Game News You don’t know it, but Monster Hunter has an exceptional story! A look back at a saga that marked the history of video games

Game news You don’t know it, but Monster Hunter has an exceptional story! A look back at a saga that marked the history of video games

Monster Hunter World has just surpassed the 25 million sales mark this Monday, March 11. Surely one of the strangest coincidences that can exist when we know that the first game in the franchise was released 20 years earlier, to the day. And this success, although resounding, is far from being a surprise: it is the culmination of two decades of hard work. The franchise has been able, from the start, to breathe a breath of fresh air into the world of video games by offering gigantic monster hunts, plentiful loot and the crafting of ever more imposing armor. A true social phenomenon in Japan, Monster Hunter quickly spread across the globe and still enjoys certain success in the West.

Monster Hunter 1: The beginnings of success

To be honest, Monster Hunter is probably the least successful opus in the franchise. But there is one thing that cannot be taken away from him: he laid the foundations for everything that will charm the public for years to come. It’s an action RPG where you have to face imposing creatures that are very different from each other. There is a village which acts as a central hub and which is used to buy survival items, food to grant powerful upgrades and something to forge our dream equipment. Once the player feels up to it, it’s time to accept a quest and go hunting. Between the forest, the desert, the volcano or the mountain, each zone has its own biome and its own monsters. The final goal of Monster Hunter is to overcome all these creatures in order to recover their materials and thus forge ever more sophisticated weapons and armor..

But to understand the Monster Hunter phenomenon, we have to go back in time a little. At the beginning of the 2000s, in addition to wanting to emancipate itself from arcade games Street Fighter (which had the good times of the 90s), Capcom is led to think about a new license and this, because of one thing: their desire to create an RPG that could be played online. Their first source of inspiration was Phantasy Star Online, released on Dreamcast in 1998, which is considered the first MMORPG in history. But it is the emergence of online multiplayer brought by the new generation of consoles (PS2 in 2000, Xbox in 2001) which pushes them forward.

It was therefore in 2001 that producers Tsuyoshi Yanaka (Devil May Cry 2 and 3) and Noritaka Funamizu (Street Fighter) were brought on board, as well as artistic director Kaname Fujioka, the future face of the franchise.. Even if the initial idea is already announced (typing big monsters with several people), the Monster Hunter that we know is still far from being born. Basically, the studio set out on a fantasy world with magic and mystical creatures. It was our dear Fujioka who refocused the project around nature and the hunting of more – or less – realistic monsters. The game was presented for the first time at E3 2003 and was released a year later in Japan, on March 11, 2004, while the West would have to wait until May 27, 2005 to taste it.

The first opus was therefore popular in Japan as soon as it was released, with a total of 300,000 copies sold throughout the country.. The title also won the Game of the Year award at the CESA (the local Game Awards). For this reason, Monster Hunter was able to create a small community around monster hunting. However, Western audiences were not really impressed. The fault is too high a difficulty and a few other flaws, including an incomplete online mode and gameplay that would scare away more than one person. Indeed, when we see the state of the gameplay with the controller with the obligation to attack with the joystick, we understand certain reluctance. But despite that, the obvious success that the game had in Japan pushed Capcom to repeat the operation.

More than a game, a phenomenon

After this first successful attempt, Capcom decided to export its first games to Sony’s new console, the PSP, in a format called “Monster Hunter Freedom” (or Portable in Japan). But beyond porting its games to other consoles, the publisher is starting to develop so-called “Ultimate” versions. These are extensions which arrive on the market one year after the release of the initial title and which bring new content. With this new export and the Ultimate versions, the monster hunter franchise will move up a notch in popularity.

It was therefore in 2008 in Japan (2009 in Europe) that Monster Hunter Freedom Unite was released. This is the Ultimate PSP version of Monster Hunter 2, released two years earlier. And this game is literally becoming a phenomenon in a very short time. 800,000 copies were sold around the world in less than a week and the title became the best seller of the year in the Japanese Archipelago, thus overtaking Nintendo which was considered unbeatable there.. A year later, Capcom decided to re-release the game in “The Best” (low-cost version of the game which is similar to PlayStation Hits) which makes it possible to relaunch sales and reach 3.5 million units worldwide.

Thanks to this strategy, Monster Hunter Freedom Unite literally explodes all records: it becomes the second best seller in the history of the PSP (behind GTA Liberty City), but also the best seller in the history of the Japanese studio. The game itself featured graphical improvements as well as a twice-larger bestiary, new varieties of weapons and great local multiplayer.

From there, Capcom made two important decisions for its new license: on the one hand, to export it completely throughout the world, and on the other hand, to release games derived from their universe. This is how we discovered the first (and last) MMORPG of the license, called Monster Hunter Online, which will only be released in China. It didn’t really do well but made the mouths of all Western fans water, notably thanks to the broadcast of numerous gameplay videos on YouTube. But MH Online is not Capcom’s only attempt to take its license towards other paths. Among their many attempts, the one that has proven to be the most lucrative is Monster Hunter Stories. Released in 2016, it’s a Pokémon-like where you can create your team of monsters and have them fight in turn-based gameplay. The two Stories opuses have sold more than 2 million copies and have attracted new players to join the Monster Hunter license.

As for the main series, the game called Monster Hunter Generations (2015), which brought together a lot of content from the old games, didn’t really please everyone. Fans wanted their favorite franchise to go even further and it didn’t take long for their prayers to be answered.

Monster Hunter World, the ultimate hunting game

On January 26, 2018, after 24 games and 14 years of existence, the license Monster Hunter offers an international launch for the first time with Monster Hunter World on PS4 and Xbox One (a year later on PC). The game lived up to its name very well because it became a global phenomenon upon its release, with more than 6 million sales in the space of two weeks. It thus outperforms all its competitors at Capcom and allows the franchise to become a must for the company. And it must be said that this success is not trivial: Monster Hunter World is the culmination of everything his predecessors had accomplished up to that point.

It is a renewal on practically all aspects of the license. On the one hand, from a technical point of view, we are entitled to a clear graphics improvement with, for the first time, a Monster Hunter game in 4K which runs at 60 fps. The environments are very detailed and give the impression of being immersed in a living, vibrant nature. The bestiary also gets a little spruce up by offering many more monsters than before. Finally, the gameplay is overhauled to the delight of fans.

But the supremacy of Monster Hunter World does not stop there, because in 2019 the Ultimate version of the game, Iceborne, is released. This extension completely boosts sales of the title by offering more important content than the base game. There are then 71 large monsters in total, including 15 new creatures and mythical beasts from old opuses like the Fatalis or the Alatreon. The game brings a new snowy area and above all extremely rich endgame content.

Today, MH World reached 25 million sales and ranks 38th among the best-selling games in history, alongside Cyberpunk 2077 and GTA 4. The 11 million sales of MH Rise, released in 2021, and the announcement of MH Wilds in December 2023 show that the license is in its best form. And although many have tried to repeat the feat, like Wild Hearts or Dauntless, none have succeeded. Let’s hope that Monster Hunter will continue to chase away all competition for a long time to come.