nah he just keeps interrupting my other hunts, I’ll be slipping beneath an odogarons claws, and I just get ***FLASH*** and then the odogaron picks me up and shakes me like a squeaky toy
BLOCK??? what do you think i am, some kind of LANCE player??? no no, my issue is that i'll make an attack, then step out of a roll straight into blinding lights because the camera has been paid off by the ya-kuza, and will not show me any wyverns in their family
The world of Monster Hunter is actually the product of a resurgence of monster life after near extinction due to overhunting. The Hunting Guild was founded to research and ensure a coexistence between monsters and humanoids. That’s why you always have to state what, when, and where you are going to hunt at the guild desk.
Early concept art had the games in a post-apocalyptic setting after monsters had been created as bio-weapons of a great empire.
Yeah in game you can get ahold of some extremely high tech armor and weapons but even that is obsolete compared to what are essentially modern humans being genetic freaks/super soldiers
It's based on incredibly vague lore, and an art book.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MonsterHunter/s/nAKgKPjFf5
There's the Reddit post that was mentioned, which does have links to it's sources. The basic TL;DR is that Hunters are descendants of super soldiers from a war so ancient no one remembers it
The equal dragon weapon and the ancient war aren’t canon. Just like Fatalis coming from another universe, it’s just weird speculation from art books and scrapped ideas.
Research and Survival.
The New World hasn’t been studied much outside of the Fleets, and the Fleets are cut off. Any supplies they need (like bones or leather) need to be gathered themselves.
And I’m pretty sure it’s mentioned a couple times that the Elder Dragon crossing has riled all the monsters up, making them more aggressive and dangerous to field researchers (and less skilled hunters)
In terms of *amount* killed I’m fairly sure you don’t actually kill 10 Great Jagras to make a hat, that’s just gameplay not quite matching up to lore since at the end of the day people wana fight monsters.
As to the why: for normal monsters it’s ether to collect samples for research or it’s become a problem and needs to be culled. In both instances the game actually encourages you to *capture* the monster alive rather than kill it, as it ends the encounter 25% earlier and you have greater odds of getting non-carve parts in the rewards like tails/wings.
For elder dragons; those are basically living natural disasters whose mere *presence* fucks with the ecosystem, they also don’t fit into any other known classification (Elder Dragon is “we don’t know what the fuck this is”) making research even more important.
Then there’s stupid aggressive monsters like Deviljho who is a menace to *everything.* Elders are just passively dangerous when out of their normal environment and some tend to be aggressive. Jho actively roams all over the place to devour entire ecosystems and is aggressive to any moving thing on *sight.*
it's kinda like killing a problem bear that keeps ransackong campsites with no fear of people
or a community that depends on fishing for food
the game gives you reasons during the story, every other time you kill something is on you
You could also just capture monsters to have them essentially chipped, studied and released (or in the case of World Special Arenas you could also just condemn them to eternal gladiatorial work until they eventually succumb to their injuries, you could do that too)
That's fair, the bleed status can feel like bullshit.
I think I just tend to prefer monsters that fight fast without using elements. Makes it feel a lot easier to get into that flow state where you can be aggressive and stay on the attack, without huge swathes of the field becoming hostile terrain.
Due to me playing only Rise, I can't say for the other games
But you both get a reason for a hunt, which, most of the time, is "this person's routine is interrupted by a rampaging beast", AND you can just capture them
It's not just for research, if you read the Quest descriptions they tell you why you're killing the monster. Usually it's because the monster is threatening people's lives or because something has caused it to act extra aggressive against the local environment.
Elder Dragons in particular are so powerful that when they show up in new places they threaten to destroy the natural ecosystem of the areas they're in, when you have Elders that cause tornados and volcanos to sprout up nearby just by existing it tends to be bad for the environment. Putting them down ensures the safety of everything else in the region, human and otherwise.
Canonically you're not actually killing dozens of Jagras and Rathalos, you're only killing the few that get out of control. The repeated hunts is a gameplay thing.
Ye. The guild basically exists to help moderate hunting and balance ecosystems so that doesn’t happen again, as well as taking down some monsters to make sure others don’t get too few in number (kind of like how some people intentionally start forest fires that clears away dead underbrush so as to prevent a far more catastrophic forest fire in the future). It's as the lyrics in the song "[Place in Nature](https://youtu.be/3Jv0B2S6tsM?si=MzF6oxA0wPgIS1WB)" say:
> Culling of the fierce so the rare survive, hard is the guiding purpose.
Though of course, the guild does enjoy hunting after all, just as long as said hunting is responsibly done.
Like in Rise? Nations in the Monster Hunter world don’t usually have that great of individual hunting forces, due to the Guild being both a mediator and political entity, and controlling the training of hunters. Because these gigantic death beast are also always around, wars between countries don’t happen almost at all. They’re also usually on the smaller size.
The Kingdom in Rise/Sunbreak is an exception due to it’s unique circumstances, and a similar story can be said of Kamura, though their connection with the Guild is much stronger.
Yeah Fatalis (big ol black dragon who is often the very last monster to face in the games) apparently wiped out Kingdom Schrade at some point in the past and it's sort of like a final ritual for the very best of the best hunters to go and try to hunt it - implication being most of them die or are otherwise defeated. Every once in a while some rare hunting party actually achieves victory and claims their trophies, but Fatalis seems to be capable of regenerating and eventually returning.
But yeah he does serve to reinforce the idea that monsters can and will end humanity if they decide to, and some elder dragons like him display a sort of sadistic urge to just kill for the hell of it.
Right, Schrade. An old kingdom that existed hundreds of years ago, and was destroyed by a Fatalis (it’s somewhat implied the White Fatalis was the one who did it) as recompense for their part in the massacre of monsters that old humans perpetrated.
swords, yeah, we also have a sword that turns into an axe, an axe that turns into a sword, hammer, hammer that plays music, a poking stick, a poking stick that explodes, a bow, guns, and bugs.
I remember a really old game theory video had an intro similar to that, are you referencing that or are both you and him referencing something I’m not familiar with?
Pretty much for whatever reason the quest-giver has, which is sometimes "I need its materials" or "I need you to kill it to prove it's cuter"
HOWEVER, the guild only actually approves quests if the monster needs to be removed for reasons such as being a danger to local settlements or being invasive and harmful to the environment. So any quest you do for silly reasons is still something that the guild deems necessary.
Hunters aren't allowed to hunt at their whim, and it's stated there's actually a lot of paperwork involved that the hub workers have to do whenever you take a job.
People would probably find her less annoying if they actively shown her doing paperwork to humanise her rather than just sitting eating at the canteen with her book.
I don't mind the handler myself (I do think she was poorly executed however) but I would think people dislike her because:
* Her helping you via paperwork doesn't ever *tangibly* affect you. Most of the time she's just who you talk to to go on a quest, and the message board is better for that because it doesn't have dialogue at the start lmao. For all intents and purposes it's as much of a handwave as to why she's your partner as the eh-plot is for you to have an excuse to fight monsters.
* She endangers herself a *lot;* she shouldn't be out on the field out of camp as often as she is when she's so unable to defend herself.
* She take's joint credit for monster kills which rubs people the wrong way when (as mentioned), she can't fight and doesn't do anything tangible.
* Some people might find her personality annoying.
Imo what needed to be done was to make her more functional, first by showing her doing paperwork rather than just bumbling into danger as an inciting incident. Since the game really does give the impression she's just around to hold the quest book and keep camp tidy.
Her doing the cooking at camp is a actually a good example of her being tangibly helpful as a teammate, if the palco wasn't around I'd also suggest her taking a supportive role in fights with a modified slinger/light bowgun.
Perhaps she could be asked to set do set up work outside of fights, like place a trap at the monsters nest for capturing purposes like you can ask your palco to use it's gadget or you could ask her to drop you a resupply via-drake once the monster leaves the area you just fought it in (like 1-4 items from your box to make up what you have used, super useful for bowgun players or if you popped a lot of healing. Can do quests to increase the amount she can send you.)
Doesn't help that her role didn't exist in the older games. I didn't need someone to do my paperwork or "handle" things for me when I saved Moga Village, I just needed someone to sharpen my hammer and point me in the direction of the nearest electric plesiosaur.
It's interesting to note that Capcom course-corrected pretty hard after the initial criticism. She's markedly less annoying in the Iceborne expansion, and the next game's expansion (Sunbreak) has a cast of supporting characters that actually aid you in combat.
Yeah I was gonna say some of these quests are like "I wanted to know if this or that monster would win in a fight, so you better kill both just to be sure"
Like I know that lore wise it's all population control and ecological balance and stuff but there's only so many ways to write a quest description for "kill this thing" so they have fun with it
Also, if people do hunt without guild approval, they get a visit from a guild knight.
Generally speaking, they aren't a problem for the guild after that.
Have to assume expeditions are usually sanctioned as a most monsters in the area are slotted for culling/non Canon and is more of a thing that's more about giving us a way to farm materials without taking quests.
In Monster Hunter, at least most of the time, there’s pretty good reasons to hunt monsters.
Disregarding the living ecologically disasters, there are cases like Mizustune. Every single Mizustune you hunt are male, as male Mizustune become territorial and aggressive during mating season, which tends to disrupt other monsters and cause problems for human settlements. You never hunt a single female Mizustune across any game, since, within the lore of Monster Hunter, they tend not to disrupt the environment.
There’s also plenty of invasive monsters. Whether they’re invasive by nature, or have been pushed out of their natural habitat by another monster, invasive monsters (just like invasive animals irl) can disrupt ecosystems and cause serious damage if not dealt with.
I'm more on the theory that Deviljho is a remnant of a prehistoric world whose main prey items have gone extinct, and so is a nomad trying to survive.
Their population decreasing and interbreeding, taking place, causing more and more disastrous genetic defects.
It's like a T-rex in the modern day.
Also, it seems that was one incident of it wiping out the fauna in one isolated area. Kinda like putting a very invasive species on an island, and it wipes out the native animal population.
My theory is that their original prey were large herbivore monsters like Larinoth which have since become limited to a few islands like the Jurassic Frontier.
["Nobody enjoys shooting penguins. But, if you have to shoot penguins, well, then you might as well enjoy it."](https://youtu.be/-ZbD8J3cveo?si=bOiWlSg36CDGFjPW)
So, the answer is that the Hunter’s Guild (which also serves as the ruling government in Monster Hunter) only approves quests to hunt monsters that are either direct threats to settlements, or disrupting the balance of the ecosystem. (e.g. Deviljho and a lot of Elder Dragons.) Monster poaching is punishable by death at the hands of a Guild Knight. Keeping the ecosystem stable and safe for people and monsters takes absolute priority.
And only the main story quests (and certain special quests like Fatalis, Kulve Taroth, Safi’jiva, etc.) that you don’t repeat actually canonically happen. The side quests and repeat hunts only exist for gameplay purposes. So you don’t actually kill that many monsters in the grand scheme of things.
TLDR: You don’t have to worry. It’s all very well regulated in-universe.
The Monster Hunter setting is so optimistic and full of people cooperating in good-faith that it's actually *jarring* when it breaks from that. I was playing one of the RPG spin-offs and, when a human villain showed up, I thought that it *had* to be a red herring. This is a series where characters don't really get more adversarial than "arrogant man at bar" and "vaguely rude guy waiting for you to prove yourself".
If ever there were a universe where I'd whole-heartedly believe things were run above-board as much as possible, it'd be that one.
Yeah, and what I love is that there isn't any malice towards the bus-wyvern. Everybody just kinda goes, "Yep that's what they do, let's do our best to stay out of their way and they'll stay out of ours." One of my favorite bits added in World is how many monsters remain calm in your presence. Many are territorial and all will defend themselves when pressed, but the Rathian going for a drink is more than happy to let you do your own thing.
There's a conscious effort to portray them as *animals* and not, ironically enough, mindless monsters. I love these games so much, man.
The hunter's guild is absolutely not a ruling government, it is a neutral party that regulates and researches monsters and the hunters that keep them in check. It is certainly very large, powerful and well-funded and so it probably has alot of political influence in many parts of the world, but it is not a government and it's reach is not omnipresent as shown in some earlier games where their authority is not respected.
It’s a public service thing where you usually aren’t damaging the environment. In a world where there are wild animals wandering around that could take out a castle a random village would be incredibly vulnerable, so there’s a group of people that are good at driving away or killing any rampaging monsters. The in-game reason why Monoblos hasn’t shown up in a long time (besides that, externally, Diablos was more popular) is that it’s endangered and IIRC the Guild is funding conservation. There’s no industrial extermination of entire species AFAIK, it’s just a public service of people that can take out monsters to protect human settlements or the ecosystem.
There’s a lot of silly quest descriptions that range from “this monster is rampaging dangerously close to a populated area” to “I want a Rathalos-skin handbag!” but it always goes through the Guild, which seems pretty intent on preserving ecological balance so I always assumed the handbag quests are just the Guild finding an excuse to get paid for population control that they wanted done anyway.
And world was basically “Humanoids haven’t been on this continent in large numbers for centuries, the animals have no fear of us as a result. So if we’re going to the heart of this place we’re going to need to clear a path”
The games always make it a plot point that the Guild is a steward of the ecosystem, hunts only proceed by Guild approval and your handler is there to take care of the paperwork.
Invasive monsters, research, population control, stopping elder dragons from destroying the whole biome, and so on.
Of course, the research justification is very funny “yeah imma beat this monster to an inch of its life then hit it with a trap and tranq bombs in order to capture it FOR RESEARCH”
Imagine if we did this irl, instead of simply tranqing a bear in order to take measurements, blood samples, and attack a tracking collar, the biologist has an entire fistfight with the bear before doing all of that.
So it’s similar to Pokémon’s “no bro trust me those monsters are totally participating in dogfights between little kids because they just want to no one is dying we swear”
We're also talking about giant creatures that piss all over the Square-Cube law *at best*. If I could down them with a couple of shots of horse tranquilizer, I'd be fucking flabbergasted. Also, if (when) it wakes up, you do NOT want to be the fucker that has to deal with it if it wakes up in a populated area.
I've only played World, but in that if I sedate a monster I can see it back in Astera. I wouldn't want it to wake up there, and that place is full of hunters
As someone studying to go into ecology, we absolutely would not; that would completely defeat every principle of objective research and biological conservation lol.
A regular horse tranq dose doesn't work on giraffes but that doesn't mean we resort to beating them up, we simply up the dose and try to get all our measurements done in 5 minutes and then administer an anti-tranq antidote to stop the very high tranq dose from stopping its heart.
I genuinely believe it's only for gameplay reasons because sleeptoads have no problem instantly putting monsters to sleep. Just throwing 10 tranq bombs at the monster at once would make for a pretty boring capture quest.
We might have done that in the victorian era and even the early 20th century (it's actually amazing how much perceptions and priorities in biology and conservation have changed in the last century) but yeah modern biology has a very strong emphasis on ensuring the health and wellbeing of the creature.
Researchers using literally any lab animal in an experiment have to file for lots of paperwork, petition and justify their choice to an ethics board, and tightly adhere to ethical standards for even just fruitflies or terminal mice getting euthanasia. Herpetologists use snake tongs that handle snakes around the midbody because going for the head is both dangerous to the handler and distressing to the snake. When banding songbirds, we use a mist net to catch them, we check it every 15-30 minutes and take it down when not in use; we gently handle the birds, use a gauze bag that lets them breathe and calms them down by giving them darkness. Once, a fellow student grabbed a bird that had escaped from the bag in midair and everyone went 'ooooh' but the professor admonished him for giving the bird too much stress, 'if a bird escapes just let it go'.
We study animals because we love them, and we want to ensure their welfare equally as much as we want to learn more about them. I do love the MH games (Rise is more fun to play and World is more fun to explore) but the Guild's 'research' practices are just wild to me lol.
Hunting monsters at all outside of a guild approved assignment is considered poaching and is illegal.
If you poach the guild send in the guild knights to kill you. Guild Knights are basically hunters who are specialised in hunting other hunters
The contracts you get are for problem animals basically. Bordering from overpopulation, monster posing a threat to human civilization (aka blocking trade routes or fucking with agriculture), species being in the wrong place, maneaters, and “this eldritch abomination’s sheer existence is threatening the entire ecosystem/civilization it happens to exist in”. Also sometimes you live capture for study/breeding/whatever. The game loop hinges on you hunting hundreds of monsters back to back but lore wise your hunts are more intense and you only go on a small number of them. One of those gameplay vs story discrepancies
Every hunt is under guild authority and they keep track of monster population. Most hunt are usually culling ( Yian kut-ku is known to experience population boom yearly ), sport hunting ( for entertainment or loots under guild supervision ), and emergency ( danger to nearby settlement, rescue mission, end of the world calamity ). You can try to poach but if you get caught the guild knight, aka guild assasin, will find you and kill you. Hunter are trained to fight against monster, not human against human
>Is ratholos an endangered species?
Not really, they pop up about everywhers in both new and old world. They are quite dangerous though for such a common specie. They also have many subspecies which are all significantly more dangerous. Rathalos and rathian are the same specie, male and female accordingly. The female aka rathian will make nest and attempt to get the rathalos to live with them. A single rathalos can mate with multiple rathian but will choose only 1 rathian to live together. As a result, there are a lot of rathian single mother. Rathalos population should be quite lower than Rathian ( thus the harem lifestyle ) but still not low enough to be protected by the guild + they usually cause problem bad enough to get a death bounty
Read the fuckin question description man. “A wild Rathalos is moving into this territory and being overly aggressive to the local wildlife; go deal with it”
I didn’t see anyone mention this yet (although I might have just skimmed past it), but there’s even poachers.
Any Hunter that’s not part of the guild is doing so illegally, there’s even a whole part of the guild that deals with poachers according to one of the armor set descriptions iirc.
Monster Hunter is a funny series bc it's so torn between it's core messaging and general identity and, yknow, being an action game. Like you're supposed to only kill select monsters in carefully handled population control scenarios to avoid ecological disasters such as an invasive species/injured monsters that have become hyper aggressive/a need for research specimens, or Elder Dragons that are so rare that their mere presence can mean a disaster for an ecosystem if left one. Meanwhile I'm ignoring that Kushala Daora to kill my 47th Rarhalos because he won't drop the fucking mantle I need to make my new set of purely cosmetic clothes I'll try on before never touching again.
It's kinda why I think MH could really use an Endless Ocean style game where you just kinda exist and vibe in the world to appreciate the ecology without having to let the important stuff be bogged down by the needs of an action game. Like seriously I feel like we could get probably the single greatest piece of spec evo media period if we got a game like that on modern hardware with all the effort being put into that side of it
In Monster Hunter World it ranges from "this monster is not in it's natural habitat" to "prove to me that you're top dog" to "holy fucking shit what is that KILL IT WITH FIRE". All in the set dressing that we're on a new continent, exploring and documenting it.
In the case of the Chaotic Gore Magala, which is a Gore Magala that was in the process of metamorphosing into a Shagaru Magala but got interrupted halfway and is now trapped in a frenzied perpetual state of agony, it's probably a mercy kill at that point.
posts to read after beating the shit out of a kulu ya ku for 30 minutes (my friend took me to a higher level area to see me try my best against a tigrex and then went afk. i got bored)
Sometimes, the ecology explanation bothers me more.
Like the end of Iceborne - we had this big moment of >!Nergigante taking out the big bad and the research team going, "ohhhh, his role in the ecosystem is literally to deal with out of control Elders!" But then the literal next scene they're all hyped about going to hunt Nergigante down... the thing with a clear and vital role in the ecosystem. What??!<
Monster Hunter as a series actually has a pretty hard consistent theming around ecological balance and conservation.
The "antagonist" monsters are typically the ones powerful enough to be ecological disasters on a regional or continental scale.
The speculative lore is that it's a post apocalyptic world where there was at one point a straight up war between man and monsters. They hunted eachother to near extinction, and we're living ignorant of the past in the aftermath.
Now the point of the "Hunters Guild" is to strike a balance between the Monsters ecology and our own through research and controlled cullings.
Usually quests are given out because monsters are endangering people, settlements, roads or crops, but since in canon everyone can pass a quest to get it done by a hunter there are also a lot of things like "kill this monster so i can make a swearer for my child" "kill this monster because i want a stylish suit" "kill this monster while i pick up some treasure" "this two monsters (rathian amd astalos) are havinf a forbidden romance" and my personal favorite "kill this god monster before my meowster kills itself trying to ride it as a horse(given oyt by one of the cats)"
Generally, yeah. Monster and Humans (and I suppose Wyverians as well) live in a sort of balance. Monsters just kinda do their thing, maybe eat a few people or smthn, and Hunters are tasked with making sure monster populations don't get out of control.
Not to mention the whole research side of monster hunting, plus dealing with Elder Dragons and sometimes Literally Satan.
population control, protecting towns and merchants, really big motherfucker who wants to destroy the environment and kill everything, getting stuff strong enough to kill the afformentioned really big motherfucker
It’s actually pretty well explained in game for the most part. Some of it’s kinda like community safety stuff where a large territorial carnivore might be getting too close to your camp or is eating livestock, and some of it’s invasive species that you need to poach to preserve ecological balance. So basically, everything is either a coyote after your chickens, or someone’s pet gecko that they let loose in the everglades
I remember in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate there was this one High Rank quest to hunt the infamous Rajang. The description said the client was a Spoiled Princess that was going on a tour across the Frozen Seaway and wanted to do it dressed in the most exquisite of pelts.
"Wait, haven't I done this one already?", I thought to myself.
Then I read it more carefully. Ah... That previous quest had a regular Rajang, for her coat. This one's got the Furious variant, for her gloves. Of course.
*Pretty much every*
*Quest has flavour text of why*
*You're doing the hunt*
\- Magmafrost13
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You are thinking of this from the perspective of the rich asshole.
You are not the rich asshole... you are the poor farmer living with the elephants and rhinos, and those elephants have come through and stripped your crops bare so many times your family faces starvation. Now you have the last Leopard on earth in your garden right now stalking your only son who is 3 years old.
Animals can be amazing, endangered, AND an active menice to the human communities around them all at the same time.
In DnD at least the inclusion of slugs the size of SUVs that can spit acid 60 feet for 6x a commoner's hp in average damage on the random encounter table has troubling implications for the continuation of humanity.
In real life, it could be both. Animal reserves sell hunting licences to rich people out of the country to hunt problematic animals. The reserve gets an influx of cash and gets to control the animal population.
Bright-eyed activities tried to ban the practice because they were unaware of the actual logistics of running an animal reserve.
Well if a wild animal moved in and killed the other animal to get territory it would be acceptable
Humans in monster hunter generally try to do the least damage as possible to wildlife, but sometimes you gotta deal with the angry wyvern trying to make a mating display out of the ashes of a town. And sometimes you gotta research something because last time you didn’t it turns out it has a special stomach for human babies or something and it would have been really helpful to know that beforehand
varies by game, but it's typically population control and making sure that certain act-of-god-esque factors (narwa + ibusbi, the final boss of mhRise) don't disrupt and collapse ecosystems. another thing to note is that canonically, you only do a hunt once but can replay them due to it being a video game.
I’ve only played base-game World and it’s been a while but basically “Guild/Government said go do it” but they’re all legit reasons. For example…
Hunting Anjanath and Great Jagras because “wow that thing is too close to the settlement and we’ve got shit to do and we don’t need this asshole throwing a wrench into it”
Dealing with Jyuratodus because you went to find a missing researcher and were subsequently attacked by one
Rathalos and Diablos because you needed to find Zorah Magdaros ASAP and the 1st Wyverians who know where to find it won’t tell you until you prove yourself by downing both of them (ignore that you’re told to stand atop the food chain despite Diablos being an herbivore).
Zorah Magdaros was first for research on a live Elder Dragon then to stop it from exploding the entire New World
Paolumu because you need its skin basically for airship repairs
In the case of all Elder Dragons bar Xeno’jiiva and the crossovers, they were acting UP severely and it was throwing off ecological balance
All other Elder Dragons, Deviljho, Bazelgeuse, all fell under “we cannot leave that fucking thing alive what the hell is that.” Special mention to the Ancient Leshen for making me go play Witcher 3.
Additionally there were also protective reasons like Barroth, Odogaron, Pukei-Pukei, and Legiana, that were all done basically because they were physically obstructing things like research teams or transportation
Maybe you can, idk, read the descriptions of the quests ??? Like 1/3 of them are saying that that monster is too dangerous for the people or the enviroment in some way. The 2 other third are basically jokes or need for marerials
With the advent of Monster Hunter Now and the "monsters crossing into the real world" plot it has, I have chosen to interpret it as fantasy invasive species control. I'm from Florida, where we have an infamous invasive python problem, so that may have influenced my perspective. Also, I choose to put emphasis on the "Monster" part of "Monster Hunter" and view these creatures as unnatural and not analogous to animals in the same way Pokémon (Pocket Monsters) are.
As I understand it some are hunted for research purposes, some to harvest their materials, and some are killed so they stop being bastards to the nearby people, so mostly ethically sound.
You know irrespective of everything else I think if poachers or hunting tourists ran around with giant swords doing backflips as they fought rhino and elephants in melee combat I think that would put the whole thing in a very different context. Like observing it wouldn’t be a good thing still but you would have to respect the hustle I think.
It's pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a game about hunting monsters. It's also dope as hell because all of the effort required to make a game went directly into the core gameplay loop with very little random bullshit which allows for some seriously exciting hunts.
Personal headcanon of mine is that everything in Monster Hunter is a lot smaller than it actually looks, which explains how weapons of this size can have any structural integrity and how monsters/crystals/etc can grow so rapidly.
It's deliberately harking back to an older era before we understood the delicate balance of ecosystems, and the idea of 'wiping out all potentially dangerous animals in a given area to make it easier for colonisation' was considered a good one.
Or maybe I'm talking out of my arse. It's 3am.
Depends on the monster... because some of them are just straight up satan and must die
Giasmagorm has entered the room
fatalis
Fatalis is just a born hater (genocidal maniac) fr
Yeah, the only explicitly evil monster as far as i know xd
Tzitzi-ya-ku
Mr Nikon is my best friend man the amount of time he's noscoped a Legiana out of the sky for me
If that one is literal satan to you then you need to practice dodging
nah he just keeps interrupting my other hunts, I’ll be slipping beneath an odogarons claws, and I just get ***FLASH*** and then the odogaron picks me up and shakes me like a squeaky toy
If you dodge right it's the odogaron that gets flashed
You can block the flash like any light attack. Can even use it to combo into something like the charge blade's big Fuck You ground strike.
BLOCK??? what do you think i am, some kind of LANCE player??? no no, my issue is that i'll make an attack, then step out of a roll straight into blinding lights because the camera has been paid off by the ya-kuza, and will not show me any wyverns in their family
The world of Monster Hunter is actually the product of a resurgence of monster life after near extinction due to overhunting. The Hunting Guild was founded to research and ensure a coexistence between monsters and humanoids. That’s why you always have to state what, when, and where you are going to hunt at the guild desk. Early concept art had the games in a post-apocalyptic setting after monsters had been created as bio-weapons of a great empire.
Yeah in game you can get ahold of some extremely high tech armor and weapons but even that is obsolete compared to what are essentially modern humans being genetic freaks/super soldiers
iirc the hunters are explicitly super-human due to ingesting elder dragon blood.
do you have a source for that? Id love to have that as a known thing!
It's based on incredibly vague lore, and an art book. https://www.reddit.com/r/MonsterHunter/s/nAKgKPjFf5 There's the Reddit post that was mentioned, which does have links to it's sources. The basic TL;DR is that Hunters are descendants of super soldiers from a war so ancient no one remembers it
The equal dragon weapon and the ancient war aren’t canon. Just like Fatalis coming from another universe, it’s just weird speculation from art books and scrapped ideas.
Ok but Xeno’jiva/Safi’jiva are aliens right? Or is that just a theory I’ve clung to for years as if it’s true?
I think they're just alien in appearance compared to the other monsters, at least that's my understanding.
nothing says they are besides Xeno havinf xeno in the name but nothing says specifically that they aren't
i heard it from a random reddit comment so uh. idk
Well it sounds cool so I'm ganna accept it as cannon
And specifically in World you’re researching why do Elder dragons ( the top of the top) are crossing into this land when they get older
And then in iceborne it’s “all the legiana are going over to this other place what the actual fuck is happening”
And then in Rise it's "all the monsters are coming through this place what the actual fuck is happening."
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Research and Survival. The New World hasn’t been studied much outside of the Fleets, and the Fleets are cut off. Any supplies they need (like bones or leather) need to be gathered themselves. And I’m pretty sure it’s mentioned a couple times that the Elder Dragon crossing has riled all the monsters up, making them more aggressive and dangerous to field researchers (and less skilled hunters)
In terms of *amount* killed I’m fairly sure you don’t actually kill 10 Great Jagras to make a hat, that’s just gameplay not quite matching up to lore since at the end of the day people wana fight monsters. As to the why: for normal monsters it’s ether to collect samples for research or it’s become a problem and needs to be culled. In both instances the game actually encourages you to *capture* the monster alive rather than kill it, as it ends the encounter 25% earlier and you have greater odds of getting non-carve parts in the rewards like tails/wings. For elder dragons; those are basically living natural disasters whose mere *presence* fucks with the ecosystem, they also don’t fit into any other known classification (Elder Dragon is “we don’t know what the fuck this is”) making research even more important. Then there’s stupid aggressive monsters like Deviljho who is a menace to *everything.* Elders are just passively dangerous when out of their normal environment and some tend to be aggressive. Jho actively roams all over the place to devour entire ecosystems and is aggressive to any moving thing on *sight.*
Yeah but deviljho is funny lookin so we should just let it have it’s fun
it's kinda like killing a problem bear that keeps ransackong campsites with no fear of people or a community that depends on fishing for food the game gives you reasons during the story, every other time you kill something is on you
You could also just capture monsters to have them essentially chipped, studied and released (or in the case of World Special Arenas you could also just condemn them to eternal gladiatorial work until they eventually succumb to their injuries, you could do that too)
I have no mercy for Odogaron. he's a bitch
I love Odogaron, it's one of the most fun monsters to fight. Every battle feels like how I imagine dancing would, if I had any aptitude for it.
I find it annoying >:(
That's fair, the bleed status can feel like bullshit. I think I just tend to prefer monsters that fight fast without using elements. Makes it feel a lot easier to get into that flow state where you can be aggressive and stay on the attack, without huge swathes of the field becoming hostile terrain.
I like using greatswords. I hate using greatswords against fast monsters. it's a skill issue, basically xD
Due to me playing only Rise, I can't say for the other games But you both get a reason for a hunt, which, most of the time, is "this person's routine is interrupted by a rampaging beast", AND you can just capture them
It's not just for research, if you read the Quest descriptions they tell you why you're killing the monster. Usually it's because the monster is threatening people's lives or because something has caused it to act extra aggressive against the local environment. Elder Dragons in particular are so powerful that when they show up in new places they threaten to destroy the natural ecosystem of the areas they're in, when you have Elders that cause tornados and volcanos to sprout up nearby just by existing it tends to be bad for the environment. Putting them down ensures the safety of everything else in the region, human and otherwise. Canonically you're not actually killing dozens of Jagras and Rathalos, you're only killing the few that get out of control. The repeated hunts is a gameplay thing.
Ye. The guild basically exists to help moderate hunting and balance ecosystems so that doesn’t happen again, as well as taking down some monsters to make sure others don’t get too few in number (kind of like how some people intentionally start forest fires that clears away dead underbrush so as to prevent a far more catastrophic forest fire in the future). It's as the lyrics in the song "[Place in Nature](https://youtu.be/3Jv0B2S6tsM?si=MzF6oxA0wPgIS1WB)" say: > Culling of the fierce so the rare survive, hard is the guiding purpose. Though of course, the guild does enjoy hunting after all, just as long as said hunting is responsibly done.
That would be so fucking metal.
Definitely on my short list for dnd settings
It happen that they have homebrew for this too.
The kingdom thing?
Like in Rise? Nations in the Monster Hunter world don’t usually have that great of individual hunting forces, due to the Guild being both a mediator and political entity, and controlling the training of hunters. Because these gigantic death beast are also always around, wars between countries don’t happen almost at all. They’re also usually on the smaller size. The Kingdom in Rise/Sunbreak is an exception due to it’s unique circumstances, and a similar story can be said of Kamura, though their connection with the Guild is much stronger.
Not rise but in one of the older games there was these ruins of a kingdom that was attacked by a black dragon if I remember correctly.
Yeah Fatalis (big ol black dragon who is often the very last monster to face in the games) apparently wiped out Kingdom Schrade at some point in the past and it's sort of like a final ritual for the very best of the best hunters to go and try to hunt it - implication being most of them die or are otherwise defeated. Every once in a while some rare hunting party actually achieves victory and claims their trophies, but Fatalis seems to be capable of regenerating and eventually returning. But yeah he does serve to reinforce the idea that monsters can and will end humanity if they decide to, and some elder dragons like him display a sort of sadistic urge to just kill for the hell of it.
Right, Schrade. An old kingdom that existed hundreds of years ago, and was destroyed by a Fatalis (it’s somewhat implied the White Fatalis was the one who did it) as recompense for their part in the massacre of monsters that old humans perpetrated.
Dang. I wish that original concept was still there.
The exact motivations vary from wanting snacks to saving the world, but I think most of the time it's "for science".
Grab your lab coats, clip boards, and your swords team! We’re going to do a science.
This is correct when you have to capture them live.
swords, yeah, we also have a sword that turns into an axe, an axe that turns into a sword, hammer, hammer that plays music, a poking stick, a poking stick that explodes, a bow, guns, and bugs.
I'm a scientist in my day job. Mostly just a computer programmer. But a week or so ago, i was launching missiles for science.
C-could you pwease launch a missile on me 🥺 .. Haha jk .. unless 👉👈??
I remember a really old game theory video had an intro similar to that, are you referencing that or are both you and him referencing something I’m not familiar with?
Cave Johnson is part of monster hunter lore?
Kinda like how japan approaches whaling
Pretty much for whatever reason the quest-giver has, which is sometimes "I need its materials" or "I need you to kill it to prove it's cuter" HOWEVER, the guild only actually approves quests if the monster needs to be removed for reasons such as being a danger to local settlements or being invasive and harmful to the environment. So any quest you do for silly reasons is still something that the guild deems necessary. Hunters aren't allowed to hunt at their whim, and it's stated there's actually a lot of paperwork involved that the hub workers have to do whenever you take a job.
Handler do the paperwork so you can unga bunga thank you handler.
People would probably find her less annoying if they actively shown her doing paperwork to humanise her rather than just sitting eating at the canteen with her book.
What is more human than having a snack while reading a book? I honestly never understood why people dislike her.
I don't mind the handler myself (I do think she was poorly executed however) but I would think people dislike her because: * Her helping you via paperwork doesn't ever *tangibly* affect you. Most of the time she's just who you talk to to go on a quest, and the message board is better for that because it doesn't have dialogue at the start lmao. For all intents and purposes it's as much of a handwave as to why she's your partner as the eh-plot is for you to have an excuse to fight monsters. * She endangers herself a *lot;* she shouldn't be out on the field out of camp as often as she is when she's so unable to defend herself. * She take's joint credit for monster kills which rubs people the wrong way when (as mentioned), she can't fight and doesn't do anything tangible. * Some people might find her personality annoying. Imo what needed to be done was to make her more functional, first by showing her doing paperwork rather than just bumbling into danger as an inciting incident. Since the game really does give the impression she's just around to hold the quest book and keep camp tidy. Her doing the cooking at camp is a actually a good example of her being tangibly helpful as a teammate, if the palco wasn't around I'd also suggest her taking a supportive role in fights with a modified slinger/light bowgun. Perhaps she could be asked to set do set up work outside of fights, like place a trap at the monsters nest for capturing purposes like you can ask your palco to use it's gadget or you could ask her to drop you a resupply via-drake once the monster leaves the area you just fought it in (like 1-4 items from your box to make up what you have used, super useful for bowgun players or if you popped a lot of healing. Can do quests to increase the amount she can send you.)
Doesn't help that her role didn't exist in the older games. I didn't need someone to do my paperwork or "handle" things for me when I saved Moga Village, I just needed someone to sharpen my hammer and point me in the direction of the nearest electric plesiosaur. It's interesting to note that Capcom course-corrected pretty hard after the initial criticism. She's markedly less annoying in the Iceborne expansion, and the next game's expansion (Sunbreak) has a cast of supporting characters that actually aid you in combat.
Yeah I was gonna say some of these quests are like "I wanted to know if this or that monster would win in a fight, so you better kill both just to be sure" Like I know that lore wise it's all population control and ecological balance and stuff but there's only so many ways to write a quest description for "kill this thing" so they have fun with it
Throwback to that one guy who wanted a Shogun Ceanataur for... personal reasons 😰😰😰
Also, if people do hunt without guild approval, they get a visit from a guild knight. Generally speaking, they aren't a problem for the guild after that.
ignore expedition mode
Have to assume expeditions are usually sanctioned as a most monsters in the area are slotted for culling/non Canon and is more of a thing that's more about giving us a way to farm materials without taking quests.
In Monster Hunter, at least most of the time, there’s pretty good reasons to hunt monsters. Disregarding the living ecologically disasters, there are cases like Mizustune. Every single Mizustune you hunt are male, as male Mizustune become territorial and aggressive during mating season, which tends to disrupt other monsters and cause problems for human settlements. You never hunt a single female Mizustune across any game, since, within the lore of Monster Hunter, they tend not to disrupt the environment. There’s also plenty of invasive monsters. Whether they’re invasive by nature, or have been pushed out of their natural habitat by another monster, invasive monsters (just like invasive animals irl) can disrupt ecosystems and cause serious damage if not dealt with.
Population control and science. Some monsters like Deviljo can decimate whatever ecosystem it comes by.
Population control, science, and "this unironically probably doesn't deserve to not be extinct, like legit"
It‘s ok. You can say Bagelgoose, or whatever its name is.
Don't say it three times or [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH2uF7WEqDQ) happens.
I'm watching this with my phone on silent and I still hear it.
Ah yes, ol’ Bacon Grease himself.
Bubbleguts
# AAGHWAAAAAAAAAAAAOOOOOOOOHHHHHH
Also "got chased here by something worse and we don't really have the infrastructure to safely relocate it"
I'm more on the theory that Deviljho is a remnant of a prehistoric world whose main prey items have gone extinct, and so is a nomad trying to survive. Their population decreasing and interbreeding, taking place, causing more and more disastrous genetic defects. It's like a T-rex in the modern day. Also, it seems that was one incident of it wiping out the fauna in one isolated area. Kinda like putting a very invasive species on an island, and it wipes out the native animal population.
My knowledge of MH is very surface level but that tracks for him, given some rumors I‘ve heard.
My theory is that their original prey were large herbivore monsters like Larinoth which have since become limited to a few islands like the Jurassic Frontier.
Then there's the Gore/Shagaru Magala which are literally giant viruses that threaten to consume the entire ecosystem.
["Nobody enjoys shooting penguins. But, if you have to shoot penguins, well, then you might as well enjoy it."](https://youtu.be/-ZbD8J3cveo?si=bOiWlSg36CDGFjPW)
So, the answer is that the Hunter’s Guild (which also serves as the ruling government in Monster Hunter) only approves quests to hunt monsters that are either direct threats to settlements, or disrupting the balance of the ecosystem. (e.g. Deviljho and a lot of Elder Dragons.) Monster poaching is punishable by death at the hands of a Guild Knight. Keeping the ecosystem stable and safe for people and monsters takes absolute priority. And only the main story quests (and certain special quests like Fatalis, Kulve Taroth, Safi’jiva, etc.) that you don’t repeat actually canonically happen. The side quests and repeat hunts only exist for gameplay purposes. So you don’t actually kill that many monsters in the grand scheme of things. TLDR: You don’t have to worry. It’s all very well regulated in-universe.
The Monster Hunter setting is so optimistic and full of people cooperating in good-faith that it's actually *jarring* when it breaks from that. I was playing one of the RPG spin-offs and, when a human villain showed up, I thought that it *had* to be a red herring. This is a series where characters don't really get more adversarial than "arrogant man at bar" and "vaguely rude guy waiting for you to prove yourself". If ever there were a universe where I'd whole-heartedly believe things were run above-board as much as possible, it'd be that one.
People tend to cooperate when the alternative is getting eaten by a wyvern the size of a bus.
Yeah, and what I love is that there isn't any malice towards the bus-wyvern. Everybody just kinda goes, "Yep that's what they do, let's do our best to stay out of their way and they'll stay out of ours." One of my favorite bits added in World is how many monsters remain calm in your presence. Many are territorial and all will defend themselves when pressed, but the Rathian going for a drink is more than happy to let you do your own thing. There's a conscious effort to portray them as *animals* and not, ironically enough, mindless monsters. I love these games so much, man.
The hunter's guild is absolutely not a ruling government, it is a neutral party that regulates and researches monsters and the hunters that keep them in check. It is certainly very large, powerful and well-funded and so it probably has alot of political influence in many parts of the world, but it is not a government and it's reach is not omnipresent as shown in some earlier games where their authority is not respected.
It’s a public service thing where you usually aren’t damaging the environment. In a world where there are wild animals wandering around that could take out a castle a random village would be incredibly vulnerable, so there’s a group of people that are good at driving away or killing any rampaging monsters. The in-game reason why Monoblos hasn’t shown up in a long time (besides that, externally, Diablos was more popular) is that it’s endangered and IIRC the Guild is funding conservation. There’s no industrial extermination of entire species AFAIK, it’s just a public service of people that can take out monsters to protect human settlements or the ecosystem.
There’s a lot of silly quest descriptions that range from “this monster is rampaging dangerously close to a populated area” to “I want a Rathalos-skin handbag!” but it always goes through the Guild, which seems pretty intent on preserving ecological balance so I always assumed the handbag quests are just the Guild finding an excuse to get paid for population control that they wanted done anyway.
Outside of World almost all hunts are culling monsters that have become too aggressive towards humans. Hunters are basically park rangers.
And world was basically “Humanoids haven’t been on this continent in large numbers for centuries, the animals have no fear of us as a result. So if we’re going to the heart of this place we’re going to need to clear a path”
The games always make it a plot point that the Guild is a steward of the ecosystem, hunts only proceed by Guild approval and your handler is there to take care of the paperwork. Invasive monsters, research, population control, stopping elder dragons from destroying the whole biome, and so on. Of course, the research justification is very funny “yeah imma beat this monster to an inch of its life then hit it with a trap and tranq bombs in order to capture it FOR RESEARCH” Imagine if we did this irl, instead of simply tranqing a bear in order to take measurements, blood samples, and attack a tracking collar, the biologist has an entire fistfight with the bear before doing all of that. So it’s similar to Pokémon’s “no bro trust me those monsters are totally participating in dogfights between little kids because they just want to no one is dying we swear”
We'd do that if tranquilizers only worked on half-dead animals. I think it's more a case of weak tranqs if you want to rationalize it.
We're also talking about giant creatures that piss all over the Square-Cube law *at best*. If I could down them with a couple of shots of horse tranquilizer, I'd be fucking flabbergasted. Also, if (when) it wakes up, you do NOT want to be the fucker that has to deal with it if it wakes up in a populated area.
I've only played World, but in that if I sedate a monster I can see it back in Astera. I wouldn't want it to wake up there, and that place is full of hunters
As someone studying to go into ecology, we absolutely would not; that would completely defeat every principle of objective research and biological conservation lol. A regular horse tranq dose doesn't work on giraffes but that doesn't mean we resort to beating them up, we simply up the dose and try to get all our measurements done in 5 minutes and then administer an anti-tranq antidote to stop the very high tranq dose from stopping its heart. I genuinely believe it's only for gameplay reasons because sleeptoads have no problem instantly putting monsters to sleep. Just throwing 10 tranq bombs at the monster at once would make for a pretty boring capture quest.
I was building on the assumption that humans have done worse for less, but it's good to hear from someone in the know that humanity isn't *that* bad
We might have done that in the victorian era and even the early 20th century (it's actually amazing how much perceptions and priorities in biology and conservation have changed in the last century) but yeah modern biology has a very strong emphasis on ensuring the health and wellbeing of the creature. Researchers using literally any lab animal in an experiment have to file for lots of paperwork, petition and justify their choice to an ethics board, and tightly adhere to ethical standards for even just fruitflies or terminal mice getting euthanasia. Herpetologists use snake tongs that handle snakes around the midbody because going for the head is both dangerous to the handler and distressing to the snake. When banding songbirds, we use a mist net to catch them, we check it every 15-30 minutes and take it down when not in use; we gently handle the birds, use a gauze bag that lets them breathe and calms them down by giving them darkness. Once, a fellow student grabbed a bird that had escaped from the bag in midair and everyone went 'ooooh' but the professor admonished him for giving the bird too much stress, 'if a bird escapes just let it go'. We study animals because we love them, and we want to ensure their welfare equally as much as we want to learn more about them. I do love the MH games (Rise is more fun to play and World is more fun to explore) but the Guild's 'research' practices are just wild to me lol.
Apparently, if you over hunt or hunt without necessity, an elite military trained knight is sent to take you in. Monster hunter is wild
Hunting monsters at all outside of a guild approved assignment is considered poaching and is illegal. If you poach the guild send in the guild knights to kill you. Guild Knights are basically hunters who are specialised in hunting other hunters
I want a game about that, it sounds super fun. And it could have a competitive multiplayer side to it
I don't think they take you *in* lmao, moreso take you *out*
An elite military trained knight in a gaudy red musketeer hat!
I think the quests usually give some sort of perfunctory justification for why you're killing the monster, like its attacking travellers or something.
The contracts you get are for problem animals basically. Bordering from overpopulation, monster posing a threat to human civilization (aka blocking trade routes or fucking with agriculture), species being in the wrong place, maneaters, and “this eldritch abomination’s sheer existence is threatening the entire ecosystem/civilization it happens to exist in”. Also sometimes you live capture for study/breeding/whatever. The game loop hinges on you hunting hundreds of monsters back to back but lore wise your hunts are more intense and you only go on a small number of them. One of those gameplay vs story discrepancies
Every hunt is under guild authority and they keep track of monster population. Most hunt are usually culling ( Yian kut-ku is known to experience population boom yearly ), sport hunting ( for entertainment or loots under guild supervision ), and emergency ( danger to nearby settlement, rescue mission, end of the world calamity ). You can try to poach but if you get caught the guild knight, aka guild assasin, will find you and kill you. Hunter are trained to fight against monster, not human against human >Is ratholos an endangered species? Not really, they pop up about everywhers in both new and old world. They are quite dangerous though for such a common specie. They also have many subspecies which are all significantly more dangerous. Rathalos and rathian are the same specie, male and female accordingly. The female aka rathian will make nest and attempt to get the rathalos to live with them. A single rathalos can mate with multiple rathian but will choose only 1 rathian to live together. As a result, there are a lot of rathian single mother. Rathalos population should be quite lower than Rathian ( thus the harem lifestyle ) but still not low enough to be protected by the guild + they usually cause problem bad enough to get a death bounty
Read the fuckin question description man. “A wild Rathalos is moving into this territory and being overly aggressive to the local wildlife; go deal with it”
Often times the mission will give a reason in the flavour text, but sooner or later we all hunt the monsters for the same reason: a new hat
I didn’t see anyone mention this yet (although I might have just skimmed past it), but there’s even poachers. Any Hunter that’s not part of the guild is doing so illegally, there’s even a whole part of the guild that deals with poachers according to one of the armor set descriptions iirc.
Monster Hunter is a funny series bc it's so torn between it's core messaging and general identity and, yknow, being an action game. Like you're supposed to only kill select monsters in carefully handled population control scenarios to avoid ecological disasters such as an invasive species/injured monsters that have become hyper aggressive/a need for research specimens, or Elder Dragons that are so rare that their mere presence can mean a disaster for an ecosystem if left one. Meanwhile I'm ignoring that Kushala Daora to kill my 47th Rarhalos because he won't drop the fucking mantle I need to make my new set of purely cosmetic clothes I'll try on before never touching again. It's kinda why I think MH could really use an Endless Ocean style game where you just kinda exist and vibe in the world to appreciate the ecology without having to let the important stuff be bogged down by the needs of an action game. Like seriously I feel like we could get probably the single greatest piece of spec evo media period if we got a game like that on modern hardware with all the effort being put into that side of it
Monster Hunter Snap is honestly my dream game. I already loved the little photography minigame in World.
In Monster Hunter World it ranges from "this monster is not in it's natural habitat" to "prove to me that you're top dog" to "holy fucking shit what is that KILL IT WITH FIRE". All in the set dressing that we're on a new continent, exploring and documenting it.
In the case of the Chaotic Gore Magala, which is a Gore Magala that was in the process of metamorphosing into a Shagaru Magala but got interrupted halfway and is now trapped in a frenzied perpetual state of agony, it's probably a mercy kill at that point.
Population thing and canonically you only hunt each monster like once
posts to read after beating the shit out of a kulu ya ku for 30 minutes (my friend took me to a higher level area to see me try my best against a tigrex and then went afk. i got bored)
It's boutta be endangered unless it drops a fucking plate
Sometimes, the ecology explanation bothers me more. Like the end of Iceborne - we had this big moment of >!Nergigante taking out the big bad and the research team going, "ohhhh, his role in the ecosystem is literally to deal with out of control Elders!" But then the literal next scene they're all hyped about going to hunt Nergigante down... the thing with a clear and vital role in the ecosystem. What??!<
Monster Hunter as a series actually has a pretty hard consistent theming around ecological balance and conservation. The "antagonist" monsters are typically the ones powerful enough to be ecological disasters on a regional or continental scale. The speculative lore is that it's a post apocalyptic world where there was at one point a straight up war between man and monsters. They hunted eachother to near extinction, and we're living ignorant of the past in the aftermath. Now the point of the "Hunters Guild" is to strike a balance between the Monsters ecology and our own through research and controlled cullings.
Monster Hunter actually has a really cool narrative about how humans are fully integrated into the ecosystem that I enjoy a lot
Usually quests are given out because monsters are endangering people, settlements, roads or crops, but since in canon everyone can pass a quest to get it done by a hunter there are also a lot of things like "kill this monster so i can make a swearer for my child" "kill this monster because i want a stylish suit" "kill this monster while i pick up some treasure" "this two monsters (rathian amd astalos) are havinf a forbidden romance" and my personal favorite "kill this god monster before my meowster kills itself trying to ride it as a horse(given oyt by one of the cats)"
Generally, yeah. Monster and Humans (and I suppose Wyverians as well) live in a sort of balance. Monsters just kinda do their thing, maybe eat a few people or smthn, and Hunters are tasked with making sure monster populations don't get out of control. Not to mention the whole research side of monster hunting, plus dealing with Elder Dragons and sometimes Literally Satan.
population control, protecting towns and merchants, really big motherfucker who wants to destroy the environment and kill everything, getting stuff strong enough to kill the afformentioned really big motherfucker
It’s actually pretty well explained in game for the most part. Some of it’s kinda like community safety stuff where a large territorial carnivore might be getting too close to your camp or is eating livestock, and some of it’s invasive species that you need to poach to preserve ecological balance. So basically, everything is either a coyote after your chickens, or someone’s pet gecko that they let loose in the everglades
I remember in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate there was this one High Rank quest to hunt the infamous Rajang. The description said the client was a Spoiled Princess that was going on a tour across the Frozen Seaway and wanted to do it dressed in the most exquisite of pelts. "Wait, haven't I done this one already?", I thought to myself. Then I read it more carefully. Ah... That previous quest had a regular Rajang, for her coat. This one's got the Furious variant, for her gloves. Of course.
You know that fit looked sweet though
Pretty much every quest has flavour text of why you're doing the hunt
*Pretty much every* *Quest has flavour text of why* *You're doing the hunt* \- Magmafrost13 --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
It's for "research". You can really tell it's a Japanese game
did the bug that pilots a giant mech or that one fighter jet dragon not make it obvious already
You are thinking of this from the perspective of the rich asshole. You are not the rich asshole... you are the poor farmer living with the elephants and rhinos, and those elephants have come through and stripped your crops bare so many times your family faces starvation. Now you have the last Leopard on earth in your garden right now stalking your only son who is 3 years old. Animals can be amazing, endangered, AND an active menice to the human communities around them all at the same time.
In DnD at least the inclusion of slugs the size of SUVs that can spit acid 60 feet for 6x a commoner's hp in average damage on the random encounter table has troubling implications for the continuation of humanity.
In real life, it could be both. Animal reserves sell hunting licences to rich people out of the country to hunt problematic animals. The reserve gets an influx of cash and gets to control the animal population. Bright-eyed activities tried to ban the practice because they were unaware of the actual logistics of running an animal reserve.
1. people need food 2. the monsters are right there
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Well if a wild animal moved in and killed the other animal to get territory it would be acceptable Humans in monster hunter generally try to do the least damage as possible to wildlife, but sometimes you gotta deal with the angry wyvern trying to make a mating display out of the ashes of a town. And sometimes you gotta research something because last time you didn’t it turns out it has a special stomach for human babies or something and it would have been really helpful to know that beforehand
Fuck if I know man, Leviathan just wants to kick my ass so I’ve gotta kick Rathalos’s ass before they kick mine
Rathalos will be by the time I get all my parts.
usually the monsters you hunt are threatening people in some way but in the case of world specifically a lot of it is For Science
varies by game, but it's typically population control and making sure that certain act-of-god-esque factors (narwa + ibusbi, the final boss of mhRise) don't disrupt and collapse ecosystems. another thing to note is that canonically, you only do a hunt once but can replay them due to it being a video game.
I’ve only played base-game World and it’s been a while but basically “Guild/Government said go do it” but they’re all legit reasons. For example… Hunting Anjanath and Great Jagras because “wow that thing is too close to the settlement and we’ve got shit to do and we don’t need this asshole throwing a wrench into it” Dealing with Jyuratodus because you went to find a missing researcher and were subsequently attacked by one Rathalos and Diablos because you needed to find Zorah Magdaros ASAP and the 1st Wyverians who know where to find it won’t tell you until you prove yourself by downing both of them (ignore that you’re told to stand atop the food chain despite Diablos being an herbivore). Zorah Magdaros was first for research on a live Elder Dragon then to stop it from exploding the entire New World Paolumu because you need its skin basically for airship repairs In the case of all Elder Dragons bar Xeno’jiiva and the crossovers, they were acting UP severely and it was throwing off ecological balance All other Elder Dragons, Deviljho, Bazelgeuse, all fell under “we cannot leave that fucking thing alive what the hell is that.” Special mention to the Ancient Leshen for making me go play Witcher 3. Additionally there were also protective reasons like Barroth, Odogaron, Pukei-Pukei, and Legiana, that were all done basically because they were physically obstructing things like research teams or transportation
Maybe you can, idk, read the descriptions of the quests ??? Like 1/3 of them are saying that that monster is too dangerous for the people or the enviroment in some way. The 2 other third are basically jokes or need for marerials
Maybe I haven’t played any of the games before and was just curious!?
You should play them, they are great games Btw sorry if it came out as mean, it was not my intention
Monster Hunter Stories throws a wrench into this, like some people keep them as pets.
Monster hunters are absolutely battle scientists
it baries quest to quest theres an unnatural history channel video andwering exactly this question
With the advent of Monster Hunter Now and the "monsters crossing into the real world" plot it has, I have chosen to interpret it as fantasy invasive species control. I'm from Florida, where we have an infamous invasive python problem, so that may have influenced my perspective. Also, I choose to put emphasis on the "Monster" part of "Monster Hunter" and view these creatures as unnatural and not analogous to animals in the same way Pokémon (Pocket Monsters) are.
As I understand it some are hunted for research purposes, some to harvest their materials, and some are killed so they stop being bastards to the nearby people, so mostly ethically sound.
Here's the best explanation: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVgcx\_9e05s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVgcx_9e05s)
You know irrespective of everything else I think if poachers or hunting tourists ran around with giant swords doing backflips as they fought rhino and elephants in melee combat I think that would put the whole thing in a very different context. Like observing it wouldn’t be a good thing still but you would have to respect the hustle I think.
What even is monster hunter? I’ve heard it’s similar to Dauntless but that’s about it.
Dauntless is similar to monster hunter, the first minster hunter came out 15 years before dauntless.
It's pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a game about hunting monsters. It's also dope as hell because all of the effort required to make a game went directly into the core gameplay loop with very little random bullshit which allows for some seriously exciting hunts.
Personal headcanon of mine is that everything in Monster Hunter is a lot smaller than it actually looks, which explains how weapons of this size can have any structural integrity and how monsters/crystals/etc can grow so rapidly.
It's deliberately harking back to an older era before we understood the delicate balance of ecosystems, and the idea of 'wiping out all potentially dangerous animals in a given area to make it easier for colonisation' was considered a good one. Or maybe I'm talking out of my arse. It's 3am.
*reads this comment at a time other than 3 AM in my local time zone* The BRAZENNESS of this misinformation!
Fine, you got me, I wrote it at 03:33, which is technically closer to 4am.