Monster Hunter creator on why the series switched to Nintendo platforms

For a very long time, the main Monster Hunter games were only made for Sony platforms. That all changed with Monster Hunter Tri.

Tri was originally scheduled for the PlayStation 3, but development soon switched to Wii. Since then, Tri G/Ultimate 3 and Monster Hunter 4 have also been created for Nintendo systems.

Monster Hunter series creator and producer Ryozo Tsujimoto commented on the platform switches in an interview with IGN.

He said the following:

“Other than what we’ve already announced, we don’t have anything that we’re planning. The way that we work with Monster Hunter games is that we see them as single entities, so we don’t develop for one platform and then think about porting it to another platform. The situation with the 3DS and the Wii U is that we wanted people to play this game a lot, so that’s why we have taken this [multi-platform] approach with Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate. But it doesn’t mean we’ll do that with new entries.

“The series did start out on Sony platforms, but it’s just realistic to think that it can’t continue on one platform forever. With Monster Hunter 4, it actually just came down to timing – we were developing a new Monster Hunter and the 3DS hardware had just come out, so we figured it was probably the best platform for us to develop it on. You have two screens, with action on top and menus on the bottom, and there’s the 3D view as well. It just made sense to put it onto 3DS.”