Your Weapon is not my Weapon: on Monster Hunter's 'Combat Landscape'
Monster Hunter is an action-RPG series where your character build is totally defined by equipment. The weapon you have equipped defines your moves and affordances, and the fourteen MH weapons are somewhat analogous to character classes. There's two halves that make up the 'combat feel' unique to those games: the weapons, and the monsters themselves; and the weapons really are a huge point of focus. People 'main' different weapons in the way that you might 'main' a class in an MMO or a character in a fighting game.
MH's combat is made out of a bunch of overall mechanical themes that are familiar to players of different kinds of action games: resource management, timing, positioning, and so on. None of these mechanics are really unique to MH; but what's unusual is the series' approach to using them as recurring elements that overlap in different ways.
Here's a metaphor: the MH weapons are points in a complex landscape of hills and valleys; each a unique vantage point that sees some, but not all, of these underlying mechanical ideas. It's all the same combat system, but each weapon is a different way of looking at it; some elements are out of view, others are in the background, and others are front-and-center. Changing your weapon changes your vantage point on combat; you now care about different things.
Of course, different equipment giving you different affordances is common in the action-RPG genre. To pluck out a recent example, in Obsidian's excellent Avowed, dual wielding weapons renders you unable to block; the game has parry mechanics that disappear entirely for certain loadouts.
What sets MH apart is that more or less every mechanic is occluded for some weapon or another, excepting perhaps the barest skeleton of the combat system – hitting the monster to do damage, positioning yourself so you don't get hit in return.
For example, unsheathing one of the lance-family weapons replaces the familiar dodge-rolling with sort of 'hop' that moves you rigidly forward, back, left, or right while retaining your orientation.
Even where weapons share a mechanic, they will take different perspectives on it – again, think of approaching or departing from a visible landmark on our 'landscape' of combat mechanics. Countering ('parrying') monster attacks is integral to longsword play, but the switch axe views it as a rewarding extra, an advanced maneuver. Move a little further and you can't see this 'landmark' at all – the insect glaive, eg, has no countering move of any kind.
So here's survey of the landscape; the landmarks you can see from each vantage point.
Sword and Shield
The sword and shield has no singular overarching theme. It cares a lot about positioning, as a weapon with high mobility but terrible reach; but it also cares somewhat about monster management, as one of the weapons that can stun the monster. The sword and shield only stuns when using the shield bashing attacks, and so it is one of the few weapons that explicitly asks you to make a tactical choice between dealing stun and just dealing damage.
It is one of the few weapons without meters, gauges, inherent buffs, or other buff/timer/resource-management aspects. What it does have, however, is fairly precise inputs and some combo learning curve.
S&S is often thought of as a good beginner weapon because it is closer to the assumptions you typically hold about most action games; it doesn't slow you down when unsheathed, and it doesn't stop you from using items either
But using it effectively to deal damage requires knowing and executing some of the more complex inputs in the game; the main big-damage combo for the S&S (the 'perfect rush') is particularly demanding of some more precise inputs that are almost akin to what you'd find in a fighting game. Wilds in particular, leans into the idea; the cognitive space freed up by not having to manage resources or weapon state is taken up by being very deliberate about your inputs.
For example, one of the SnS's best damaging combos can only start when you have the left analog stick in neutral; pushing it forward leads into the 'shield bash' combo that's used for stunning the monster, instead. On the SnS's other bread-and-butter combo, every move reacts to movement input by changing which sword swing you do and how it moves you; skilled players can use this to keep in position without breaking their attack. Heavier weapons tend to be rooted in place while attacking, so thinking about this is particular to the SnS and some other high-mobility weapons.
Great Sword
The Great Sword leans all the way into one of the ideas that are iconic to MH but unusual to the action-RPG genre in general: Unsheathing your weapon causes you to move very, very slowly. The great sword is, traditionally, a weapon that spends a lot of its time in the sheath and only comes out when there's a significant chance to do damage.
In more recent generations, however, the great sword's identity has shifted as a sort of bullying version of a countering weapon. You're not so much parrying attacks as just using 'hyper armor', the action game mechanic where certain attacks can't be interrupted by damage. By powering through monster attacks, you can heft and swing the massive weapon to hit at just the right time. This, then, turns the GS into one of the more tactical weapons; it's all about reading and reacting to the monster.
Specifically, it's about knowing which of your different damage-dealing combos – some of which take a long time to charge up – will fit into a given opening, a sort of game of temporal tetris with push-your-luck elements.
Longsword
The longsword's basic premise is that you power up your weapon either by completing a long combo string, or by successfully countering a monster attack. The weapon is much more effective in its powered-up state, so you really want to get there as fast as possible and be able to do it again consistently.
As the 'easy' way of powering up is not really practical against faster or more aggressive monsters, learning to counter is critical to using the weapon well.
The twist is that you can't enter any of your counter moves from a neutral stance; you can only do them as part of a combo, following up another attack. The weapon's central idea, then, is maintaining combo flow, weaving in those counter moves into a string of inputs. It rewards reading and reacting to what the monster is doing, staying aggressive (you literally can't defend without attacking first), and learning the intricacies of how the timing works; really good longsword users understand instinctively how many frames they can wait after the animation for one move ends before they can no longer initiate the next move, and they use this to be able to counter at the right time consistently.
Beyond that, there's just a little resource management, as you try to hold on that buffed state as long as possible or opt to burn it to fuel a powerful attack.
Dual blades
The dual blades do away with a lot of the restrictive slowness that MH combat usually has; you move fast and your attacks are generally low commitment. In exchange, you have to constantly monitor your stamina, which is a resource that other weapons generally only use for dodging.
The dual blades are most effective in "demon mode", a buffed state that you can enter at will but which continuously drains your stamina. Hitting the monster in demon mode fills the "demon gauge"; once full, the gauge is then spent to fuel more powerful attacks while out of demon mode.
The idea is to be weaving in and out of demon mode to keep both demon gauge and stamina topped up, while at the same weaving around the monster to keep hitting it constantly without getting caught by its attacks. 'Modal' weapons are a recurring idea in Monster Hunter, as is the idea of one mode that fuels the other mode. But the dual blades explore that in a slightly skewed way where you 'dive' into demon mode and then 'come up for air' in normal mode, with a lot of the weapon skill lying in being able to effectively maximize both modes.
Insect Glaive
The IG is a weird weapon across multiple axes; it almost feels like the 'weirder cousin' to a more staid 'normal glaive' weapon that doesn't exist - like if the Gunlance existed but not the Lance.
The IG is, first, a buff management weapon. The glaive is paired with a 'kinsect', a 'pet' that attacks the monster and gathers 'extracts' from it; these extracts buff the glaive user, and more generally the glaive is only useful in its buffed state.
To fully buff you have to acquire three extracts from different parts of the monster. The glaive in Wilds has multiple extract-gathering tools, each ideal for a different situation, as well as a couple of shortcuts to gathering all the extracts together. But buffing up is required; this brings in an element of aiming (as the kinsect itself is kind of a ranged weapon of sorts), as well as monster knowledge and good positioning.
There's a huge difference in effectiveness between a glaive user who can consistently buff quickly, and one that spends a lot of time poking at the monster with their bug trying to get themselves ready to actually use their weapon. It's a very odd experience compared to most of the other weapons; there's a built-in 'sizing up' period.
Once buffed, the IG becomes a fast-attacking weapon like the dual blades, but with two additional dimensions. One is that your kinsect will attack the monster automatically once you 'mark' the monster; it also deals damage and leaves behind clouds of dust that detonate for an effect when hit by the glaive.
The other is a literal extra dimension: the IG is the only weapon that allows you to jump into the air at will, using the glaive like a vaulting pole. Hitting the monster with an aerial attack will let you bounce off it, extending your airtime.
This is, of course, a lot of fun, but it also gives glaive a whole extra layer of nuanced monster knowledge; you have to learn to read monster attacks with an eye to whether or not you can safely fly over them. Some attacks are more safely dodged by jumping, but only an IG would really know which ones.
Historically, the IG has been balanced in one of two ways. In World, aerial attacks deal relatively poor damage, and their reason for being is that you can often be attacking in the air at times when the monster is too dangerous or unpredictable to hit on the ground. In Rise and Wilds, by contrast, aerial attacks deal an escalating amount of damage as you continue to hit the monster and stay in the air for longer, encouraging their use as a more general option relative to the ground-bound attacks.
Lance
The lance's player fantasy is pretty obvious: with a big shield and a poky stick, you are supposed to latch on to the monster's face like a tick and simply annoy it to death with a constant stream of weak attacks.
The lance is the ultimate 'uptime' weapon. It has no big-damage option to take advantage of a big opening. To the lance, everything is an opening; you are always poking, always slowly tearing at the monster bit by bit, shrugging off its attacks and then poking some more. This is another distinction we can draw space, between maximizing limited opportunities (as with the great sword) and simple consistency over time (as with the lance).
The actual pattern of lance play focuses, also, on the idea of movement and positioning with unusual tools. The lance doesn't have a dodge roll and doesn't allow you to freely move around; instead, you hop and strafe, playing almost with tank controls. The lance's movement biases towards charging forward, while giving you limited options to get out of danger.
As such, the lance is one of the more elemental, almost trance-like weapons. There's not much to it other than positioning and timing, and so it's the weapon for people who want to really perfect positioning and timing.
Gunlance
The gunlance trades in the lance's consistency and some of its mobility options in favor of (literally) burst damage; the 'gun' part is not a ranged weapon but rather short-ranged explosions that you set off at point blank range.
The gunlance takes the lance's idea of limited movement and staples it to a much more technical game of resource and combo management. The gunlance's best attacks are all lurking deep in its combo strings, but there are both multiple ways to access them and multiple different "off-ramps" that lead to different powerful attacks; choosing between them is a matter both of build theory and situational specificity.
Individual gunlances favor different approaches, but the gunlance has three different types of ammo – sometimes it's best to fire off your "less optimal" attack, sometimes it's best to reload.
Hammer
The hammer's main claim to fame is that it deals blunt damage; blunt damage dealt to the monster's head builds up the stun status effect. This gives hammer players a very directed set of goals in every hunt: Hit the head until the monster is knocked out so you can hit its head even more.
Mechanically, the hammer is similar to the great sword in that it's a heavy weapon with a hold-button-to-charge-attack mechanic. But unlike the GS, it has very good mobility, allowing the player to move as they charge. Also unlike the GS's charge, different hammer charge levels lead into completely different moves and combos.
So the core of hammer play is to charge just enough to perform the combo that fits the opening that you have, while continuously moving around to keep hitting the monster's head (so you can keep stunning it, so you can keep hitting the monster's head more).
I think the hammer is a really interesting case study in that it has a very strong player fantasy and surface-level identity (hit the monster on the head so you can hit the monster more on the head), but that's paired to an equally strong and unique mechanical vantage point that complements it.
The hammer's player fantasy is slightly off-kilter, a little sideways from the more obvious idea of just hitting the monster with a really big sword; the mechanics, similarly, are also a little off-kilter.
Hunting Horn
The hunting horn uses the basic mechanical bones of the hammer (mobile but slow attacks, blunt damage) but builds something very different on top. Attacking with the hunting horn will put a 'note' on a 'musical staff'; each possible 'note' is mapped to one of the attack inputs (on a Playstation controller: triangle, circle, or triangle + circle).
Every horn attack can flow into an attack for any of the three notes, allowing for 'songs' to be played by performing attacks in different orders; and these combo strings are unique per specific horn. Completing a 'melody' of 3-5 notes will 'load it' so it can be 'performed' with the horn's special attack; performing will then apply a party-wide buff, or deal extra damage.
The hunting horn is sort of the ultimate combo memorizer weapon; each individual horn has different melodies, and each melody has nuances of timing and performance. A triangle input is always a white note, but where that input happens in relation to other inputs determines which actual attack animation goes along with it; playing hammer effectively involves playing songs as you attack the monster, dealing damage while generating buffs and other effects.
In essence, there are two 'layers' to what the horn player is doing, and optimal play means harmonizing (ha) both: the 'song' layer of which buffs you're trying to keep up, and the 'attack combo' layer of which attack animations you're trying to perform.
Of all the weapons, the hunting horn is the one that most approaches the idea of just layering a whole subgame on top of MH's normal combat ideas.
Switch Axe
The switch axe has two modes: one mobile and long-reaching, one low-mobility but hard-hitting. Axe mode fills the gauge that is then spent to attack in sword mode. Switching from one mode to the other is itself an attack, allowing for combos to flow across the different weapon modes fluidly.
The switch axe expresses two of the major mechanical ideas in MH combat – resource management and combo decision trees – in a very pure way, which makes it (in my mind) one of the weapons that most cleanly exemplifies the idea of what MH combat "is". It's kind of a middle of the road weapon; it's not particularly mobile nor particularly immobile, it doesn't attack all that fast but neither is it particularly slow.
Good switch axe play focuses on fluidly shifting between the two modes; unlike with the dual blades' demon mode, switch axe transforms are always available as something you can do mid-combo, and are in themselves attacks. So all of the ideas that are particular to MH combat are here: weapons that 'power up' through gauges and meters, modal weapons, mobility-vs-damage tradeoffs.
It's worth noting that the switch axe was only introduced in Monster Hunter 3; this identity of MH combat involving weapons with complicating ideas is something that developed over time. But that's definitely where the movement has been. The set of weapons without meters, gauges, or resources is also the set of melee weapons that were in the original US release of Monster Hunter (2004).
But by the time Monster Hunter 4 added the charge blade and insect glaive, this 'expansion' of the combat landscape had left the switch axe squarely in the middle; it touches on many of the mechanics that other weapons specialize in.
Charge Blade
The Charge Blade is kind of a maximalist experiment in making a weapon that really does 'see' most of the combat landscape; this gets it described as a very technical or even overcomplicated weapon, even though the basic loop of the charge blade is not that complex. Most of the elements that make it up are somewhat simplified individually, so that they can all stand together.
Like the switch axe, the charge blade is a modal weapon. But the two halves are much more different and lopsided in their construction. The base mode is a sword and shield that can block attacks; it has a unique 'guard point' mechanic where certain windows at the start or end of various animations are blocking frames, allowing for blocking to be incorporated into combos.
In practice, this is very difficult to land effectively, and I imagine the overwhelming majority of guard points in normal CB play are triggered by accident. But skilled players can intentionally use the guard points as a more effective guard – although Wilds gives the CB a 'perfect guard' mechanic that's much like having a guard point at-will upon hitting L2.
Attacking with the sword builds up energy, which can then be 'loaded' and stored into 'phials' – here's the 'reloading' mechanic from the gunlance, kind of. Phials can then be spent to empower attacks with the weapon's axe mode, which is where most of the damage comes from.
But to maximize the effect, first you have to burn some phials to enable a shield buff; this also empowers axe mode effects because, of course, the weapon is a transformer and the shield is also the axe blade.
More recent iterations of the weapon, including in Wilds, also include a distinct 'savage axe mode' in which the axe spins around like a buzzsaw. In Wilds, this is an essential buff that is achieved either by breaking a wound (a general Wilds combat mechanic) or by counter-attacking after a guard point or perfect guard.
All of these different affordances are accessed through a relatively complex combo tree, of course. So here we have a weapon that has resource management, different elements of timing, buff management, and two different modes with different mobility and defensive affordances. But all this complexity and cognitive load is actually pretty carefully managed.
Combo strings are actually pretty limited and straightforward, and they tend to bottleneck through a handful of critical moves. Inputs are kept relatively simple, so performing the big-damage combos requires less input precision than something like the SnS's perfect rush.
While buffs do have to be managed, they are fairly long-lasting, and can be refreshed; this is unlike the insect glaive's buffs, which cannot be reacquired until they run out or are spent on a finisher.
While guard points are a difficult nuance, triggering a perfect guard is fairly simple, and more forgiving than performing the longsword's similar foresight slash combination. While the weapon is modal, you don't have to switch back and forth and possibly lose track of which mode you're in – something that happens to me, at least, whenever I try to use the switch axe.
If we extend our 'landscape' metaphor a bit further, the charge blade has a sort of high vantage point – it 'sees' a lot of the landmarks around it, but they're hazy and distant rather than up close.
Bowgun
In theory, traditionally, Monster Hunter has two 'classes'. One is gunner, defined as a character using any of the ranged weapons; the other is 'blademaster' and includes everyone else. The underlying difference is that gunners take more damage from monsters, reflecting the idea that they're not really supposed to be getting hit at all.
Equipping a bowgun essentially turns MH into a third-person shooter; it changes the game very dramatically. There's definitely a component of aiming, although it's not really precision aiming; monsters are pretty large and slow moving targets. Aiming in MH is as much a matter of positioning yourself on the right side of the monster to hit the right parts of it as it is about the actual inputs of aiming.
Rather, bowgun is about managing resources (you have a limited pool of ammunition to use) and managing the monster; unlike most of the melee weapons which are locked to inflicting usually one status effect or none, bowguns have access to a range of different tools (poison, paralysis, and so on).
What separates the light and heavy bowguns is their relative mobility and range, as well as which special attacks and tools they have access to. Light bowguns have a shorter range and more mobility, encouraging dodging around the monster; heavy bowguns have greater range, worse mobility, and (in some games including Wilds) the ability to block attacks with a built-in shield.
The bowguns are, again to overextend our metaphor, kind of their own little island off to the side. Except...
Bow
There's the bow. Which really exists in an interesting in-between space, a sand bank or the neck of a peninsula. It is technically a ranged weapon, but the range is fairly short; you're often incentivized to make it even shorter; and the weapon shares multiple mechanics with some of the melee weapons. Bows can charge, like the hammer and great sword; charge levels are essential to doing good damage with them. Like the dual blades, bows rely on stamina to attack, creating an inherent tradeoff between attacking and evading.
Also like the dual blades, they rely on a 'perfect dodge' mechanic1 to allow for added skill expression; dodging just as a monster hits you refunds you the stamina you'd otherwise spend on the dodge, allowing skilled players to get their dodge 'for free'. In previous iterations of MH, that in-betweener nature was highlighted by bows having both stamina and ammo management; they use 'coatings' that are essentially just bow-specific ammo. Wilds actually nudges the bow a bit closer to the melee weapons by doing away with coatings as an inventory item.
The thing about the combat landscape is that while the weapons are specific vantage points in it, we can easily picture other possible points; unoccupied in-between spaces. An example might be the one I gave previously of the nonexistent 'normal glaive', a hypothetical weapon that has the glaive's aerial toolkit but not the pet bug. Monster Hunter Frontier, an MMO take on the series released in 20102, featured two weapons unique to it; one of those was the tonfa, which is essentially 'what if the dual blades dealt blunt damage'.
To me this makes it meaningful that the bow exists but not the 'normal glaive' or (in the mainline games) the tonfa. MH hasn't added a new weapon since Monster Hunter 4 added the charge blade and insect glaive; both weapons with some of the stranger mechanics in the series, and consequently ones that 'expand' the landscape more so than 'fill in' the blank space within.
I think this is the overall design lesson here; identifying your design space and then staking out the best spots in that space. And, crucially, identifying the space that should be left unfilled. The fact that the 'normal glaive' doesn't exist kind of suggests that it maybe doesn't need to exist; we could imagine a much more maximalist Monster Hunter that has the 'normal glaive', the 'sword and club', the 'charge maul' and so on and so forth. But the weapons in MH generally overlap just enough that a new weapon can seem familiar to you, while giving them all very clear mechanical identities.
I think part of what makes the combat in the series so distinctive is exactly that the weapons aren't just expressions of different player fantasies, but really distinctive lenses on what 'hunting action' combat can be.