Just an idea for a story for a hypothetical Monster Hunter game

I know that a lot of hunters think that story is utterly unnecessary in the main monster hunter games, but I’ve been toying with an idea for a bit of story in a hypothetical game lately, and I wanted to share it.

In this hypothetical game you play as a hunter from Alduron city. Basic setup, not really that important. The main story of the game is pretty generic. You are a new hunter, you go on a couple hunts, you find out that a something weird is going on and it is affecting the balance of nature, a monster gets blamed, you hunt the monster, turns out it wasn’t the fault of the monster you just hunted but rather an unknown Elder Dragon all along, you slay the Elder Dragon, crisis averted, hooray.

The actual meat of my idea lies in a b-plot involving the player hunter and a specific individual monster of the cover art monsters species. I’m going to call this theoretical cover art monster Maleon and the individual monster that the b-plot revolves around are called Old Leon. Old Leon is a monster that the whole city of Alduron knows about. He’s been around forever and has been a thorn in the side of the hunters guild for a long time. He’s also tough as nails. There have been many requests to hunt Old Leon throughout the guilds history but no one has ever managed to do it. All of the local hunters you can talk to have at least one story to tell about Old Leon. “I saw him take on a Teostra and beat it without a sweat”, “I hit a direct hit on his gnoggin once with all I had, and my hammer just bounced off and the old bastard just shook it off like it was nothing”, etc. (all of this dialogue are optional chitchat with NPC’s). Old Leon also has a slightly altered appearance than normal Maleon. Just to make him distinct.

During an early low rank urgent mission Old Leon will be present at the beginning. In this quest Leon is invincible and can oneshot just about anyone, at worst he twoshots an endgame player. This is to establish Old Leon to be strong through gameplay for any early game players. So you complete the mission while avoiding Leon. After this Leon will sporadically appear in quests, just as powerful and invincible as the first time he appeared.

Then the player does the last low rank urgent quest and captures a Maleon, a cutscene plays right after you capture it. The player character turns away from the captured Maleon to do something when the Maleon wakes up and tries to ambush the player. That’s when Old Leon appears and he slams the other Maleon’s head into the ground properly knocking it out and simultaneously knocking the player to the ground. Old Leon leans in and takes a close look at you, and the players sees the frightening eyes of a very intelligent and wise apex predator. Leon then blows smoke in your face and wanders off.

The player now in high rank will still encounter Old Leon in quests, but now he doesn’t oneshot anymore, he still does a lot of damage just not one shotting. And should the player choose to try and slay Leon, instead of dying he runs away, same with capturing. Old Leon’s appearance has changed a bit too. One of his horns are broken, but he still is as badass as before. In this hypothetical game there is a chance that at the end of a high/master rank quest might be interrupted by a monster, here you have two choices, either beat that monster and get a bonus, or just run to camp and escape to get the base reward. If you fight and slay the bonus monster you get some rare material used for making talismans or decorations (doesn’t really matter as long as it’s worth the bonus fight), and a few materials from the bonus monster. Using up your carts on this bonus monster doesn’t make you fail the mission, you just loose out on the bonus reward. Among the monsters that can show up as a Bonus monster are Old Leon. You won’t get any Maleon materials for beating Old Leon but rather a random assortment of monster gems and sellable materials.

As you progress the main story Old Leon will look more and more damaged when he shows up.

From here on the main story goes on and the hunters blame the wrong Elder Dragon for the oncoming catastrophe. So after you hunt that Elder Dragon you find out that the one that is responsible for the catastrophe is an Elder Dragon known as Terrordeus. An Elder Dragon that can adapt to the elements used on it and can heal. The player progresses the main story and reaches Terrordeus. It is in an arena with a Dragonator. The idea with Terrordeus is that it, over the course of the battle, changes colours and with the colours, it changes what element it resists. It resists one element, is weak to one element and are neutral to all others over the course of the battle. It also will enter a healing state that can only be interrupted by the Dragonator. The Third time the player hit Terrordeus with the Dragonator it will get angry and break the Dragonator. This means that the player can no longer interrupt Terrordeu’s healing. So the player is wailing away at Terrordeus, and as Terrordeus enter its healing status again, who shows up to save the day, it’s Old Leon. He Doesn’t look very good though. His tail is cut off and he looks like a Maleon that has had all of its parts broke off. Old Leon roars at the Terrordeus and pounces on it breaking it out of its healing animation, as this happens, this game’s version of Proof of a Hero begins to play. Old Leon begins to circle just outside the arena and lets the players wail away on Terrordeus again. (fun idea, should the player fail the quest at this point and retry the quest, the quest will start with the Dragonator broken and Old Leon will be there from the start). Anyways as Terrordeus does one more attempt at healing Old Leon pounces it again and pulls out the organ that Let Terrordeus heal itself. In response Terrordeus slams it’s tail down on Old Leons head and knocks him off the arena. Now the Player will finish off Terrordeus and the main story is finished. No one knows what happened with Old Leon after the fight but oh well. But one character theorizes that Old Leon had been fighting the Terrordeus to hold it back from wreaking havoc. And that’s why he had been looking worse and worse over the course of the story.

The player then goes through the remaining urgent quests and the last urgent quest is a Find and slay quest (A hypothetical quest type where a player has to pick up clues and find a monster that has been wreaking havoc, these are one off quests). The description of this quests talks about an unknown monster that has been running amok throughout the hunting locations and killed everything from Kulu-ya-ku, to Rathalos, to even Elder Dragons. So you go to the last location and begin looking for clues. And you find corpses of really strong monsters everywhere, A Teostra hanging from a wall, a Nergigante torn in two, etc. you gather clues from these until you find Old Leon.

But This is not the Proud Old Leon that you knew. He looks as broken as he did when fighting Terrordeus, only with one additional detail, there is a Terrordeus tail spike sticking out from his head. Old Leon looks scared and confused, he’s slowly dying, very slowly, because Leon is tough as nails. So the player starts to fight Old Leon. And its hard. Old Leon in this fight has the same moveset as a normal Maleon, but he hits like a truck and never lets up the pressure. The music is frantic and a bit sad. Should you fail the quest after starting to fight Old Leon the quest name will change to “Show Mercy to Leon”. When the player eventually gets Leon to low health the music will change to a sadder version of Proof of a Hero called End of a Hero. And as the quest ends a cutscene plays where Old Leon weakly falls to the ground, it tries to stand back up, but it can’t and it tries to roar one last time, but the only sound it can produce is a weak growl as it dies. The player gets no material or rewards from this quest, except a lone Maleon gem called Leon’s gem. This Gem can be used to craft a Decoration with the skill Leon's Blessing.

And that’s the end of Old Leon