Monster Hunter (モンスターハンター)

Released in 2004, Monster Hunter tells almost nothing: you track a huge beast, bring it down in twenty minutes of coordination, carve armour from its carcass and start again on something bigger. The loop is austere, the learning curve brutal, and the game took fifteen years to break out of Japan.

In Japan, though, it defined a social practice. The PSP and later 3DS entries played over local wireless, sending high-schoolers hunting together in fast-food outlets and on trains; operators even installed dedicated hotspots. Monster Hunter: World, released in 2018 on home console and online, pushed the series past twenty million copies and finally globalised it.