Why Final Fantasy 14’s Monster Hunter missions are behind a high level cap

Capcom and Square Enix’s announcement of a rare crossover event during E3 that would put Monster Hunter: World and Final Fantasy 14 content in each other’s games left some fans disappointed in its implementation. Players looking to join Final Fantasy 14 to fight Monster Hunter big bad Rathalos will need to have hit the level cap of 70 and have completed the game’s Stormblood expansion before they can unlock the fight, according to the game’s website. That could take a couple months of playing, according to a Square Enix representative.

But Final Fantasy 14’s director Naoki Yoshida said he thinks getting to the endgame won’t be too much of a challenge for veteran Monster Hunter players, whom he sees as very experienced.

“The title already sort of dictates that you are there to hunt monsters and it’s very serious business,” Yoshida said during an E3 interview last week. “So looking at that with Final Fantasy 14 and our level 15 or level 30, it’s intermediate. It’s not as challenging as Monster Hunter. I don’t think you could consider it hunting for monsters at a lower level.”

Square Enix

Yoshida said by setting the challenge level at the game’s level cap, players will get “a serious fight against a formidable opponent.” That opponent will be a Rathalos, a fire-breathing dragon that’s a Monster Hunter series mainstay, and a creature Yoshida has loved since he first played the series on PlayStation 2. He struggled to defeat the monster on his first encounter.

“I asked, ‘How could one feeble human being defeat a flying dragon?,’” he said. “How do I defeat Rathalos? It was such a formidable foe. But as I continued to challenge the dragon, I would pay attention to how it’s moving. Pay attention to any weak points that I could strike. And then I realized that yet by paying attention, it is possible for a human to defeat a dragon.”

Monster Hunter: World’s producer Ryozo Tsujimoto said the team hadn’t decided what hunter rank players would need to be to tackle Final Fantasy’s Behemoth, which will enter the game around the same time. He hinted the monster would be “challenging” and “you need to make sure your equipment is up to snuff.” (For some comparison, recent special event monsters have ranged around Hunter Rank 14 to 16, which falls after the first part of the game’s main story.)

The Behemoth will also act just like any other Monster Hunter creature, in the sense you can hack off its tail and break its weak points for rare parts. Tsujimoto said he and his team asked Yoshida if it was okay to show a beloved creature in the various states of Monster Hunter carnage, but the director gave him the green light.

“I think if you are a player in Monster Hunter, I’m sure you would feel weird if you can’t chop off a monsters tail as you’re fighting it,” Yoshida said. “So it wouldn’t be very fun if we didn’t allow for that to happen.”

Both games’ crossover events are due out this summer.