Long before he was the director of Monster Hunter Wilds, Yuya Tokuda was a Monster Hunter fan. His first credited game in the series after joining Capcom was the third, 2005's Monster Hunter Freedom. But even before then he apparently knew exactly what drew him to Monster Hunter.
"My background with the series is I hadn't yet joined Capcom when the first Monster Hunter came out. I was so bowled over when I saw the trailers for that game: I was impressed with how it was already, from the very first title, trying to depict a convincing ecosystem where the monsters were part of a world and it wasn't just bosses on a game stage, so to speak," Tokuda said in an interview at Summer Game Fest.
Tokuda served as a planner, aka designer, on five Monster Hunters before being promoted to lead planner on Monster Hunter 4: Ultimate. Then on World, and now Wilds, he moved up to director, where he's focusing on the part of the series that I'm particularly excited to see Capcom explore more fully.
"To be honest, it was always clear in my mind that was the direction I wanted to take it," he told me. "Any Monster Hunter game where I'm director is always going to be focusing on the ecosystem element. As the hardware generations we're working on get more and more powerful, I want to use the specs of the hardware to the max in order to depict as convincing a living, breathing world as I possibly can."
Considering Monster Hunter World is Capcom's best-selling game ever, I think he might be on the right track.
