How the Monster Hunter community gassed itself for over a decade

It all started with Monster Hunter Tri – Deviljho, the devourer of worlds; a monster that would gorge on meat traps, other monsters, and even its own tail. Except that last part never happened, and the Monster Hunter community is in disarray as what has long been common knowledge has been turned upside down.

Monster Hunter as a series has a long history with communal superstitions. The “desire catcher” was jokingly used to describe instances where players continued to only receive materials they didn’t need on hunts; while “petting the Poogie” – the series’ adorable pig mascot – has been theorized as a way to rig the RNG in your favor. Yet these were always recognized as fake and were just playful ways to massage the pain of fighting the same monster over and over again in an effort to get what you would need to upgrade certain gear.

Deviljho, and his alleged taste for his own flesh, was different. From the monster’s inclusion, it was assumed that he was keen to savor his own products. Looking ahead to Monster Hunter 3: Ultimate, a video uploaded to Capcom’s official YouTube even perpetuated the misinformation that he would choose his own tail to eat as a snack. Between everything Deviljho would eat – including hunters and even other monsters – it wasn’t such a stretch to believe his appetite could include his own flesh and blood.

Since the question was first posed to the community several weeks ago, the community has panicked as more and more players opened up about their perceived experiences, and others desperately continued to hunt Deviljho in every game in which he appeared, trying any number of methods to make it eat his own severed tail. A clip, which at first glance appeared to show someone performing the deed in the Japan-only Monster Hunter Portable 3rd, appeared to confirm the phenomenon at first – until further testing suggested that the video in question, which was working on the PPSSPP emulator, could have disguised a placed meat trap using an imperfect texture replacement; with a pixel strand that popped out of the tail revealing the trick.

Of course, like other examples of the Mandela Effect, many players continue to insist that their memories of seeing Deviljho eat his tail are true; and from their point of view, it may have seemed so. Older monster hunters didn’t sync small monsters between players in multiplayer, so perhaps a Deviljho attempting to eat a small monster corpse from another player’s side could have cut its own tail, chasing the cunning. Perhaps these cases were the result of scammers intentionally hiding meat traps in a tail, as appears to have been the case with the “evidence” we linked above.

Regardless of what led to the perpetuation of the rumor in the first place, with so many in the community desperately trying to confirm what everyone thought was true. If Deviljho was actually able to target his own tail for consumption, we would have seen definitive evidence of it already. The fact that there has been no such documentation, from any of the games the monster has appeared in, nor from Western or Japanese communities, can only mean that the Deviljho effect has been real; and the community as a whole had fallen into the trap of a ruse for more than a decade.

For a series that, especially in older games, tended to be deliberately obtuse – it’s perhaps no great surprise that such a misunderstanding could persist for so long. For games as mechanically dense as Monster Hunter, it has always been very easy to believe that such a system could exist. As sad as it may be to learn that such a defining characteristic of a fan-favorite monster was never true, it’s odd that such a rumor could have existed for so long before it was finally revealed. Who knows what other misunderstandings remain for players to uncover?