Monster Hunter: Legends of the Guild review: a Netflix movie for fans

In a story of frames that finishes off the Netflix animated short film Monster hunter: Guild Legends, a hunter, Aiden, takes a page from veteran sailor Quint in Steven Spielberg Jaws. On a ship sailing to a new world, excited hunters discuss how they will take down the elder dragon Zorah Magdaros. Aiden doesn’t run his nails across a blackboard to shut them up, or speak poetically about a doll’s eyes, and he’s a redhead in his twenties, not a surly old fisherman. But the vibe is the same. Elder dragons are serious threats, and Aiden has a story from his past to tell his new hunter friends, to illustrate why they should be afraid.

Aiden is a minor character in several of the Monster Hunter games, but Guild Legends follows a much younger Aiden, a small-town boy who wants to be a Guild-licensed Monster Hunter, much like the players in the game’s franchise. And while the 58-minute movie is messy, it nails that initial Monster Hunter feeling of being new to the hunt and eager to take down some big creatures.

Every hunter’s journey

Aiden’s journey begins like the stories of many players, with him hunting down a small and relatively harmless monster. But unlike the early missions of a Monster Hunter game, Aiden’s Velociprey hunt is interrupted by a Velocidrome, a much larger version of the raptorlike monster. Before the Velocidrome can finish off Aiden, a more experienced hunter walks in and out with ease, a feeling that any new hunter who has played with seasoned friends is well aware.

The rest of Monster Hunter: Guild LegendsThe runtime features Aiden and Julius, the Geralt-like guild hunter who saved Aiden, trying to stop Teostra before he wipes out the villages in a valley. And here, we see Aiden go from an aspiring hunter with a cast iron skillet strapped to his chest to a true beast-killer.

Aiden’s “training” is what Monster Hunter: Guild Legends does well. Not only does he enthusiastically ask about the biggest and scariest monsters he’s eager to hunt, but he fails spectacularly against every monster he and Julius encounter. As Julius and other hunters attempt to engage the creatures, Aiden plays the role of the player’s avatar, hanging in nets, dragged by sands, and struck by most of the monster’s attacks.

In true Monster Hunter fashion, Aiden’s mistakes make finding his team much more difficult than necessary. But when the hunt is over and Aiden is beaten, bruised, and covered in guts, he’s thrilled by his team’s little achievement. It’s the same enthusiasm that propels all players through their initial Monster Hunter journey, no matter how badly they turned the ball. Throughout Aiden’s history, he builds a new confidence and retires when the going gets tough. But it grows with each hunt.

Doing Monster Hunter good

It’s a bit hackneyed, but Guild Legends does a good job of moving Aiden down the Hunter’s path. He goes from groping through a hunt, to false confidence, to failing at the first sign of real trouble, to finally being that Hunter hero where all players end up as if they stick with the series. It’s an identifiable journey, and one that Monster Hunter fans know well.

Weather Guild Legends works fine with the license, the hardest part of doing something like this, it fails on some pretty basic levels. Editing can lead to confusing cuts and strange camera shifts. The CGI art style looks decent on the poster, but the faces are flat and boring in motion. And the movie tries to pack too much character backstory into a too short runtime.

But as a game fan, I didn’t feel like the time I spent watching Aiden hunt was completely wasted. Guild Legends it is clearly made by people who understand how games work and want to see it translated into a different medium.

Director Steve Yamamoto has worked on visual effects, mainly as a preview supervisor, for some visual parties like League of Justice, Deadpool 2and the Transformers movies. But Guild Legends it’s his directorial debut, and there will surely be some growing pains there. The movie’s problems could dissolve into a sequel with a bigger budget, a less cumbersome average runtime (longer or shorter would be more suitable), and a more experienced director, be it Yamamoto’s second time behind the wheel, or a new director entirely. But taking care of the Capcom license cannot be taught.

Monster Hunter: Guild Legends It can lead to a split movie viewing experience – audiences unfamiliar with Monster Hunter won’t get much out of this story, but hunters will see themselves in Aiden’s adventures, and that’s worth an hour of messy editing and ugly art.

Monster Hunter: Guild Legends it’s streaming on Netflix now.