Monster Hunter

Monster Hunter from 2004 stood at the birth of a genre that today shapes dozens of games and a fan base numbering millions of players worldwide. In it, Capcom linked the hunting of giant monsters with crafting into a simple but immensely addictive loop: the player heads out into the wild, hunts a monster, forges a new weapon or armor from its bones, hide, and scales, and with better gear sets out to face an even more dangerous creature. The story was minimal – the player was a member of a hunters' guild fulfilling contracts to remove dangerous creatures, and all the emphasis was on the gameplay itself, not the narrative. This hunt-craft-hunt cycle became the foundation of the whole series and still works, essentially unchanged, twenty years and many sequels later.

This very first version, though, was noticeably rawer than what players of later entries are used to. The character controlled slowly and clumsily, dodging and blocking demanded great patience, and the game was played almost exclusively in a team – solo play was extremely tough due to mission length and enemy strength. Players faced iconic monsters like Rathalos and Rathian for the first time here, creatures that remain faces of the series to this day. Multiplayer on the PlayStation 2, moreover, ran through a network adapter and required players to wrestle with technical setup that today's generation doesn't know. In Japan the game didn't dazzle commercially, in the West it went practically unnoticed, and only in hindsight, after the success of the portable Freedom entries, did fans start to see it as the series' historical cornerstone.

Why play it: This version makes sense for players who know the series from its newer entries and want to experience firsthand just how uncomfortable and slow the whole concept used to be. It's not a comfortable entry point into the series, nor the best way to enjoy Monster Hunter for the first time – a newer title serves that purpose better. But anyone who wants to understand the genre's historical roots will find here its pure, unpolished foundation, out of which everything else grew.