As if it wasn't obvious enough from the stage upon which Capcom chose to introduce the newest Monster Hunter, this one's going to be a little different. Monster Hunter World, which opted out of the series' traditional Japanese debut to break cover during Sony's conference at this year's E3, is a hard play for the west, an attempt to win over an audience that the series has been wooing for a while now. Will it manage to do so? I'm not entirely convinced it can, but also I'm not entirely fussed - because either way, Monster Hunter World ushers in some very welcome changes for the series.
The first, quite obviously, is the platform itself, and some ten years after Satoru Iwata first announced Nintendo's remarkable coup in wrangling the series away from Sony with the Wii's Monster Hunter Tri there's something slightly strange about playing it on PlayStation hardware again, even if it is a homecoming of sorts. The past few years have seen Monster Hunter carve its way into the heart of the 3DS, and making the leap from the handheld Generations to World can be quite the eye-opener.
There was some confusion around the announcement about why this - ostensibly the fifth mainline entry in the series, with the directing team of 4 and 4 Ultimate returning after the compilation piece that was Generations - isn't carrying the number 5, but in truth the generational leap feels like it's worthy of more than a simple ticking over of a digit. The vistas are vast, complex and beautiful things (not that its predecessors were any slouch, as playing a scaled-up XX on the Switch attests), and the most profound improvement is how they're now all linked-up, no longer partitioned by loading screens.
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