I played the final preview build of Monster Hunter Wilds, and the 2 beasts I hunted were the best kind of absolute freaks

Monster Hunter contains multitudes. Not just multitudes of monsters, but multitudes of moods. What other game series would open with a child’s village being destroyed by a raging mythological beast, then an hour later devote five minutes to a cutscene of a roided-out chicken chasing a bunch of cats carrying a giant steak over their heads?

Wilds veers from glimmering sincerity to hoo-ra action to outright horror in sheer defiance of tone as a concept. It’s not the first Capcom game to do so and make it work, but I’m hoping that more of the horror awaits deeper in this Monster Hunter, because the small taste for it I got in a recent preview build wasn’t enough.

We’ve already written about how impressive the storytelling bits of Monster Hunter’s early hours are compared to past games in the series, and I felt the same playing through some of the early hunts at a Capcom preview event in January. So I’ll skip right to the new stuff: a couple fights deeper into the campaign that Capcom threw me into after I’d shaken the rust off my insect glaive and remembered how to dance in the air (a key glaive move missing in the beta that has thankfully been restored for the final game).

The two monsters I fought, which haven’t been in earlier preview builds or in the recent Monster Hunter Wilds beta, are truly some of Capcom’s nastiest, freakiest creations. So of course I fought them shortly after hunting a giant farting monkey.

First there was Rompopolo, a bulbous, slithering birdsect that I assume is filled with the raw substance they distill nightmare fuel from. You can’t give a monster with a body like that a beak! With a long tongue!! I want the Capcom artist behind Rompopolo awarded both a medal and a high-ranking position on an internet watchlist.

Capcom has already shown off this corporeal sack of screams before, but I finally got to fight it, and found it went down surprisingly easily—which just makes me worried about what extra moves Rompopolo may be saving for a later Apex form.

The second monster I fought, Nerscylla, returns from an older game in the series, but exceeds the usual horror threshold of “big spider” by being a big spider with a dangly, fleshy cowling of some kind. I only got to fight Nerscylla once, but I think it’s either wearing some kind of monster poncho or has molted but not bothered to clear off the ol’ dead skin. A bit of extra flesh never hurt anybody, I guess.

Though maybe it slowed Nerscylla down a bit—as with Rompopolo, this hunt went down pretty easily with a four-player co-op squad tackling those spindly legs. Monster Hunter Wilds’ new wound system, which lets you deal extra damage and stagger monsters by targeting specific body parts, seems to make the game easier on the whole than Monster Hunter: World. I’m prepared to eat those worlds once I get into some of the later High Rank hunts in the final game, though.

I just hope a few of those hunts live up to the body horror oddity of Rompopolo or the more conventional but still effective arachnophobe punch of a Nerscylla. Maybe a somehow-more-twisted version of Vaal Hazak? Something entirely new? Perhaps one day Capcom will be brave enough to let Monster Hunters battle the most horrifying prey of all… man. 😱

You’ll have to wait until February 27 to fight Monster Hunter Wilds’ nastiest creatures, but a few good fights still await in the second half of the open beta, running from February 13 to 16.