire series, largely because Capcom actually cared about it this time around.

Monster Hunter has needed a narrative for a long time, as it helps to contextualize a lot of the grindy parts of the game while also bringing in an audience accustomed to more cutscene-heavy RPGs. Fortunately, Wilds does include a story, and a lot of cutscenes to help make it a spectacular adventure. There are some truly nail-biting sequences throughout, but, unfortunately, that's not what fans are talking about. In fact, fans have a specific complaint about Wilds' story that's ruining the game for them.

Walking & Talking Is The Worst Part Of Monster Hunter Wilds

It Slows The Game To A Snail's Pace

Monster Hunter Wilds' story is told through a number of means, but predominantly via gorgeously directed cutscenes and sequences in which characters talk to the player while in-game. Essentially, one is hands-off immersive storytelling that helps elevate the best parts of Wilds' story, while the other is a frustrating ordeal in which players walk aimlessly while exposition is thrown at them. It isn't hard to guess which is which.

Players absolutely hate Wilds' walk-and-talk sequences as they strip them of any agency and force them to listen to dialogue they may not even be interested in. While many love Wilds' more story-heavy approach, others just want to get straight into the action, and that isn't possible when these sections rear their ugly head. It isn't even that Wilds' writing is bad, or that its characters are annoying. In fact, it is often quite the opposite.

Rather, much like in other games that adopt this form of storytelling - Gears of War is one of the worst for this as it forces the player to a snail's pace just to listen to dialogue - Wilds' walking and talking segments are as immersion-breaking as they are unfun. However, what makes them truly unbearable is the fact that, unlike the cinematic cutscenes, they cannot be skipped no matter how hard players try.

Real Cutscenes Can At Least Be Skipped

It Makes Getting Into The Action Easier

Monster Hunter Wilds' sumptuous cutscenes offer some of the best moments in the game, but it is understandable that those more accustomed to Monster Hunter's narrative-less approach will want to skip straight through these. Monster Hunter has never been anything remotely like the Yakuza series, for example, so that's completely understandable. Fortunately, this is possible, as the main cutscenes, which are more akin to watching an anime, are skippable with the press of a button.

This allows those who don't care about Monster Hunter Wild's amazing story to breeze through it and get back to the titular monster hunting. Like with anything concerning video games, more options are always better, so it's great that Capcom offered a way for those who either don't like the story or have already completed it, a way of getting through it quicker. However, as aforementioned, the walking and talking segments aren't skippable, meaning that even those who've avoided as much of the story as possible must sit through them.

Adding A Story Focus Could Be Cool, But MH Wilds Does It Wrong

It Should Have Dropped The Walking And Talking

Monster Hunter Wilds' narrative is greatly appreciated, especially by those who have been clamoring for the series to better explore its untapped lore. However, Capcom's approach to narrative is a little subpar, especially as it clashes with the core tenets of Monster Hunter's gameplay. This isn't particularly surprising as Capcom fumbled the narrative of Dragon's Dogma 2, although it hasn't historically told exclusively bad narratives.

It is important to clarify that Wilds' story isn't bad, but, much like Dragon's Dogma 2, is just told poorly at times, or is at odds with the gameplay it is contextualizing. Monster Hunter is about taking down huge creatures in intense and action-packed scrapes. Forcing the player to auto-run to a location and skip through their surroundings, or making them listen to endless dialogue while being unable to do what it is they want to do, is antithetical to Wilds' gameplay loop.

The best approach would have been to make every story sequence a skippable cutscene, even if the less-important or dialogue-heavy sequences were told through less flashy cutscenes, akin to how JRPGs like Xenoblade Chronicles handle their narratives. Monster Hunter Wilds ironically needed more traditional cutscenes, not less, to both placate those who genuinely care about its unfolding story and those who want nothing more than to skip through it.