I Helped Thousands Of Players Slay Nergigante In Tokyo At The First Monster Hunter Now Carnival

Whe🥀n I logged in a♕t the beginning of the inaugural Carnival in Tokyo, Japan earlier this month, I saw just over 400 nearby players. I had to do a double-take.

Whenever I play Now around where I live in Southern California, I’m lucky to see one or two other hunters out in tꦅhe wild. Before the Carnival, the highest number of nearby players I’d ever seen was seven, and that was while going through security at LAX. When the event reached its peak around noon, the app said there were over 1,500 nearby players. I don’t know what or expect🍸ations were for the event, but as a player, it was a dream come true.

Monster Hunter Now's New Season Is Doing What Pokemon Go Won't

Monster Hunter Now adds Elder Dragons and new ways for players to find o🦩th꧑ers to hunt with.

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Monster Hunter Now Carnival, like Pokemon Go Fest, is a weekend-long live event for players of the location-based Monster Hunter spin-off. This was the first in-person event for Now, so it was appropriately held in Tokyo, which is the game’s biggest market. From 9am to 5pm on Saturday, Shibuya was filled with an estimated 20,000 players, all slicing and dicing their way through hordes of Silver Rathalos and Gold Rathian. This is equivalent to Pokemon Go Fes🦩t’s attendance in its first couple of years, so it’s a gre🥀at start for Now’s first event. There were also no major technical difficulties, no network outages, and the CEO didn’t get booed off stage, so I’d say this was an incredible success.

While Japan is the biggest market for Monster Hunter, it currently ranks as the 42nd top-grossing mobile g🅷ame. Dragon Quest Walk, a Japan-exclusive location-based game, is ran♔ked second.

Monster Hunter Now Is True Monster Hunter

One of the things I enjoy most about Now is how well it incentivizes exploration and gives you dir꧋ected goals compared to Pokemon Go, and the Carnival event embodied that value perfectly. The event’s story was built around gathering Elder Dragon tracks throughout the city that eventually led to the discovery of Nergigante. Now has always been great at translating the core Monster Hunter games into the structure of a GPS experience, so this quest line, pulled directly out of Monster Hunter World, gave the event a great, overarching structure.

The Carnival featured a series of basecamps filled with photo-opꦛs 🎃and activities spread throughout the city, with a nice path of footprints to lead you from one camp to the next.

We started the morning in Meiji Park, an urban sports park created for the 1964 Olympics. Here you could find replica weapons from the game, a gallery of Monster Hunter art, and places 🌜to eat and relax just as you would in an actual MonHun base camp. I spent a half hour farming Silver Rathalos and Gold R🐈athian materials here with a few hundred attendees before setting off towards the next base camp, leap-frogging from one set of Elder Dragon tracks to the next as I made my way.

Before❀ the event started I was nervous that I might be under-leveled. Only HR11 was required to participate, but I didn’t know if that meant I’d be able to take on some of the more challenging hunts in the quest line or not. Luckily, monsters hunted during the event dropped special event tickets that could be used to craft carnival weapons and armor, which are now some of the best gear you can get in the game. Even though I hadn’t even finished the main story quest, I was s🍌uddenly fully kitted in end-game gear, ready to take on the world.

The Road To Nergigante

Monster Hunter is great at providing catch-up mechanics like this whenever new expansions come out so new players can jump in and get caught up to their friends, so this is yet another example of how much effort Niantic puts into making sure Now feels🌊 like an authentic Monster Hunter game. It isn’t just a cheap AR reskin, it’s something unique and worthwhile.

Having endgame gear won’t let you get past the Hunter Rank gates however. You’ll need to reach HR🦂50 to take on 8-star monsters, HR100 for 9-star, and HR150 for 10-star.

I made it to the second base camp, the famous Shibuya Parco shopping center, just before noon, and picked up my 11th and final footprint. That timing was key, because noon was when Nergigante made its first appearance, and you could only find him on the map if you had collected all of the tracks. After a quick sto🌳p at the Capcom store, I rushed to the closest Elder Dragon Interception and waited for Nerg to appear.

The moment Nergigante finally appeared was an experience I’ll never forget. I found myself in an alleyway a few blocks from Shibuya Parco filled with hundreds of players all waiting for the battle to start. When the tꦬimer ended, we were ♔treated to a cutscene of Nerg slamming down into the middle of the iconic Shibuya Scramble Crossing, which is the setting of the fight itself.

Shibuya Parco basecamp from Monster Hunter Now Carnival

The actual fight with Nergigante was incredibly brief, and MHN battles tend to be. Granted, I was only HR45 at the time so I could only challenge 7-star monsters. When I spoke to high-level players, they told me the 9 and 10-star Nergs were a real challenge. My only complaint about the battle is that the incredible build-up didn’t match the fight itself, but it was still so much fun to track down Nergigante and t🅘ake him down in the middle of Shibuya, physically and virtually. It even does its signature dive bomb attack. It was perfect.

As Perfect As A Well-Done Steak

Life-sized Zinogre from Monster Hunter Now Carnival.

There was still a lot to do after felling Nerg. I made it to the third base camp, another small urban park where a replica Rathalos footprint was staged. Then I had lunch and headed back to Meiji Park for my afternoon interviews. Just before the event ended I made it to the fourth and final bas🐼ecamp - and my favorite one of the day - the Shibuya Sakura Stage: a futuristic business park filled with LED mosaics meant to look like digitized cherry blossom trees. Niantic erected a lifesize Zinogre statue to serve as the centerpiece here, making it the most impressive and photogenic camp of the day.

Monster Hunter Now Carnival was an unforgettable experience, and hats off to Niantic for putting together such a well-organized and thoughtful event. The company has learned a lot about running successful live events over the years and that experience shined through here, but at the same time, it wasn’t just a copy of Pokemon Go Fest either. Monster Hunter Now may still 𒉰be niche outside of Japan, but it’s the most fully-formed and well-designed game Niantic has made Since Pokemon Go. It’s worthy of blowing up internationally, and Monster Hunter Now Carnival proved that it’s even better suited for in-person events than Go.

If you didn’t make it to Tokyo for the event there’s good news. ♚MH Now Carnival 2024 Global is this coming weekend, November 2-3. Like the global Go Fest, participants will get to experience a version of the event locally, with the same story, monsters, and rewards. You can buy a 💛ticket for Saturday or Sunday in the Monster Hunter Now shop right now.