I have played the Monster Hunter series for a long time now. My first Monster Hunter was the eponymous game for the Playstation 2, and it has been exhilarating to see this franchise continue to flourish. Two decades ago the series was just a Capcom curiosity, and now it’s one of the companies core pillars. It’s outsold Street Fighter! Truly, dizzying heights I could have never imagined for a janky little PS2 game where you swing your sword with the right analog stick.

The series newest release is this year’s Monster Hunter Wilds, which has released to mixed results. The combat, as always, shines brilliantly, but the systems surrounding it leave a lot to be desired. There’s plenty of discourse about Wilds that you can run into online though. Today I thought I would talk about another Monster Hunter with glaring flaws. A distorted glimpse into the halcyon days where Monster Hunter could fit in your pocket: Monster Hunter Now

Monster Hunter Now is a mobile game, and it comes with all the baggage that most games locked to your phone come with: Microtransactions galore, the hooks to get you checking in everyday and oodles of systems designed to push you to pull out your wallet. There are numerous currencies, and the game gently nudges you towards the storefront to gaze through digital glass before you pickup your free supplies for the day. Mobile gaming is an ugly place for the most part, but there’s still something shining through here.

The game managed to distill the Monster Hunter essence into seventy five second chunks. A series that prides itself on an involved twenty minute hunt of a single monster somehow made the transition into bite sized boss fights that I can enjoy while my dog goes poop. The intricate dance of dodging and exploiting openings to wail on a vulnerable monster is still here. It’s just a few steps of the dance instead of the whole song.

Touch screen controls aren’t ideal for this sort of game, but the fact that it’s manageable at all is impressive. Every weapon class has its core identity compressed into taps, long presses and swipes. One of the big draws that got me back into the game has been the release of my beloved hunting horn, but even before that premiered, I was having a good time walloping things with a hammer. But any fan of the series knows that much of the joy of the game is pouring over the armory list, planning what to build next. How do the noncombat portions of the game stack up?

I can only get so far into this entry without addressing the elephant in the room. This game is built on the skeleton of Pokemon Go. You use your phone’s GPS to wander the real world and gather materials and encounter monsters. If you need to kill a dozen giant rock monsters, then you need to get out there and hit the pavement. Niantic’s release of Pokemon Go in 2016 was gigantic, and the whole world was swept up in the fever that game produced for a few months. The novelty of walking around to play paired with collectable hook of Pokemon was dynamite. The actual gameplay? Spinning your finger to throw curve balls, and mashing the screen to attack enemy Pokemon.

It’s a disappointing departure for Pokemon, an all ages series that has always had a deceptively deep competitive game running inside its heart. I fell off of Pokemon Go when the craze ended, and would check in occasionally, but even as a big fan of the series, I didn’t find it to have staying power. Niantic would continue to experiment in the GPS enabled game genre that they had pioneered to mixed success. The path to their current state is littered with the corpses of games that failed to find enough of an audience: A Harry Potter game, A Settlers of Catan game, an ill advised NBA game. I’m a big fan of just walking around, so enhancing that with digital frivolities is very appealing to me. Not every experience could make a graceful transition into this sort of game. I’ve played almost every Niantic release, and I think Monster Hunter Now is the closest to a traditional game.

This also means that the flow of gameplay is a little more stilted here than Niantic’s other offerings. I am not a graceful man, so it’s best for me to hunt monsters standing, not actively walking around. So I’ll fight a Deviljho, walk down to the corner and clobber something else. I find this to be a much more engaging gameplay loop than the passive collecting of Pokemon Go, or Pikmin Bloom’s glorified pedometer. The game does try its hardest to pry open your wallet however.

Full transparency: I’ve spent five dollars total on this game, and I’m still having a good time. If I dropped more money though, it would smooth out the experience. I constantly find myself at the inventory limit, an artificial problem brand new for the series, and mostly solved through real life cash. Almost every other purchase in the store is for something fleeting and ephemeral. I want this game to have a long healthy life, but I don’t feel great about any of the purchases available here. I’m not even a late game player who can experience it yet, but the idea of paying for tickets to fight limited time bosses rubs me the wrong way. I wish I could do a big thirty dollar or so premium purchase and have access to all the premium features moving forward, but that is not the will of the mobile market. These games are made to nickel and dime.

Niantic was recently acquired by Scopely, the biggest mobile game developer in the country, for 3.5 billion dollars. My scrappy little Monster Hunter is all grown up, and is part of a financial behemoth now. You can still see the spirit of Monster Hunter in this game, even if it’s gotten blurrier over the years, but I don’t know how much longer that will be the case. Will the new owners raise new tent poles to attract more players, and more money? Will they just squeeze every dollar out of the existing player base? We’re too early in the acquisition to see how things will ultimately shake out, but I feel the shadow of capitalism grow stronger every day here. Not even my silly little walking games are safe.

But for now, I can play Monster Hunter in my pocket again, and it hasn’t sucked my wallet dry. I get some sun, and occasional breezes refresh me as I hunt down giant horned apes. I have the luxury of good battles, and the freedom to lock the screen and smell the night jasmines when the game gets ugly. I have to enjoy what it is as Monster Hunter Now, and not Monster Hunter Later.