is a Japanese media franchise centered on a series of fantasy-themed action role-playing video games, beginning with the first installment Monster Hunter for the PlayStation 2, released in 2004. The series has been released on multiple platforms, including personal computers, home consoles, portable consoles, and mobile devices. The series is developed and published by Capcom.
The games are primarily action role-playing games. The player takes the role of a Hunter, slaying or trapping large monsters across various landscapes as part of quests given to them by locals, with some quests involving the gathering of a certain item or items, which may put the Hunter at risk of facing various monsters. As part of its core gameplay loop, players use loot gained from slaying monsters, gathering resources, and quest rewards to craft improved weapons, armor, and other items that allow them to face more powerful monsters. All main series titles feature multiplayer (usually up to four players cooperatively), but can also be played single player.
Early Monster Hunter games sold well in Japan and other Asian countries, popularized by the series' use of ad hoc multiplayer features on portable consoles, and became a cultural phenomenon. The early games in the series have been critically well received in Western markets, but generally languished in sales, in part due to the games' steep learning curve. However, with Monster Hunter: World (2018), Capcom aimed to attract a global audience using the power of advanced home gaming consoles and computers and released the title simultaneously worldwide. World became the best-selling Monster Hunter game within three days of its release, and became Capcom's single best-selling video game of all time with 21 million sales as of July 5, 2022, including more than 70% outside of Japan. By May 2024, the series has sold more than 100 million units, with nearly half attributed to Monster Hunter: World and Monster Hunter Rise and their expansions. The 2025 entry, Monster Hunter Wilds, the first in the series to release worldwide and all platforms simultaneously, became the fastest selling Capcom game within three days of release. The Monster Hunter series has currently sold more than 131 million units .
Games in the Monster Hunter are generally catalogued as either part of the mainline series aimed for console players, and portable versions for hand held consoles. A number of spinoff games featuring different gameplay genres have also been developed for consoles, computers, and mobile devices. In addition to games, the franchise has an anime based on the spinoff game Monster Hunter Diary: Poka Poka Airou Village, Monster Hunter Stories: Ride On based on the spinoff title Monster Hunter Stories, a manga, Monster Hunter Orage, and a book, Monster Hunter Episode. A feature film directed by Paul W. S. Anderson was released on December 3, 2020.
An animated film, subtitled Legends of the Guild, was released on August 12, 2021, on Netflix.
Gameplay The main Monster Hunter games are action games taking place in a common fantasy world set some thousands of years after the collapse of an advanced civilization. While there are centers of civilization that remain and flourish, parts of the world remain unsettled due to the presence of monsters that threaten any attempts to settle in these areas. The player takes the role of a Hunter, assigned by the Hunters' Guild to help protect these remote areas by hunting down the monsters, typically alongside the work of a research team that is trying to understand the origin and behavior of these monsters. The player, as the Hunter, uses a variety of weapons and tools, along with the environment itself, to fight against the monsters.
The core feature of Monster Hunter is its compulsion loop. Unlike traditional computer role-playing games, a player's Hunter does not grow and has no intrinsic statistics or attributes whatsoever. Rather, the Hunter's abilities are instead defined by the specific weapons and armor selected. The player can equip weapons, armor, and items most beneficial towards completing a given mission, and if successful, the Hunter is awarded in both in-game money ("zenny") and loot representing parts from the monster. These parts, along with other resources collected while on missions and/or through mission rewards, can be used to forge or upgrade new weapons and armor which then can be used in against more powerful monsters and tackle more difficult missions, completing the compulsion loop. Harder missions are typically restricted by a hunter's rank, which cumulatively increases as the player completes specific missions designated by the quest giver. Mission rewards are often generated randomly, often requiring the player to grind the same monster repeatedly to get the right parts. Weapons and armor have intrinsic bonuses or penalties towards certain types of elemental or physical damages, and may provide special skills which can be fine-tuned through the mix-and-matching of equipment pieces.
The games feature a variety of different weapon classes, ranging from swords, hammers, and bows, with the most recent titles (Generations, World, and Rise) having a total of fourteen classes. Each weapon class has a unique set of combat maneuvers and reflect a number of different play styles based on speed of attack, damage strength, range and the application of buffs and debuffs to monsters and allies. Monster Hunter games use an "animation priority" combat, committing the player to a move until the animation is completed and leaving them potentially vulnerable to a monster's attack. Further, players are encouraged to watch their Hunter's health and stamina. Losing all health will force a retreat to a base camp, and after three such retreats, the mission is deemed a failure. Performing certain combat actions consumes stamina, which recovers in a short amount of time; once exhausted of stamina, the Hunter becomes vulnerable as they pause to catch their breath. Monsters and other environmental hazards can also inflict blights and other negative status effects that impair combat abilities. Combat is centered around watching for a monster's tells prior to an attack to be able to dodge it and/or make a counterattack, and looking for openings to unleash strings of attack combos, depending on the Hunter's current weapon. Unlike most other action games, Monster Hunter fights have been compared to a series of boss fights.
Nearly all Monster Hunter games have a single-player mode; in these, the Hunter is often accompanied by a Felyne or Palico, a bipedal sentient cat-like creature that supports the player with limited offensive abilities in combat. Felynes also assist the player in cooking meals, maintaining gardens, and returning them to camp if they are defeated in battle. The noises of Felynes are created using the real-life vocalizations of cats owned by the games' development team, comprising a library of cat noises stretching back to the original Monster Hunter. The noises are sometimes arranged in order to depict a situation that would be impossible to subject a real cat to, such as being attacked by a monster.
Most Monster Hunter games released with support for four-player cooperative online modes, allowing the group to hunt down stronger versions of monsters, though this support has since been disabled in older games. The games typically have a main quest line, frequently called "Low Rank" or "Village Quests", which can take up to fifty hours to complete. Once completed, the game opens up with new "High Rank" or "Gathering Hall" quests, featuring stronger versions of monsters they have previously faced, as well as new monsters not yet seen and unique variants of these foes, all of which provide better components for more powerful weapons and armor sets, providing hundreds of hours of potential gameplay following the main quest. Most titles have a third rank of difficulty ("G Rank" or "Master Rank"), released after the base game in the form of a DLC. These add more monsters, locations, weapons and armour sets to the game.
Development history
The first Monster Hunter game was one of three titles Capcom had developed to take advantage of the processing power and online capabilities of the PlayStation 2, which according to Ryozo Tsujimoto, who has been the series' producer since Monster Hunter Freedom 2, had begun to match arcade games in capabilities; the other two such titles were Auto Modellista and Resident Evil Outbreak. Tsujimoto considered Monster Hunter to be the culmination of the work of these other two titles once it was released. He also felt that the game was intended for such cooperative play so that players of any skill level, working with others, could feel accomplished in taking down giant creatures. Monster Hunter proved a success, selling over 1 million copies, principally in Japan. Enhanced versions of the early games, adding more difficult monsters and end-game quests, were released with a "G" affixed to the end (such as Monster Hunter G for the first such game); for those titles that were released in Western regions, these were often, though not always, affixed with the Ultimate moniker. A second team worked to develop a series for the PlayStation Portable. These games often had a more lighthearted tone and expanded upon the Palico system. In Japan, these games were released under the "Portable" title, while in the west they were released under the "Freedom" title. Even after these naming conventions were abandoned, this established the general tradition of one team releasing games for home consoles and a separate team releasing a portable game a few years later.
The series took off explosively in Japan with Monster Hunter G and Monster Hunter Portable/Freedom on the PlayStation Portable and even more so once its sequels Monster Hunter Dos, Monster Hunter Portable 2nd/Freedom 2 and Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G/Freedom Unite were released which supported up to four players. Handheld systems are generally more popular in Japan and due to the country's high population density, it was easy to find players to hunt cooperatively with, making it a phenomenon there. Capcom's Ryozo Tsujimoto stated that Freedom 2 was released at a time when players in Japan would not normally gather at a friend's house to play games together, so the networking capabilities of the PSP helped to drive the success of Freedom 2 and accelerate sales of the series beyond the original PlayStation 2 titles. James Miekle, writing for PC Gamer, had worked for Q Entertainment and lived in Japan during the release of Monster Hunter Portable 3rd, which was the best-selling PlayStation Portable game of all time and described how even during work, impromptu Monster Hunter sessions would break out between employees and there was extensive marketing of Monster Hunter branded consumer goods.
While Monster Hunter had been successful in Japan, its popularity in Western markets (primarily North America and Europe) languished. In contrast to the Japanese culture, Western markets favored home consoles and computers during the mid-2000s and because of a thinner population density, most players relied on Internet-based gaming rather than local ad hoc networking. The series also struggled with a difficult learning curve that had made the games off-putting in Western markets. Because of the series' limited interest outside Japan, the developers generally focused on Japan market-specific features, such as first releases within the country and in-game events for Japanese players, which reinforced the perception that Monster Hunter was aimed primarily at Japanese players, further alienating Western players from the series.