Today, Capcom aired a Monster Hunter Wilds showcase, detailing the new Grand Hub, Arena Quests, and other features arriving in the game's first title update in early April. At the end of the stream, Capcom gave us a glimpse of what to expect farther ahead in Monster Hunter's future with a short teaser for a second title update coming this summer—and it's a teaser that many veteran hunters have been waiting years for.
Lagiacrus is finally returning to Monster Hunter.
The mascot monster for Monster Hunter 3 in 2009, Lagiacrus is a long, serpentine leviathan monster that wields lightning attacks. As a showcase for MH3's underwater combat mechanics, Lagiacrus offered a unique fight that quickly earned its place as a fan-favorite brawl. Its popularity has endured: In Monster Hunter's 20th anniversary monster popularity poll, Lagiacrus ranked third out of the series' 229 monsters.
Unfortunately, since 2009, Lagiacrus has proved a little too unique. While Monster Hunter ditched underwater combat after MH3U, and while Lagiacrus made a return for Generations as a land-only fight, it's been absent from every Monster Hunter release since World—despite the community's constant hopeful clamoring to see their big wet son again.
The problem, quite simply, is that Lagiacrus is shaped weird.
Capcom acknowledged the unrequited Lagiacrus longing in 2022, when series producer Ryozo Tsujimoto explained to IGN that while "the desire is definitely there," Lagiacrus is a "difficult monster to implement" in the current era of Monster Hunter games.
"It's very snake-like, its parts are all kind of touching the ground at different moments, so it's very like a writhing sort of ground-based monster," Tsujimoto said. That snake-like body profile caused issues as Monster Hunter's level geometry became more complex in World and Rise. "We'd like to look back on it sometime, but just the technological difficulties, they are kind of daunting."
However, the earliest Wilds previews gave Lagiacrus-hungry hunters hope. Balahara, the new sandworm Leviathan, has an extremely similar body profile to Lagiacrus, indicating Capcom had cracked whatever tech hurdles were preventing serpentine monsters from gelling with current-day geometry.
That hope turned into tentative hype when players equipped with mod-enabled freecam modes started poking around areas currently inaccessible in Wilds' environment maps, discovering a sealed-off area that feels suspiciously like a Lagiacrus nest.
Today brings us a final confirmation. Closing out the title update trailer with a short teaser for a second update coming in summer, Capcom shows a Lagiacrus leg slamming a slain Dalthydon to the ground, with its body visible in the background. As the trailer cuts away to the words "Summer 2025," we hear the Lagiacrus' recognizable cry. It's happening.
I'm eager to properly meet Lagiacrus myself—I started my Monster Hunter career with MH4U, and didn't dive deep enough into Generations to fight the leviathan before I went full MonHun sicko from World onwards. I'm looking forward to getting acquainted. And probably electrocuted.
In the meantime, you can catch me working on my barrel bowling in the Grand Hub.
