The narrative of Monster Hunter has mostly been brushed off as an afterthought due to its straightforward nature, but is it really that simple? Read on to learn more about the themes and the stories explained in this deep dive.

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Evolution of Narratives in Monster Hunter

The Monster Hunter series is not what you’d call a narrative-based game. Fans like myself would even go so far as to say that it never focused on the story. But it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Many have brushed off the series’ story mainly because the design of the game is mission-based. This means that everything that happens in the game mostly boils down to either the player choosing or being forced to do the quest.

However, is it really that simple? Is Monster Hunter just a franchise with a forgettable narrative that all circles back to hunting down monsters for money, fashion, and sport? Let’s take a deep dive into the mainline series’ stories and see if it’s as simple as it seems.

How It All Starts

The Monster Hunter games almost always start and end the same. You’re a fledgling Hunter that takes quests from the village elder or leader, and you slowly work your way up to be able to hunt monsters and then become the top-ranked Hunter in the village you’re located in.

With a higher rank, you’ll be able to take on stronger and larger monsters. The whole motivation of the games is to showcase you, as the Hunter, progressing and defeating the different monsters in the game and then triumphing against that certain game’s last boss (ex. Fatalis for Monster Hunter 1).

This is the cycle that’s in the majority of the series, and even with the focus on storytelling in the newer iterations of the game, it’s still consistent with how the whole journey is structured.
However, the latest iterations, specifically World, Rise, and their subsequent expansions, have a story that you follow through with.

Protecting the Natural Order

The franchise has more or less tackled the Hunter’s role as the force of balance in the ecosystem. An example of this is in Monster Hunter 4 (MH4) where the existence of the Gore Magala threatens the balance of everything due to the Frenzy Virus. For those who don't know, the Frenzy virus was an infectious disease that was affecting living beings. It came from the dander-like scales that scattered and originated from the Gore Magala. It made monsters more aggressive and ferocious than they usually are. Other than what the virus did to the others, it was obvious that the Gore Magala was made to be a villainous monster, looks and all, and that you needed to kill it to restore the balance of the ecosystem.

However, things aren’t as cut and dry in the case of Monster Hunter: World and its expansion, Iceborne. Monster Hunter World’s endings show that while man has a responsibility of restoring balance to the natural order, they have a lot to learn when it comes to how nature runs its course.

This was revealed at the end of Iceborne, where the crew talked about Nergigante as nature’s force of balance. Yes, I agree that the Nergigante stealing your thunder as well as it being able to kill Shara Ishvalda in a cutscene is quite underwhelming. However, it does tie the whole game’s theme of balancing the natural order perfectly.

At the end of the base game, the team touted you as their Sapphire Star or their guiding light. This is directly linked to the in-game story of creation in the game: The Tale of the Five. Without going too far into the details, the tale alludes to the Sapphire Star being the guiding light that humans learned from to create their lands. So what does the base game’s ending imply? It implied that the Research Commission team has accepted their roles of being nature’s guardian in the New World literally, with the Hunter as their guide.

This was counteracted perfectly by the somber tone of the ending in the expansion. The Research Commission team had to think about what their role was in the entire ordeal and that they had more to learn about nature itself. It’s a great juxtaposition of how humans think they have it all figured out until they realize that nature has always found a way to survive without their interference.

Thematically, it makes sense. The game reflects how nature would be in real life as well. Living beings evolve by adapting to their environment to survive. But this time, they explicitly show that nature would survive even without human interference. Of course, this is all just reading between the narrative lines in those games. However, it does prove that there’s more than meets the eye in a game where you supposedly just duke it out with random monsters. Speaking of, have you ever thought to consider how the monsters perceive the Hunter?

Monster in the Mirror

As explained earlier, you fight the Gore Magala in MH4 so that you can stop it from destroying the ecosystem with the Frenzy Virus. After successfully doing so, it turns out that the threat wasn’t over just yet. It was yet to molt to its actual form, the Shagaru Magala, which was an elder dragon. In a climactic battle at the top of the tower, you emerge victorious and roll credits so you can finally access even higher-ranked quests. But what does this tell us?

The whole sequence mirrors the player’s experience of upgrading their equipment and then coming back for round two. It’s not exactly explicit, but we can infer from this thematic approach that the monsters are also learning from the Hunters as well.

Take one of my favorite monsters in the series: the Ahtal-Ka, introduced as the final super boss of Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate. It exists as one of the most unique monsters that have ever graced the series simply because it was a gigantic dragon or an island-sized monstrosity. It was a big bug, a very special bug.

In the fight against Ahtal-Ka, you’d first be fighting its actual form and think it wasn’t threatening due to its size, speed, and appearance. Until you get to the second phase of the fight, where you start to see why it’s the final super boss of the game. It assembles the Ahtal-Neset, which is a gigantic mechanical creation that it pilots with its special golden silk.

After beating the mech, the Ahtal-Ka gets out of its mech and starts wielding a gigantic wheel. It may seem silly that after all that, it decides to go out and fight you to the death with a wheel that fashions into a yo-yo. However, it all points to how the Ahtal-Ka reflects the Hunters’ ingenuity and how different it is from the rest of the monsters.

During the fight, the Ahtal-Ka uses the same weapons Hunters use to hunt monsters like the Dragonators and other structures like steel beams. It even outdoes the Hunter by creating its own walking fortress using the scraps on the battlefield. One could even say that it started to copy the Hunter by wielding a weapon of its own with the giant wheel.

It’s an amazing and genius monster in both concept and thematic relevance. You wouldn’t expect a bug to be the final super boss in a roster that consists of a dragon with jet engines, boxing dinosaurs that have explosives, overgrown primates that eat unicorn horns, and the like. It’s also a good reflection of the thematic narrative that the series has, where nature does adapt even to the same beings who thought they were being changed by nature. One might even argue that the Ahtal-Ka's form of fighting gave birth to Silkbind moves in Monster Hunter Rise, but who knows?

Man Versus Wilds: Your Story

With all this talk of protecting nature and how monsters reflect humanity, what is Monster Hunter really about? Isn't it just another special episode of Man versus Wild? Truthfully, it's the journey of the player learning and getting better against the monsters they face. While video games may have different effects as to how they encapsulate one’s experience, Monster Hunter has a personal way of doing it. You could even say it's like how people like the Souls series, where the enjoyment comes from facing seemingly insurmountable challenges and overcoming them through improvement. Let’s take a look at the introduction of the Tigrex for instance.

Those who started with Monster Hunter Freedom 2 or its several versions should already know what particular scene I’m referring to. The game starts with the Hunter encountering the Tigrex in the Snowy Mountains. Equipped with some of the weakest gear in the game, your Hunter is then shown being pushed off by the monster off of the cliff. This is the start of your journey and already motivates the player with a goal in mind: to defeat the monster that almost ended your life.

After a few hours of progress into the game, you’ll then have a quest in the Snowy Mountains yet again where you’ll be asked to deliver Popo Tongues. If you’ve played through the game, you’d know that the Popos are nowhere to be found. As you make your way up to the peak of the mountain, you catch a glimpse of the huge herbivores only to be met by the very monster that pushed you off the cliff; only this time you are in control.

While these scenes aren’t much of a clear narrative to go off of, they show that the game itself gave you a clear motivation to start your journey and even went so far as to make you feel powerless to stop it. This becomes the theme of the game itself as you try to overcome adversity and find that one rival that challenges you. Similar to how the Gore Magala in MH4 challenges you after it gets its final boss upgrade at the top of the tower.

This is how a player’s Monster Hunter journey normally starts and how the series hooks people in, as I was hooked the moment I finally overcame the Yian Garuga in Monster Hunter Freedom. Sure, it’s just a game, and it was just a normal day in Monster Hunter, but I can’t tell you how ecstatic I was to finally beat it for the first time after struggling for days.

The newer games have been shifting to having an actual story, with Wilds even openly showing off its narrative in all of the trailers it has had so far. Of course, the enjoyment is relative to each person, but I will say that I enjoyed their new approach so they could ease players in and make them more invested in the gameplay.

The Monster Hunter franchise may not have the most compelling stories throughout its releases, but it does have a way of emboldening the player’s experience into a narrative that they won’t forget.

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Michael Gerra-Clarin

Resident fighting game nerd, avid FFXIV fan, and enjoyer of mostly anything gaming. He is currently addicted to gambling in TFT and dying to Light Rampant in Futures Rewritten Ultimate.