Capcom Details Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate Localization Process, Tutorial Altered And More

Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, the latest entry of the series developed by Capcom, is finally going to be released on Nintendo 3DS soon. With the localization process now over or close to completion, Capcom has shared some interesting details on the changes made for the Western launch of their successful game.

The beginning segment of the game, which acts as a tutorial of sorts, has been changed for the Western version of the game so to make the while process faster. With the Western audience of the game made up of more experienced gamers, there was no reason to keep the whole segment as it was in the Japanese version.

If you can’t read Japanese, this message translates to “Do you want to hear that again?”, and automatically appears after every tutorial message. The cursor also defaults to Yes, so if you’re mashing buttons to get through the tutorial, you can accidentally select Yes and you’re sent through the entire thing again.
This was one of the first issues I brought to the Monster Hunter team, because I felt Western gamers wouldn’t respond well to it. After the director, Fujioka-san, explained their reasoning, I understood why they had made this decision. During the development of Monster Hunter 4, the team was directed to aim for a younger audience because the Nintendo 3DS’ market is younger than other platforms. To make sure the younger kids knew what do to, they added that question at the end of each tutorial just to be safe.
Overseas, the audience for Monster Hunter is older and more experienced with games, so they typically don’t need to read things twice to get the gist. With that in mind, we asked the team if we could remove that from our version of the game and they agreed. Woohoo! Victory #1! We also were able to naturally cut down on the tutorial length through shorter, but still entertaining dialogue – and no, we didn’t cut out anything from the tutorials – which means you can get back to the action a lot faster.

More localization changes and challenges have also been detailed. You can check them out on the Capcom Unity blog.

Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate is now available in Japan on Nintendo 3DS. The North American and European releases have yet to be dated.