Banner screenshot courtesy of the Monster Hunter Online official Facebook page.
Capcom’s Monster Hunter series allows us to fulfill two primal fantasies. Firstly, it lets us track and take down monolithic beasts by using our wits and skill. Secondly, it lets us hunt down those paragons of wild, untamed energy with a group of friends, all while crafting new equipment pieces from the corpses of your slain foes. It’s an incredibly popular social game in Japan for this reason, not to mention the fact that the newest titles in the series are available for two immensely popular handheld platforms: the Nintendo 3DS and the PlayStation Vita. Think of it as an MMORPG without all of the fluff, one where you focus solely on the hardest boss fights the game has to offer.
Three years ago, Capcom and Tencent decided to take the concept one step further and make an actual Monster Hunter MMORPG. It’s called Monster Hunter Online. No longer were players restricted to the dinky screens and low resolutions of their 3DSes. Now, prospective Hunters could defeat the most dangerous game on their personal computers, and at a high visual fidelity to boot!
The only problem: Monster Hunter Online is restricted to Chinese regions.
But a group of Monster Hunter fans named Team HD wasn’t going to let this restriction get in their way. Back in May this year, they decided to tackle their own monster: a project that would translate Monster Hunter Online into English for audiences who spoke, well, English. That project’s first beta was released this Monday in the form of the MHO English Patch, v1.1.1.
You can find the latest version of the patch here.
And if you’d like to see what adventures await you in Monster Hunter Online, you can check out the video below, courtesy of Steparu:
This FAQ answers any questions intrepid Hunters might have regarding MHO. Among other things, Team HD eventually plans to translate all of the game to English. Its patch installer also keeps the English patches up to date.
With any luck, Monster Hunter Online may eventually leave China. But considering how costly it often is to localize games outside of China, weighed against the fact that most Chinese developers consider their already-vast homeland audiences to be sufficient, most China-exclusive games never leave their region.
In the meantime, this comprehensive guide covers all of the steps needed to begin playing the game. Unlike most China-exclusive online games, Monster Hunter Online is not IP-locked. This means that you can play from anywhere in the world, without having to resort to virtual private networks to play the game.
Team HD’s English patch can be found here. You can also follow their Twitter feed here.