The Rompopolo. Sounds like a bouncy, round little chicken creature or something, doesn’t it? It’s a wonderful word to roll off the tongue – assonance abounds in every syllable, and the cute, repeated plosive of ‘poh poh’ at the end almost has a children’s cartoon character-flavour to it, like Pokémon’s seal starter Popplio, for example, or Studio Ghibli’s Totoro.
What this word doesn’t conjure is an enormous inflatable mosquito monster whose pin-prick red eyes and saggy sacks of blue and purple skin all over its body are the stuff of nightmares. The Rompopolo is horrible, and I hate everything about it – the way its long, pointed insect beak chitters and jabs at you with its lashing, poison-laced tongue, the short, thrusty spikes of its spindly, needle-like arms, and most of all, how it plants its stinger-tipped tail into the muck of Azuz’s oil basins, sucks up the gunge in large, throbbing gulps, and gradually fills its slack, shrivelled skin until it’s full to bursting.
It’s up there with the Khezu – the blind, creepy white worm with only a gaping red, lipsticked maw of a mouth – as one of Monster Hunter’s grimmest and grossest creations for me, and under any other circumstance I would give this popped blister of a creature the widest possible berth. But Wilds has made the terrible decision to hide one of the best armour sets for your Palico cat pal inside the bowels of the Rompopolo, which means I’ve had to kill this grotesque chump of a mosquito-raptor several times in a row now so I can enjoy its spoils.
Because honestly, how could you say no to dressing up your Palico as a little cat-shaped brain in a jar with a robotic suit? Impossible!
In fairness, it’s not just the Palico Rompopolo armour that caught my attention. The Hunter armour you can craft from its hides, claws and poison sacs is pretty neat too, especially the male version that gets you the long, plague-doctor gas mask and the pulsing, puffed-up neck pillow that adorns your torso. Infinitely better than the female shower cap incarnation, that’s for sure. The male belt coil is fantastic, too – a long, half skirt with scissors, syringes and other doctor tools all latched to the outside like you’re about to splice open your next monster carcass and conduct some dubious experiment on it, pumping it full of goodness knows what with the tubes on the back of your gloves that thread all the way through to the claw-like tips of your fingers.
The problem is that a lot of these pieces, for Hunters and Palicos alike, require Rompopolo beaks – a rare forging material that’s hard to come by on any given hunt. You can craft the Rompopolo Palico Supersoaker-style bazooka gun with just a single Rompopolo claw, for example, while its Mr. Freeze-esque robo-body – replete with bioluminescent tubes connecting its neck and legs – only needs one of its hides. Both are common materials you can scrounge off its corpse once you’ve slain it, or when you break bits off it by attacking the red, glowing wounds you can inflict on it during battle.
But the cat brain helmet needs a Rompopolo beak, and I had to kill three or four of these overgrown mosquito-saurs before I managed to salvage one through the RNG of the game’s carcass carving. And once I’d started down this path, it only felt right to complete the Hunter set, too, which required even more beaks to finish off its plague doctor helm (naturally), as well as its greaves and vambraces. By the time I was done, I had half a dozen Rompopolo kills under my belt, and I vowed never to go near it ever again.
I don’t normally put such effort into crafting specific armour sets in Monster Hunter. My Hunter and Palico usually look like they’ve just rummaged through the TK Maxx of Monster Hunter bargain bins and grabbed whatever hodgepodge of clothes they can lay their paws on. Some bone plates there, some big tufty fur pieces here, maybe a natty shoulder pad or two… You know what I mean. Rarely do I go all out and complete a set, either for me or my cat companion. But there was something about that ridiculous cat brain in a jar that I couldn’t resist. Its pink, spongy grey matter still has tiny, cute cat ears, for crying out loud! And I cannot get over how adorably pudgy the suit is. It looks strangely soft and cuddly, even though the glass tubes and jar head would no doubt feel hard, cold and clammy against the skin.
Mostly, though, I just love how Capcom’s designers have managed to extrapolate such apt and exquisite clothing options from such a gross and ghastly monster. It’s not a feeling exclusive to Monster Hunter Wilds, I should note – everyone knows the real reason they play this game isn’t to bring ever-larger dragons under your heel, but to cut them up and fashion the most preposterous costumes possible out of their skin and bones. Wilds’ Ajarakan, for example – a big rocky gorilla lad who can ignite his craggy exterior with volcanic force – all but transforms you into the titular demigod from Asura’s Wrath, while the enormous spider-crab Nersyclla, on the other hand, lets you morph into a veritable Gundam-esque mech suit.
They ooze cool and enviable gasps of aspiration whenever you glimpse them in the armour preview menus, though I will admit that some armour sets are almost too distracting for their own good. It’s why I usually only ever craft the bits I like the best, as running around as a full-blown mech human in a game about hunting fantasy dinosaurs for a living just doesn’t sit quite right with me somehow.
The Rompopolo armour, though, goes above and beyond expectations. While the cat brain in a jar verges on the cusp of being immersion-breaking for me, the Hunter armour sits at just the right juncture of appeal and believability. The plague doctor get-up, with its beaky gas mask, toxic tubes and sharp instruments, couldn’t be a more perfect distillation of what a mutant mosquito would look like if you peeled off its skin and ransacked its organs to walk down the catwalk with, and it’s not so entirely out there as a concept that it doesn’t still fit in with the game’s wider medieval fantasy setting. And if you’re going to don the evil doctor scientist look for your Hunter, you might as well go the whole hog and follow the Palico version through to its logical conclusion.
Everything is just right, in other words, and I can already feel myself starting to resist the urge to pollute it with other, better bits of monster armour the further I get in its main story campaign. I can stave off having to change out of it for my Hunter for a while, thanks to the upgrade possibilities brought on by my increasing number of Armour Cores, but the Palico version is afforded no such staying power. Still, I’m a big believer in wearing what you like rather than necessarily what’s best in Monster Hunter games, so there’s a strong chance it will continue to persist for a little while yet the more I play.
The main thing, though, is that I never have to fight another Rompopolo by choice ever again, which is a relief. There has never been a more excruciating disconnect between the sound of a monster’s name and the reality of seeing it in the flesh, and I’m so very glad I can put this one behind me now. Its bones have been picked clean, and the last of its inflatable skin sacs have been popped. Who’s the monster now, eh?