The first time you meet Nargacuga he prowls around waiting for someone to finally cut through the green. Unceremoniously you approach and the fight begins – as they all do – with a slap. In Nargacuga’s case it’s a wild swing of the tail, something so swift and fierce that there’s barely time to register the hitbox before you’re sent flying across a porcupine haze. As hunters, most of our encounters begin that way ; bloody tastes followed by revenge on a motive yet unknown, led by a species that just doesn’t care for our neat little preparations, a divorce perpetually in the making until you learn the patterns and the tells, even begin to dodge every move as if by second nature and emerge from the other side with a point of your own. The chicken-panther thingy becomes a simple matter of rehearsed inputs meant to maximize the harvest out of a pixel corpse; in this meat-grinding lesson Nargacuga is the impossible apex predator - a killing machine to make a bitch out of through the intimate language of portable wet-work. It’s just what we do, bleak and repetitive, strikingly animated, in the arena as in the jungle, trading blows for skeletons and every time you see them, and by that I mean truly perceive them on screen, with swords coming down and last-second realizations that this screaming charge can’t be avoided, even as you start to speedrun those hunts in search of G-Ranked material, assembling tails and bladders into the largest gunlance known to man, the monsters of Monster Hunter rarely cease to be just that. Their embodiment primes each one for mythologization, just short of being genuine paleontological wonders in fear of a reskin. They may be at the top of the food chain but you, you’re something else. You know them more perfectly than they ever could, down to the last inch. Such is the nature of the hunt ; to play Monster Hunter is to learn to love the things you kill until one day a Nargacuga comes your way.
It’s the little things seen in gameplay and heard throughout each encounter (Imagine a submarine on tribal alert) that have made Nargacuga into this force of nature we know today. The more you fight It, the more you accumulate a widening array of ideas about what the monster is, what its strengths and weaknesses are in relation to your respective ideas about buildup and play practices, followed by their subsequent deflation when finally faced with the harsh, epic game reality that is Freedom Unite. A muscle memory’s tested in reaction to signature moves, deadly mistakes and triumphant runs interwoven by the split-seconds where nothing special happens, dodge-rolls leading into character reassessments – and then all you have left is eyeing each other. "Look at us, in this videogame." A truck-sized feline fantasy. But like I said Nargacuga’s different – otherwise I wouldn’t be here making what shouldn’t be an especially hard case given its popularity among the fanbase. What I want to emphasize is how much Nargacuga always reminds you – me – that it’s just a game fiend, that whilst none of its particulars ever threaten to breach the other side every animation pushes you to imagine what could have been. Just one more slice into the cushion and I might be put in doubt. That’s what happens after ten years of fighting the same creature, from desperately trying to prolong an imaginary combo spewed-out of the two-buttons attack pipeline to grooving in and out of sync with the wealth of attacking options found in Iceborne’s emotionless wasteland, Nargacuga is everywhere, touches everything and embodies an uneven friction in Monster Hunter history that made the terse into an exchange. And it’s live. Your first monster is like your first Souls is like your first bike except Nargacuga wasn't my very first at all. Monster Hunter Tri's aquatic swamps and online tribulations came before - made for the better game - and 4 Ultimate would later have for itself the hint of story, a real sense of physical progression through the fiction and within the environments that no game in the series has been able to emulate since (one day, time permitting, I’ll profess my love for this silly little game on here). But in-between these respective milestones in a franchise that's always relied on prudent mutations lies Nargacuga – seeing it, facing it, is an instant reminder of the aesthetic possibilities of the franchise: if - and only if - I can beat this stretch of biology and live to tell the tale then who's to say of my chances in the wider world? You can kill the hunter but not the idea. Monster Hunter was always the product of unsavoury values towards animal life, rendered, sizzled-down to the lean purity of the hunt, that is until you realize that in order to craft the asset a kill must be rendered twice. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling but faith never wavers when the beast is so assuredly angry and determined in seeing your end. There are way harder monsters in Freedom Unite than Narcaguca - look no further than its rig cousin, Tigrex. There is, however, no monster that feels more like a monster to me regardless of the entry it inhabits. That’s a feat. My hunch for the longest time was that the series awkwardly sat between the "Catch'em all" fetish and FromSoft's reverence for the figure of the Minotaur - our nightmares were not cute enough to serve a virtual safari and lacked the mythological context to be examined under a narrative lens, but loved them we did, regardless. There's a certain beauty in that, seeing my relationship with Nargacuga as set. It's kill or be-killed all the way, or so it used to be because now I'm not so sure and a panther is never enough when one starts killing dragons by the dozens though it's often been the most charming argument of the earlier generations ; in Monster Hunter the grind works towards a de-escalation of the apocalypse - power not in service of entropy as seen in Dark Souls but of its reverse force, your Kushala Daoras and White Fatalises existing in the shape of playful, repeatable catastrophes for the player to engage (and defuse), even when, like in Dos, the tedium of survival heightened the stakes and - perhaps - made for a more syncretic representation of ecosystems. Monster Hunter is amniotic awesomeness and in this Nargacuga, I think, set the pace. A panther is never enough when eventually the players could have something like Zinogre in Portable 3rd or later Rise’s Magnamalo; these monsters function differently from - and in direct conversation with - Nargacuga, on par with design tendencies that reflect the franchise’s full-blown foray into exuberant, ultra-rich systems of fantasy dedicated to making the player feel like a boundless performer that could revel in the pile-on of quests and multiplayer incentives. In that sense, it’s a logical evolutionary step to grow-out some Oni fangs, defer the task to lightning itself - I mean, Teostra was blowing us helplessly in 2008, and dotted sparks do make for immediate visual responses. Still every time these monsters come onscreen, so full of polygons and visions, their theme songs screwed in my head, here revised, heightened by an orchestra maximal, I see “the weapon to surpass Metal Gear'' whereas I want to imagine an Anti-Nargacuga - no next-gen nor nostalgia but a secret, third thing. Maybe we got it with the monsters of Lordran and Boletaria - kinda, who knows - but Dark Souls’ cruelty is too entrenched, its jokes awfully repetitive and one-note for my taste, and hell am I terrible at using the wirebug in creative ways to transport myself inside these maps which require no footing. And maybe what we saw was always a byproduct of blurry reflections, yearning to turn the hunt into an indiscriminate affair of numbers as soon as possible. This would mean that there’s only ever one monster, fine-tuned, morphing with every evolution of the combat system towards this brave new World and its wider verticalities. Hack'n'slash a deeper body. I hate this idea. We've been doing the same thing for a long time so three cheers for Nargacuga. Into the slaughterhouse and away we go.
Feels good to put the old dog down, every now and then.
It’s the little things seen in gameplay and heard throughout each encounter (Imagine a submarine on tribal alert) that have made Nargacuga into this force of nature we know today. The more you fight It, the more you accumulate a widening array of ideas about what the monster is, what its strengths and weaknesses are in relation to your respective ideas about buildup and play practices, followed by their subsequent deflation when finally faced with the harsh, epic game reality that is Freedom Unite. A muscle memory’s tested in reaction to signature moves, deadly mistakes and triumphant runs interwoven by the split-seconds where nothing special happens, dodge-rolls leading into character reassessments – and then all you have left is eyeing each other. "Look at us, in this videogame." A truck-sized feline fantasy. But like I said Nargacuga’s different – otherwise I wouldn’t be here making what shouldn’t be an especially hard case given its popularity among the fanbase. What I want to emphasize is how much Nargacuga always reminds you – me – that it’s just a game fiend, that whilst none of its particulars ever threaten to breach the other side every animation pushes you to imagine what could have been. Just one more slice into the cushion and I might be put in doubt. That’s what happens after ten years of fighting the same creature, from desperately trying to prolong an imaginary combo spewed-out of the two-buttons attack pipeline to grooving in and out of sync with the wealth of attacking options found in Iceborne’s emotionless wasteland, Nargacuga is everywhere, touches everything and embodies an uneven friction in Monster Hunter history that made the terse into an exchange. And it’s live. Your first monster is like your first Souls is like your first bike except Nargacuga wasn't my very first at all. Monster Hunter Tri's aquatic swamps and online tribulations came before - made for the better game - and 4 Ultimate would later have for itself the hint of story, a real sense of physical progression through the fiction and within the environments that no game in the series has been able to emulate since (one day, time permitting, I’ll profess my love for this silly little game on here). But in-between these respective milestones in a franchise that's always relied on prudent mutations lies Nargacuga – seeing it, facing it, is an instant reminder of the aesthetic possibilities of the franchise: if - and only if - I can beat this stretch of biology and live to tell the tale then who's to say of my chances in the wider world? You can kill the hunter but not the idea. Monster Hunter was always the product of unsavoury values towards animal life, rendered, sizzled-down to the lean purity of the hunt, that is until you realize that in order to craft the asset a kill must be rendered twice. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling but faith never wavers when the beast is so assuredly angry and determined in seeing your end. There are way harder monsters in Freedom Unite than Narcaguca - look no further than its rig cousin, Tigrex. There is, however, no monster that feels more like a monster to me regardless of the entry it inhabits. That’s a feat. My hunch for the longest time was that the series awkwardly sat between the "Catch'em all" fetish and FromSoft's reverence for the figure of the Minotaur - our nightmares were not cute enough to serve a virtual safari and lacked the mythological context to be examined under a narrative lens, but loved them we did, regardless. There's a certain beauty in that, seeing my relationship with Nargacuga as set. It's kill or be-killed all the way, or so it used to be because now I'm not so sure and a panther is never enough when one starts killing dragons by the dozens though it's often been the most charming argument of the earlier generations ; in Monster Hunter the grind works towards a de-escalation of the apocalypse - power not in service of entropy as seen in Dark Souls but of its reverse force, your Kushala Daoras and White Fatalises existing in the shape of playful, repeatable catastrophes for the player to engage (and defuse), even when, like in Dos, the tedium of survival heightened the stakes and - perhaps - made for a more syncretic representation of ecosystems. Monster Hunter is amniotic awesomeness and in this Nargacuga, I think, set the pace. A panther is never enough when eventually the players could have something like Zinogre in Portable 3rd or later Rise’s Magnamalo; these monsters function differently from - and in direct conversation with - Nargacuga, on par with design tendencies that reflect the franchise’s full-blown foray into exuberant, ultra-rich systems of fantasy dedicated to making the player feel like a boundless performer that could revel in the pile-on of quests and multiplayer incentives. In that sense, it’s a logical evolutionary step to grow-out some Oni fangs, defer the task to lightning itself - I mean, Teostra was blowing us helplessly in 2008, and dotted sparks do make for immediate visual responses. Still every time these monsters come onscreen, so full of polygons and visions, their theme songs screwed in my head, here revised, heightened by an orchestra maximal, I see “the weapon to surpass Metal Gear'' whereas I want to imagine an Anti-Nargacuga - no next-gen nor nostalgia but a secret, third thing. Maybe we got it with the monsters of Lordran and Boletaria - kinda, who knows - but Dark Souls’ cruelty is too entrenched, its jokes awfully repetitive and one-note for my taste, and hell am I terrible at using the wirebug in creative ways to transport myself inside these maps which require no footing. And maybe what we saw was always a byproduct of blurry reflections, yearning to turn the hunt into an indiscriminate affair of numbers as soon as possible. This would mean that there’s only ever one monster, fine-tuned, morphing with every evolution of the combat system towards this brave new World and its wider verticalities. Hack'n'slash a deeper body. I hate this idea. We've been doing the same thing for a long time so three cheers for Nargacuga. Into the slaughterhouse and away we go.
Feels good to put the old dog down, every now and then.