Capcom’s Monster Hunter series has gone through quite a good many changes with Monster Hunter 4, which releases for 3DS in Japan on September 14th. Talking to Famitsu, main designer Yuya Tokuda stated that, “For the development team. we felt we’d be hitting the wall if all we did was give you more monsters. So instead we’re trying to give you more action, and I think that’s a good thing.”
Director Kaname Fujioka also talked about the addition of environments that could be interacted with, explored and destroyed. “When working on the Monster Hunter series there’s one thing I always keep in mind. That thing is having the game look fun when someone else is playing it. We figured that, instead of flat landscapes, having valleys and different tiers of terrain and letting you look up and down upon them would add more variation to the action and seem a lot more fun. We knew it’d be difficult [to implement in Monster Hunter], but if we could work that into the gameplay, we thought it’d be a major new weapon for Monster Hunter 4.
“The most important thing is that the controls feel good for the player. So with that in consideration, we’re reworking the behavior of the hunters and the monsters. Having it feel good is really vital for us. You can jump down from higher points in this game, for example, but it’s only natural that you’d want to attack in midair while you’re at it, right?
“Having it feel good in a natural way like that is important to me. During development you often hear things like ‘If there’s no gameplay to it, then why’s it in the spec?’, but I think instinctual desires, like wanting to climb up walls or execute jumping attacks, are also important to pay attention to.”
Producer Ryozo Tsujimoto talked about the new latch-on attacks, “Introducing these latch-on attacks really changes the reaction people have to the game’s new emphasis on a truly 3D landscape. All of a sudden they say things like ‘I want to go up as high as I can from here! I want to go take a ride on as many monsters as I can!’”