I hate that Monster Hunter Wilds' coolest Palico armour is the product of its grossest monster

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 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 , 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.

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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.