Looking Back At 10 Years Of Monster Hunter With Its Producer

Last year marked the 10th anniversary of the Monster Hunter series – a franchise that has found huge success in Japan and has built a small but devoted fan base in America. To commemorate the series’ decade of killing monsters and using their remains to create armors and weapons, we spoke with Ryozo Tsujimoto, who has been with the series since its original release. He started by working on the network operations, and is now a producer on the series.

[An abridged version of his interview originally appeared in Game Informer issue #260]

Game Informer: How did the original idea for Monster Hunter come about?

Ryozo Tsujimoto: Back when I belonged to the team in the old days, we were trying to establish three new online titles for home consoles; these were Auto Modellista, Resident Evil Outbreak, and Monster Hunter. I was one of the game designers on Auto Modellista. Monster Hunter was designed based on the concept of a “multi-action online game that anyone can join and play,” and we made full use of Capcom’s best action game talent.

Did you ever imagine it would become such a popular franchise?

Those of us on the team often said things like, “We’d like to aim for a million sales,” amongst ourselves, but I honestly didn’t expect it to become such a hit. There were a lot of factors involved, but I think the co-op functionality played a major role for the series to have achieved such success.

Monster Hunter doesn’t portray a savage world, as we wanted anyone to feel welcome to jump in and play. If the game were too over the top and savage in atmosphere, we thought that even the co-op experience could come across as rather bleak. For instance, monsters are not defined as an “absolute enemy” in the game. Both monsters and hunters are together in this world just trying to survive; in this world, you either hunt or become prey. But Monster Hunter is also a world that’s designed in a fair way. It doesn’t matter who shows off the most during a quest. The rewards are distributed equally regardless who played the flashiest. We wanted to make sure that all players cooperate and help each other, and making sure everyone feels rewarded was a big part of that.

How do you feel about its popularity? Does pushing the franchise forward each entry cause undue stress?

I don’t feel much pressure. I only focus on further evolving the game where we need to and making sure that I protect the essence of the Monster Hunter franchise.

While it has found an audience in North America, Monster Hunter hasn’t reached the same heights in popularity as Japan. Why do you think this is?

Japan is a country made up of small islands, and this gives us an environment wherein people tend to gather rather closely together thanks to the well-developed public transportation system we have with our train and bus lines. Therefore, it’s easy for word of mouth to spread while people are playing together via an ad-hoc connection on their portable gaming devices. I think the environment was really well suited for building the fan base we now enjoy and for encouraging people to play with one another.

In the U.S., the environment and culture may not be as well suited to this type of play, and that has led to it not being quite as popular yet. That said, we are aware of a growing multitude of really strong and tight-knit communities that have sprung up in the States, and we know that they hold their own events on the local level. We treasure these dedicated communities, and I sincerely hope that these veterans will usher in a new group of fans to enjoy Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate.

To learn about the process of designing weapons and monsters and if the team has ever considered making the game simpler, head to page two.

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Looking Back At 10 Years Of Monster Hunter With Its Producer

Looking Back At 10 Years Of Monster Hunter With Its Producer