Monster Hunter is one of those games, like Pokemon, where you kind of understand why Capcom has traditionally shied away from a big-budget, triple-A home console entry – Monster Hunter Tri, originally a Wii exclusive, being the exception that kind of proves the rule. Some might mention Monster Hunter Online, the China-only MMOG, but that was developed by Tencent for a F2P market and really shows it. Problem is that Monster Hunter is a perfect handheld game but also a very weird game because of that, with a learning curve that could more accurately be called a cliff, and a thousand hidden rules. The location-specific damage and weapon movesets make it a game of extraordinary precision; the variety of monsters and quests make it an essentially endless experience; the crafting system, honed over decades, can spit out so many thousands of items it never stops surprising. Monster Hunter’s quality has never been in doubt, even its esoteric nature has meant the West has been slow to love it, but making a full-fat home version is nowhere near as simple as just upgrading the graphics.

Monster Hunter World, then, is something of a gamble. And it’s the kind of task that shows Capcom at its absolute best, as with the recent Resident Evil 7, throwing everything at a reinvention of one of its most important series and focusing in on exactly the right elements. When I saw the announce trailer at the Sony E3 conference I was worried, because it suggested a cinematic and linear experience – and that’s not Monster Hunter. But seeing the game played through several times dispelled my doubts, and suggests Capcom might be putting the finishing touches on a classic.

The most important element of this new Monster Hunter is how it doubles-down on the idea of ecosystem. The previous Monster Hunters have an ecosystem in a limited sense – Aptanoth bumble about, and occasionally a bigger monster might kill and eat them to regain stamina. Sometimes, you can get monsters fighting each other. But that’s pretty much as far as it goes.

Monster Hunter World’s environments look spectacular but, far more importantly, they feel alive. Tiny lizards scarper up trees. Insects buzz about near carcasses, while smaller herbivores graze nearby in little family gatherings. Predators roam, red in tooth and claw, and steam into the smaller animals to grab their dinner. The trees are lushly carpeted with vines, and pack hunters clamber up and over the uneven environment with the natural ease of animals in their element.

Part of this new liveliness is a new concession, which is your hunter's team of scoutflies. These essentially replace the traditional opening of any hunt, where you try to find the monster, by allowing the player to find ‘tracks’ and gradually level up the scoutfly pack – as you find more tracks, they lead you closer to the monster's location via a shimmering green trail, until eventually you've found enough they can home right in. And if you subsequently lose the monster mid-fight, they’ll lead you right back.

This is a direct replacement for one of Monster Hunter’s old rhythms, which was basically that at the start of any hunt the team spreads across the map to find the monster then, once someone’s found it, the hunters try to keep the monster ‘painted’ – which shows the location on the map until the effect wears off. This part of the game has always made much more sense in multiplayer, because it doesn’t take too long to comb the map with multiple players, and can be something of a drag in singleplayer (especially given monsters’ habits of moving around). Essentially it was a system that worked, but could also not work – it says everything that later entries include an item, psychoserum, whose only purpose is to magically tell you where the monster is.

Yes the scoutflies, when levelled-up, essentially amount to a guidance arrow. But Monster Hunter’s always been brilliant at tying-in mechanics to the overall idea of hunting, and making you find the tracks keeps this on just the right side: it’ll be much easier for less experienced players to find monsters, and get into the action, while the hoary pros will enjoy the hunting theme to it, and of course can still choose to find monsters the old-fashioned way. The one concern might be that a great feature of Monster Hunter has always been how wounded monsters try to escape, and you'd hope that — certainly later in the game — the scoutflies don't make things too unfair.

I watched the singleplayer demo playthrough twice, and a separate multiplayer one, repeating the former just to confirm what Capcom's reps were saying — that every run went differently. The singleplayer mission begins with the hunter flying into base camp, holding a rope that's attached to some flying monster. At any time during the mission, in a wonderful quality-of-life improvement from the current games, this monster can be used to transport you back to base camp. And in Monster Hunter World you can now swap gear mid-mission at the base camp tent. Before the hunter's even taken a step forward, you can see how carefully Capcom is layering simple improvements with new systems.

Monster Hunter World's plot, because some people care about these things, sees you exploring a newly-discovered continent, and so this first mission is about gathering information on a new type of monster that's sent various other hunters packing. Monster Hunter's maps have until now been composed of various interlocking areas with routes (and loading screens) between them, but now the whole hunting area is seamless (no more cheap escapes from certain death). And the minor improvements keep piling up: the hunter no longer pauses for seconds to gather items, but sweeps them up quickly; there's a quick-select radial wheel to cycle through your belt items; your hunter can move, albeit slowly, while consuming a well-done steak or a potion. In one tear-jerking omission, drinking a potion no longer ends in a strongman pose, a touch that was always silly but also the quintessence of Monster Hunter — it annoyed some players, but the whole point is that drinking a potion has that period of vulnerability attached. You can't please everyone, of course, but I'm sad to see it go.

Both singleplayer runthroughs began with a similar scene: Aptanoth grazing around greenery and shallow water, before the new monster Great Jagras bursts in and takes out one of the adults. The remarkable thing about this was what happened afterwards. First the Great Jagras swallows the (sizeable) Aptanoth whole, distending its jaw and lizardlike frame to do so, then waddles back to where it came from. The hunter follows and, hiding in the bushes, sees the Great Jagras regurgitate part of its meal for a pack of baby Jagras that quickly rush in to feast.

This element of hiding is also new, and helped along by two new gadgets: a wrist-mounted slingshot and a ghillie suit. The former can be used to fire various little pellets, the most basic of which make a noise and attract monsters' attention — which is what the hunter does in the above situation to temporarily disperse the pack. The hunter can also hide in bushes themselves by crouching, or put on the ghillie suit to make themselves more or less invisible to monsters (the item has a chunky cooldown to stop it being constantly abused mid-battle, and no doubt there will be other specialised 'suits' to come). This can either be about starting off a fight with a bang, or escaping when you're taking a beating to scarf down some potions, but it's lovely how easily the game transitions between this stealth-lite element and the bread-and-butter hunting.

After finding lots of mucous from the hunt's real quarry (the Great Jagras is merely a distraction), the hunter finds an Anjanath asleep in a cave — a huge T-Rex style monster with inflating nostrils and a very nasty looking set of teeth. The hunter first of all pulls the Anjanath out of the narrow cave with a slinger pop to the nose, before running to a more open area that is reached by squeezing through some tree branches. You can probably guess what happens next: the Anjanath comes crashing through the scenery, a spectacular first look at the destructible environment. On one of the hunts, this creates an opportunity for the hunter to entangle the beast in the vines that now litter the floor for some easy hits. On the other, the hunter was too close and is sent flying into a nearby tree.

The hunter in both demos used a Great Sword as their main weapon, with all 14 weapon classes confirmed for the final game, and this weapon's slow nature shows that — underneath all the gorgeous new animations and look of the thing — the beating heart of Monster Hunter lives on. Baiting attacks, timing the big swings right, coolly dodging claws as they rake through the air and taking the chances when they come. Except it's more dynamic than ever, not least thanks to the slinger's other function, a grappling hook. So, one of the things that carries over from recent titles is the ability to mount monsters and start stabbing them in the back. And you can probably see where this is going.

In one of the demos the hunter mounted the Anjanath and was stabbing away, which showed off how this system has been changed. Rather than just shaking you off, monsters now aim at you with great swipes and you have to move your hunter around to avoid the incoming attacks, while finding the windows to add your own. And they don't just try to hit you. The Anjanath in this case is eventually so enraged it dashes at a tree and jumps, smacking the hunter face-first into a branch and sending them flying. With an amazing bit of quick-thinking, the hunter then shot out his grappling hook to a nearby tree, and swung around and right back onto the Anjanath. It's one of those gaming moments where, as soon as I saw it, I couldn't wait to do it.

While fighting, the Great Jagras from earlier turns up. Rather than ignoring each other, the monsters then ignore the hunter — and Anjanath batters into the smaller monster, picking it up in its jaws and shaking from side to side brutally. The Great Jagras, after finally escaping the teeth, limps as fast as it can away as the Anjanath bellows about how great it is — meanwhile our hunter gets in a beauty of a tail shot, before being chased up into a nest full of corpses.

Monster Hunter World's dynamism is shown in how differently this part of the demo played out. The first time, Anjanath followed up and fought the hunter for a while — before Rathalos turned up and, without a second thought, dug its talons into the dino-like monster and started lifting it up. The panicked Anjanath shook free, turned to face its enemy, and got a fireball up the snout. In an animation that resembled the monster equivalent of 'nope' it then scuttled off as fast as it could.

The second time, the hunter reached the nest, the Anjanath arrived, and then all hell broke loose. The Great Jagras appeared and started fighting Anjanath, and Rathalos immediately turns up and starts toasting them both. The hunter's in the middle of all this, basically trying not to get squashed. All three monsters are soon in basically a cartoon ball of teeth, claws and tails — soon the Great Jagras goes flying, before Rathalos just bosses the Anjanath around with its ground game. The hunter's target remains the Anjanath, so it's lovely to see him scrabbling off from this encounter, again, with a pronounced limp.

At this point the hunter returned to base camp to change gear, picking up a Heavy Bowgun and new set of armour. Another new touch tying into this feature is damage numbers: each hit on a monster now shows you how much damage it did, with low numbers white and higher numbers going orange, so you can see how effective your weapons are rather than trying to decipher the stat screens. There's no monster health bar, though, and hopefully there'll also be the option to turn them off — I like the idea of what I can learn from them but, after that, I'd rather have a clean-looking game experience.

The scoutflies lead us back to the poor Anjanath's lair. The monster's trying to sleep it off. What follows next was pretty brtual, but also amazing. The hunter begins by launching half-a-dozen cluster bombs around the monster's position, and as they tick down readies another fire mode. The bombs go boom, the startled Anjanath gets to its feet, and the hunter lets rip like Scarface with what looks and acts like a hip-mounted minicannon. As that runs out of ammo he switches, dodging a last desperate flail from the doomed beast, to wyvern fire mode, and unleashes a continuous laser blast into the monster's exposed belly. After a few seconds of that, it's all over bar the twitching. And, of course, the carving. The most important little hunting ritual remains almost undisturbed, the peace after the storm, and wouldn't you know it, the lucky sod got a plate on his first carve.

There are so many more tiny details. More environmental traps, like suspiciously-convenient bags of rocks suspended mid-tree, and the new verticality of the hunts — monsters switch between levels seamlessly, and the hunter has to do the same. The world's day / night cycle, and how this alters what's happening in the ecosystem. Multiplayer co-op is now drop-in and drop-out (amazing!) The striking manner in which, when the hunter had the Anjanath down and was landing some big blows, a pack of Jagras ran in and started biting away at their natural enemy — until it recovered, and they immediately scarpered.

Monster Hunter World is not a risk-free proposition. The series has had such a strong core over decades because, even if now showing its age, that core is a brilliant design that Capcom has preferred to enhance rather than replace. But change was inevitable, the higher-octane action of Generations leading the way, and with World Capcom has retained a surprising amount of the old character while making the whole thing much more dynamic and much less clunky. This is a clearly a new experience, but it's equally clearly a Monster Hunter game. The proof will be in the playing, of course, and especially how World manages to scale over its length. The first time I saw the trailer, I was worried. After seeing Monster Hunter World for myself, I can't wait to get lost in it.