What Monster Hunter can learn from Pragmata
How a shift to sci-fi machines can solve the hunting genre’s empathy problem.
Monster Hunter Freedom on the PSP changed my life. I remember few games with so much fondness. I spent more than two hundred hours on that first title, and probably double that in Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, which remains one of my all-time favorite games. Back then, I saw video games through a different prism. I was 13, maybe 14 years old. I’m 32 now.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy Monster Hunter anymore. I have played every single title that has come to Europe (including the Pokémon GO-like mobile game) and I’m already pre-registered for Monster Hunter Outlanders, even though I know my phone will be fighting for its life every second I play it. It’s just that I’m not that kid anymore, and I can’t view video games as “just games” anymore.
I see Monster Hunter Wilds as one of the most mature titles in the franchise. The series has become more conscious of its own world and narrative with each launch; this narrative focus bloomed in World and, particularly, in Wilds. The new kind of monsters, the Constructs or Guardians found in the Forbidden Lands, are bio-engineered life forms, unable to reproduce themselves and condemned to extinction. While the game centers its story around Nata and the Forbidden Lands, I found the lore surrounding the “last Arkveld” very compelling. It is a deeply tragic figure: a lonely monster, an artificial creation (essentially a clone), unstable and going mad. And it isn’t going mad because of its natural instincts, but because of humanity (or the ancient Wyverians, in this case) itself.
When I fought Arkveld, my empathy didn’t just make me feel bad for a bleeding animal; I felt bad for a broken, glitching creation that never asked to be born. It was lonely, terrified, and violently malfunctioning. I know I’m not the only one who thinks this way; players are already actively discussing the tragedy of the Guardians.
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It’s not just Arkveld, though. It is the way the series has evolved since its first release. I don’t mean to say that the Yian Kut-Ku in the original game was a simple mass of pixels and now isn’t. But the modern, realistic approach doesn’t just influence how monsters behave when we track them. It affects how we perceive the pain we inflict on them, too. The visual models are vastly superior: the movements, the distress signals , like limping, crawling, bleeding, or even a wounded monster desperately retreating to its nest for refuge. Even when the gameplay feels incredibly satisfying, I can’t stop thinking about the fact that I am harming an animal.
And yes, I know. We kill humans in other video games. But animals feel different. The creatures in the Monster Hunter franchise behave no differently than the animals in our own world. Even with the new narrative focus and the ecological prism the series has adopted, we are still killing animals to use their flesh, scales, and fangs to create new equipment so we can, spoiler alert, kill more animals. Yes, we can capture them instead of killing them, but we still have to brutally beat them down the exact same way first.
We do have Monster Hunter Stories, which is a brilliant spin-off. But it is just a spin-off, and the mechanics are completely different.
However, I see Capcom doing something entirely different with Pragmata. The fight with the Lunar Digger vastly inspired this piece. When you inflict damage on that mechanical worm, a special sequence triggers with massive explosions, and the machine’s thrashing deeply reminds me of a real monster’s behavioral response. To be honest, I much prefer watching a machine suffer than a living animal. The Lunar Digger isn’t the only example, either. The first major boss is shaped like a cybernetic dog, and the fight is absolutely incredible. It is an obvious comparison, but games like Horizon execute this mechanical concept beautifully.
I love Monster Hunter; it is one of my favorite franchises of all time, but I can’t shake this underlying discomfort anymore. The series has been stuck in the same “medieval fantasy” setting for almost 20 years.
Maybe it’s time to try something new. Perhaps the lore of ancient Wyverian technology is the perfect opportunity for the franchise to pivot toward something that Pragmata is already doing incredibly well.
