My girlfriend really hates Monster Hunter: World . At first, she was really excited. After work on Friday, she rushed over to Gamestop and stood on line with all the moms that bought Dragon Ball FighterZ for their snot-faced brats. She rushed over to my apartment, eager to start her dragon-slaying adventure and collect berries on my unnecessarily powerful Xbox One X.
She expected an open world epic, a game where she could spend as much time foraging and hunting as she damn well pleased. I had gotten her addicted to The Witcher 3 when we first started dating, where she spent hours glued to my television and made Roach head to every side quest on the map. She plays games differently than me, bonding with the NPCs and treating them like actual buddies rather than strings of code. Collecting loot is another passion of hers—our Diablo III playthrough took weeks just to finish the main story.
Monster Hunter: World has been an entirely different experience. From the moment she booted up the game and over the next four hours, she’s shouted angry expletives at the television.
“Everything about this game feels broken,” she screams at my 4K flat screen.“Am I just really dumb and don’t know how to play?”
I completely understand where she’s coming from. I spent a few hours in the New World and found the game extremely frustrating and lacking in the fun department. Finding objectives on the map requires a magnifying glass and tracking the footprints of giant monsters is not how I want to spend my day. I’ve never played a Monster Hunter because I hate the parts of game’s that aren’t jumping around stabbing stuff, and there’s a lot of that.
Also, the glowing orb fireflies that lead you around the map are an annoyance; an A.I. that leads you around the map without actually bringing you to to your objective destination.
I try to tell her that she doesn’t have to play, that she can put it down and spend time with Geralt instead. That isn’t an option, it seems. She spent 65 dollars on MH:W and she is not about to waste her money. I find her determination charming, charging through a game with the mouth of an old sailor with scurvy and not much time left on our planet.
“Cool, I captured a poisonous toad,” she says. I can feel the sarcasm oozing off her tongue, like the slime off the back of her new amphibian prisoner.
Still, through the dinosaur bones and fishing adventures, she’s sticking with it. I admire her dedication to hating something, playing the game not out of leisure but spite. Maybe she’ll learn to enjoy it—she’s already amassed quite a collection of dead dinosaur bits and Kulu-Ya-Ku footprints. Hopefully, she can keep from murdering the Handler, who she’s nicknamed Chatty Cathy.
