 It seems I can never get away from this game, can I? So the original Monster Hunter had a very simple character creator, like World of Warcraft who are very limited to changing the face textures and only a handful of options. But as the games have gone on, more and more choices have been added to the series to allow you to truly feel like Monster Hunter. So how does Monster Hunter World do it? Well, starting here we can choose to be a male or female and they're fairly similar in size, which is nice. You can see their physical build is more or less kind of the same aside from what you would expect, the difference between a male and female. There are plenty of facial presets available, all decently unique from one another. And as far as facial features go, you have more or less all the major parts of the face. You have your eyes, your nose, your mouth. No ears though, but that's not a huge deal. You can have facial hair regardless of gender, which I think is pretty neat. So if you so wish, you can be a pretty girl with a nice bushy beard. You have two slots for makeup and facial features. There are also additional options, like expression sets, underclothing, and player voice. The character doesn't speak, but this does allow you to pick what sort of grunts and shouts they make as they emote and attack and such. And you even get these action samples to see what it sounds like whenever they do certain gestures or do certain attacks, which is a nice quality of life there. Down here you can preview how the character looks in different lighting and environments, which is nice in case you wanted to see what your character looks like at the nighttime or if they're out in the day while hunting the monsters. Your character does show up in the cutscenes, which is always nice. Now here's an interesting thing about the character creator. Monster Hunter World allows you one free character voucher, which allows you to redo your character for any reason. It'll bring you back to this menu. You can customize them the same way you customize them the first time around. That's more of a luxury than a lot of character creators get nowadays, but it's a shame that you only get one and have to purchase any additional vouchers. Honestly, of the many ways to monetize a fully priced game post launch, this is one of the least egregious. I have no problems with the character voucher and it's nice that you do get one for free. And I wanted to make a note. This is less of a knock against the character creator itself, but I think it's worth mentioning because it does have to do with character customization as a whole. And that is this game has a minor case of sexy female armor. Some of it makes sense, like Zor Magdaros armor or Rathian or Kulu Yaku or sets where both genders are equally showing skin. But I'm talking about things like Devil Joe, Nurgigante and of course the worst offender, Cove to Wrath. Where the men would have big bulky looking armor covering every inch of their body, the women are sometimes resorted to wearing boot plate, bikinis, lingerie, whatever. Monster Hunter definitely doesn't do it as heavy a degree as other games, but I still think it's worth pointing out. And this can be easily solved in two ways. Either allow both genders the option to wear either set. I personally would love it if I could wear the female Zenojiva armor because I just like how the veil looks. Or alternatively, make the same set of armor for both with only minor size adjustments. I have no problems with sexual expression in video games. In fact, I am an advocate for sexual expression in any forms of art. But I would also like equal opportunity in that regard. Maybe I want to be a sexy boy or a non-sexy girl. And I personally think that that's not an unreasonable request. And finally, there is also a Palico creator, which I will go over separately because I think it deserves its own analysis. So what is the bad about Monster Hunter World's character creator? First of all, like World of Warcraft, these selection menus are clunky. Once again, we have another case of hovering over the option instantly changing it. This can make comparisons really difficult. Sure, with a mouse, you can hover over options you want to compare and kind of snake through them and navigate around with a mouse. But you don't get that luxury with a controller. You have to flip through them one by one. And even with the mouse, it's still difficult to compare the face options on different pages. For example, if I wanted to compare this face with this face, I have to be quick on the draw. This is a big problem when there are so many options that make minute changes. So it's a bigger deal here than it would be in something like WoW, where there are so few options. There are a bunch of options here, and some of them are just not quite right, but others look very similar. So I would have liked to be able to compare them easily. Once again, a very common thing with a lot of character creators is there is no adjustment options to the character's body whatsoever. No height, no weight. Not even small things like how muscly their body textures. This means that every hunter, regardless of how their faces will look the same physical build-wise. Now, the makeup slots. Although they're pretty nice, you only get two makeup slots. This is a problem because makeup doesn't just mean makeup. It also means facial features like freckles or scars or tattoos. So if you want your character to have a specific set of makeup, like say lipstick and eyeliner, then you have to sacrifice having anything else. You only get two. Like if I wanted freckles for this character, I have to get rid of either my eyeliner or my lipstick, which is somewhat annoying. Same thing for if I want scars or if I want any sort of face paint whatsoever. Small quality of life thing that I will praise them for doing is that whenever you select a different type of makeup, that it will highlight what's changed. This is great for kind of more subtle things like different types of eyeliner that may be hard to figure out if it even changed anything. This is a nice. Now, although I've been lucky enough to not really notice this on my character, there have been plenty of accounts where the character does not appear as nice in the real game as it appears in the creator, either because of animation rigs or real game lighting or whatever. For some reason, sometimes it just doesn't line up, which can mean you have to use up your character voucher to fix it or start over with a whole new save file. The worst part is I don't think that this is something that can really be fixed easily, if at all. But with that out of the way, let's talk about the good things because there are plenty of good things. First off, there are so many options. You get tons of options for everything, tons of face shapes, tons of mouths, tons of hairstyles, tons of eyes, tons of noses. It's just a crazy good amount of variety. I get several pages of different noses alone. Look at that. And they come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. This is great. But it doesn't just stop there. There are also additional adjustment sliders for every option I just listed. So for skin color, you not only have a set of preset skin colors, you have a whole skin color wheel. And you have sliders for face complexion and wrinkles. For noses, you get to choose your nose height. For eyes, you can choose their orientation, whether they're high or low, or if they're closer together or further apart. You can adjust eye colors individually, if you so wish. For things that you can color, you get to choose hue brightness and saturation. For makeup, you even get the option to choose how glossy or metallic you want it to be. This means you can make yourself look shiny. This is awesome for fine-tuning different selections that may look almost like what you wanted, but if only you could make a slight change to make it perfect. Well, with this, you can. And of course, the quality of the character is fantastic. This is among one of the prettiest character creators I've seen. The finish is nice. The textures are extremely detailed and high quality. And oh my God, the hair. I'm a stickler for hair quality and design and games. And when they don't look good, it is constantly bothering me. But this hair looks incredible. And bonus points, although I can't show it here because I guess I forgot to download it, you can have the same hairstyles as the NPCs for free. And finally, the additional options like under-clothing and facial expressions and voice are just a cherry on top. It's nice enough to have all of these general options to make your hunter truly yours, but the fact that Capcom went the extra mile to give you a character, the extra little touch is very nice and great and making you feel like this character is an actual character in the world, even if they are a blank slate. Conclusion, a huge variety of face options make for a huge variety of looks. And no matter what, your character will always look amazing, even if they're ugly. And now on to the Palico creator. Starting with Freedom Unite, the Monster Hunter games allowed you to have a cat companion that would fight along your side, also known as a Palico. The franchise has allowed you to customize these little critters more and more with each entry, so let's see how world does it. Just like the hunter, you get a handful of presets. You can change the cat's fur pattern, eyes, ears, tail, voice, all that good stuff. You can change the Palico's fur color as well as three colors on their fur pattern for a combined four different colors at once. Colors are fully customizable, just like the hunter, with additional brightness and saturation sliders, so you don't have to stick with just the preset colors they give you. And although you should never talk poorly about a cat, I'm about to tell you what's bad about this character creator. The options are very limited, especially compared to the hunter. Now, having less options is to be expected, but I feel like you could have had a few more, like maybe a couple of more patterns or maybe a couple of more ear types or voices or tails. As it is, it feels a little lacking. You also don't get the additional sliders that the hunter has. Sure, you have fur length and thickness, but for things like the eyes, you can't adjust their orientation or size for the ears, same thing, tail, same thing. Maybe perhaps I wanted this thick fluffy tail, but I also wanted it to be longer, while I can't do that. It's a shame when you can make all these additional adjustments for the hunter, but not your palico. It'd be nicer if you could make those further adjustments just to make up for the fact that your options are very limited, like being able to rotate or position or resize the fur pattern. That would allow these four patterns you get to go a long way in how different they can be instead of just color. Like imagine if I could take this pattern and rotate it to orient it to where the stripe is horizontal across the legs. And although this is just the nature of the game, your initial customization for your palico is a little bit undermined by the gear they're going to wear, many of which is going to cover up your hard work in making the perfect cat companion. The hunters don't have this problem because of layered armor, this game's version of transmogrification, and the ability to hide your helmet. Palicos don't get that option, and their gear progression is a lot more linear compared to the hunters. Which means once people figure out what the best armor is for the palico, a lot of them are going to be wearing the same thing online. Now, what about the good? Well, first and foremost, you can have a goddamn cat companion. Any game that allows you to customize a companion character from the ground up gets a gold star in my book, and this one is awesome because you get an adorable fucking cat. The palico creator has achieved something very special in that every person's first reaction to it is universally positive. What? Oh! I get to make a kitty? Palico are, oh my God, game of the year. Now I- And why wouldn't it be? Look at this guy. Look at his eyes. For what limited options you do have, it is fairly competent and recreating any real cat you may have. So all you cat owners out there, you get to hunt dragons and dinosaurs with your furry little friends. And just like the hunter, the presentation is once again fantastic. The model looks good, especially the fur. And the design of this cute little piece of shit just makes me wanna jump out of my apartment window with how adorable he is. Conclusion. Sure, it's limited, but how many games allow you to make a custom adorable fighting cat companion? And how many of them look this good? This has been character creator critique. Be sure to vote on which games character creator should be critiqued next. And I'll see you then.