Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate Has Changes to Western UI

Capcom's Andrew Alfonso, Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate's Localization Director, recently talked about the process.

The much-anticipated Nintendo 3DS game will be surfacing in Europe and North America this year, primed to be the the definitive version of the bestselling Monster Hunter 4, with content that doesn't exist in the Japanese release.

In a Capcom Unity blog post, Alfonso noted how in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, the team were able to talk to director Kaname Fujioka and lead designer Yuya Tokuda to get approval to tweak the UI/tutorials to "make the experience smoother for players overseas."

He also detailed some of the ideas behind naming, for example "Val Balbar", the central hub, could have been called names like "Balbary", "Valvare", "Valbar" and "Barbaary."

The flagship monster would, if Romanised from Japanese, be "Goa", but Capcom decided on "Gore" to make the monster sound that bit more sinister, revealed Alfonso, with the team keeping the original "Magala" part of the name.

"Kecha Wacha", another beast in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, was, like Goa Magala, also localised early - in order to get the critter a name for the demo that was shown at the Tokyo Game Show back in 2012.

In previous games, subspecies got their own unique name, so in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, some beasts will get prefixes based on their attack element - for example "Ash Kecha Wacha."

What do you think of the naming choices in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate?