Welcome back to Save State where I returned to Monster Hunter Wilds after a bit of a hiatus. I rarely ever put down a Monster Hunter game for very long, but there have been a lot of excellent titles released in 2025, so I have found myself only popping back into Wilds whenever there’s a major update or a new challenge quest released. The latest title update introduced Omega Planetes from Final Fantasy XIV (well, Final Fantasy V, but this collaboration is specifically with FFXIV), and I just had to catch up on all of the various event quests I missed out on while playing a bunch of Switch 2 games I still need to write reviews for. My pile of shame, much like Olberic’s blade, is unbending. So, this reference barely works because Octopath Traveler is also made by Square Enix, and my wife is actively playing Octopath music stages in Theatrhythm Final Bar Line while I write this, so we’re just going to have to live with the tenuous nature of that reference.
Every time Monster Hunter Wilds has updated with a new challenge quest, I have made sure to hop on at least once to quickly A rank it and collect the special weapon pendant that it provides. The Seregios arena challenge quest they posted is the first time this whole year it took me more than one try to get an A rank time, but I was able to score an A on my second attempt using my trusty gunlance (even if the gunlance set they give you for this arena quest is atrocious).
About a week after the Seregios challenge left, a new one for everyone’s favorite fiery octopus Nu Udra appeared. Capcom was very generous with the A rank time for this quest, giving players a whole 14 minutes. This resulted in my getting an A on my very first attempt and then scoring a time of 7 minutes on the second try. Spicy calamari is no big deal, after all!
The big allure of title update 3, of course, is the collaboration monster with Final Fantasy: Omega Planetes. Originally a super boss you could just randomly encounter in the fifth Final Fantasy game, Omega has appeared in different games since then with the explanation for its presence being that it’s capable of interdimensional travel and can conquer planets. Omega decides that it’s going to evolve using one of the biggest, baddest creatures in the Forbidden Lands, but your hunter prevents it from doing so which makes you public enemy number one in the eyes of Omega Planetes.
Omega is actually a frantic and incredibly fun fight in Monster Hunter Wilds. I always do my first hunts solo in order to get experience before playing with others, and while the first hunt was easy, there was still a lot of chaos and crazy moments. Omega fires missiles, rocket-propelled fists, lasers, and even spawns mini-Omegas to mess with the hunter, and dealing enough damage to it will have it enter a frenzied mode called Pantokrator where its attacks become even more relentless and unyielding.
Thankfully, there are plenty of options at the hunter’s disposal to handle Omega. The rocket fists, for example, can be knocked out of the air using nothing but your slinger or a well-timed overhead attack, and the mini-Omegas can be easily dispatched or dodged (though if you ignore them, they can cause you to trip at a very inopportune time). Omega will generally harass all players equally with its barrages of weaponry, though it does feature a returning mechanic from Monster Hunter World’s collaboration with Final Fantasy XIV: A single player can hit Omega in the head enough to gain its enmity, which will cause Omega to direct most/all of its attacks at that player.
This has always been a cool part of these hunts, in that you can more easily carry a player through these challenging hunts by fulfilling the tank role that is normally nonexistent in Monster Hunter due to how this series handles monster targeting. Omega will typically deal a lot of chip damage to players trying to tank with shield weapons, however, which means that players who can heal others with items like Lifepowder and Dust of Life are super valuable too. There is even a DPS check partway through the hunt where you need to quickly beat down a monster that Omega visualizes on the spot, which thankfully had a weakness to multiple point blank explosions with a gunlance.
After you clear the hunt, you get some timey-wimey alternate universe stuff explained to you by a smaller, nicer Omega bot, giving a lore explanation as to why Omega is a repeatable hunt. In fact, Capcom also included an even more difficult hunt: Savage Omega, a “what-if” quest wondering how powerful Omega could have become if it were allowed to absorb power from giant heatsink dragon Jin Dahaad. Savage Omega is tough, mostly because it forces the player to actually respect the monster you’re hunting, which is probably the first time this has been the case in Monster Hunter Wilds since Zoh Shia’s repeatable quest.
Taking on a powerful challenge like Savage Omega is fun, but trying to accomplish this task with random players felt like I’d have an easier time of beating myself unconscious with my own shoes. Savage Omega attacks more frequently, has added follow ups to many of its attacks, and typically will give players less time to react to whatever nonsense it is doing at any given point in time. My first few attempts at Savage Omega ended in miserable failure largely because I didn’t know how to deal with certain new combinations of attacks, took an incorrect guess at which direction to dodge or block, which almost immediately resulted in a trip back to the starting area on the kitty cat cart.
Thankfully, my persistence paid off since the third try was a successful clear. In fact, once I got that first clear of Savage Omega, I was able to clear it alone over 20 times… mostly because I didn’t know you could repeat the non-Savage Omega quest because you have to actively scroll down in the optional quest list to find it. So, the bad news is I dealt with hunting Savage Omega many times more than I needed to for nothing. The good news is because I put myself through all that, I learned how to handle basically every attack Savage could fire off at the player when I’m using a gunlance, sword and shield, heavy bowgun, and bow.
Savage Omega is just a simple matter of pattern recognition if you’re playing it alone with CPU support hunters: Alyssa and Fabius are lance-users that can tank for you and will regularly yoink enmity if you get it yourself. Kai’s hunting horn will buff and heal you, and Mina does a phenomenal job of popping any and all wounds that reveal themselves on Omega throughout the course of the hunt. Even better, their fainting doesn’t count against the three faint limit for failing the quest, so support hunter Mina can cart six times in the hunt and it literally won’t matter, you can still win.
Of course, I’ve hunted it a number of times with other players since then, helping several of my friends through the hunt as well, but I definitely recommend trying to solo Savage first before attempting to play it with others- that experience really helps. I also find it’s just straight up easier to take the tanking role yourself: Nobody else wants to do it, nor should you trust anyone else to do it. If you have to slot Evade Window on your armor or Guard/Guard Up on your weapon/talisman, just do it.
I have regularly been eating for Insurance and Tumbler Meal Hi at the cantina, the latter of which effectively gives 3 points of Evade Window, which is just enough to dodge through most of Savage Omega’s attacks when playing with a heavy bowgun and gunlance (even with a shield, I think i-framing some attacks is valuable because the chip damage from blocking can rack up quickly).
That being said, I’m not going to keep you here all day to talk Monster Hunter strategy. Monster Hunter Wilds is still going, and I’m very much looking forward to title update 4 next month. This is primarily because that’s finally going to be the update that yields some performance improvements… hopefully. That said, remember that shotguns can be a solution to many in-game problems involving big robots. Things to ruminate on until we reconvene in two weeks’ time!