The 2nd trailer for MH Wilds has been out for a couple weeks now and I want talk through some of my thoughts. I enjoyed what I saw, but was expecting a little more…

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Overall Opinion

The trailer seems to show more of a thread of a questline, and I appreciate much of what we were shown. I was hoping to see some standard combat or normal gameplay, but this trailer really focused on the new monster, the seikret, and a glimmer of combat feel. The female hunter looks and sounds great, and the exposition and storytelling bits we see in the trailer have me really excited. The final monster we see is a bit of a mystery, and might just be the flagship of the game!

Balahara

The balahara are new sand leviathan monsters. The ‘leviathan’ moniker is important because that means they aren’t ‘piscene wyverns’ like jyuratodus, beotodus, or plesioth and are instead more like nibelsnarf, almudron, or mizutsune. Given their movements, snakey, fishy movements, this was a surprise to me. It has an ominous glow in its mouth and can spit some goopy stuff. They seem to create sand pits for hunters and prey to fall into, which reminded me a lot of the diablos pit in the wildspire waste in MH World. From the trailer, it almost feels like they will be among the first monsters we fight, but likely not the first - I don’t think they’re the next great jagras, and are more likely to be in a spot similar to where jyuratodus was in MH World; jyuratodus was predator of barroth and the balahara has been shown as predator of the doshaguma. We also saw a set-piece of a reddish balahara hanging from a rock. This might be a balahara in rage mode, or a different kind, seeing as we saw multiple colors of doshaguma in the last trailer.

Seikret and Combat

This trailer really served up the seikret as a critical part of the gameplay. The trailer begins with a chase through the sand with a mysterious person who is likely a non-hunting npc. We see mounted attacks from both the greatsword and the heavy bowgun in addition to the mounted slinger use we saw in the last trailer. We even see a mounted dodge of some sort. I’m interested to see how much the seikret will be involved in hunting, especially if they serve as the location for weapon swapping. We saw from MH Rise that sharpening or healing from the palamute can be exceptionally powerful, and if that’s the case with the seikret, we might see exceptionally powerful monsters to compensate for hunter power creep.

What’s Next?

• My history with the series
• Summaries of what I’m currently playing: MH4U and Sunbreak
• A guide to modded MHFU emulation
• MH Stories?
• Follow-up with more MH Wilds news/speculation
• Ideas for some Monster zines
• WILD HEARTZ?

Thank you for reading!

nuzcraft

Image Credits: monsterhunter.com