Despite the fact it's not advisable to mod an online game—not for ethical reasons, mind, unless you're a dirty cheater—that hasn't stopped Monster Hunter Wilds from having a bustling mod scene.
While I'd typically celebrate this as a sign of ingenuity and creativity, I'm unfortunately going to have to say: Stop. Shut it all down. Get the flamethrowers out and torch it all to the ground. This was a mistake. We have spat in the eye of God and we must smite ourselves in penance. One Monster Hunter Wilds player, drunk on power and filled with a vengeance against all creation, has made this… thing.
The Natarkveld mod, a kitschy portmanteau of Nata and Arkveld, stitches Nata's body and horrendously grafts it into the husk of Arkveld. I'll be getting into spoilers to explain why this thing exists—or, well, attempting to. The catastrophic nature of evil can never be truly explained, lying just beyond the dark doors in the abandoned rooms of our imperfect souls—like the monsters we imagined as children, only they breathe within us. Anyway, consider yourself warned.
Nata is a kid character in Monster Hunter Wilds who, in my honest opinion, is one of the better examples of the adolescent tagalong I've seen. I don't know what it is about children, but gamers seem to have an allergic reaction around them when they act out or are illogical. How dare this traumatised pre-teen not defeat Arkveld with facts and logic! Anyway.
Nata spends most of the game sunk deep in his trauma about being cut off from his village when the Arkveld, a horrible beastie, attacked. Later in the game, however, he finds a sort of kinship with the critter—see, Arkveld is a guardian, a creature made by Nata's ancestors to serve a now-dead society.
As such, it's limited to its role in life. Guardian creatures don't have reproductive organs, and their stomachs are atrophied. In their servitude to the world that came before, they were forced to not do anything that a monster might naturally do, like hunt and eat. This is sort of heresy in a game all about protecting the natural order (in the lore at least, in gameplay, it's about crushing the same wyvern over and over for a cool hat).
When he finds this out, Nata kinda imprints onto him: He'd spent his whole life in a reclusive village, never venturing outside, but now he's truly found out what it means to live. Arkveld's started hunting and doing more normal monster things, so he decides that he and Arkveld are the same in spirit.
It's a tragedy then that, immediately after having this epiphany and letting go of his hate for Arkveld, that we find said Arkveld going mad on the wyvern juice and need to slay him for the good of the ecosystem. We all but say 'I think we're gonna have to kill this guy, Nata', and he loses it a little.
Anyway, that's the joke. Nata has the sheer temerity to say "Arkveld and I are the same", and now those with the power to do (in other words, boizoi on Nexus Mods) have bound him to a horrific amalgamation of flesh for all eternity. That'll teach a child to be, like, a little impulsive and weird. Here's some more upsetting pictures of this unholy thing, courtesy of the Monster Hunter WIlds subreddit.
Best mod ever just dropped from r/MonsterHunter
I'm reminded of that one infamous scene from Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood where a certain young girl becomes fused to her dog, and is thus only capable of mumbling "Ed…ward". Which is not a great memory to have thrust back into my psyche on a Thursday. I'll just put it on the trauma pile, alongside that one Thomas the Tank Engine mod in Baldur's Gate 3.
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