Capcom Unity has been very active in regards to Monster Hunter lately.  They have started participating in hunts with fans on Saturdays, they have multiple Twitter accounts (1,2) tweeting images and videos for the past few weeks, and their Facebook page has also been much more active.  As a fan who loves to piece together clues, I took this as a positive sign concerning the franchise’s direction in the West.

Today, one of the Twitter accounts formerly modeled after the bearded viking depicted in early Monster Hunter Tri commercials tweeted this link.  The link goes to a thread on Capcom Unity concerning a rumor that Monster Hunter Portable 3rd is coming out in the West in 2012.  Capcom’s Corporate Officer/Senior Vice-President Christian Svensson replied with the following:

Guys, I’d hate to be a killjoy and I’m not sure what our French office is saying (if anything as it’s on FB and I’m not sure if they use FB) but the conclusions you’re drawing are unfortunately premature. We’re still waiting on confirmation from SCEA and SCEE that they’re going to be able to support certain elements of the game (that SCEJ has supported) before we can commit to bringing it over. It’s not entirely within our hands.

We’re hoping for it to happen, but we won’t begin localization efforts for the West until we have confirmation from Sony that it’s even possible here. Sony has been focused on the PSN issues and hasn’t had time to address these inquiries with their respective territory network teams.  As such, timing or even the feasibility is still in question. That’s why it’s still not announced.

I just don’t want to see expectations being set prematurely and having you guys be upset if it doesn’t go according to what we’d like it to.  Please know that I personally am working with Sony to try and make this happen. :(

I really want to see it come to the West.

From this we can conclude one important thing: Capcom does want to bring over Monster Hunter Portable 3rd.  This is worthy of celebration to all hunters!

So what stands in the way?  My guess is whether or not Sony will still support ad-hoc, the heart and soul of Monster Hunter’s multiplayer capabilities.  Mikey from Bit-Speak explains this more in-depth for you techies out there:

Ad-hoc is a local communication structure and Capcom Japan has written the remake to support the same structure for backwards compatibility reasons. This means they must rely on the ad-hoc tunneling service that SCEA provided on the North American PSN.

If that didn’t make sense, just understand that the ball is in Sony’s court at the moment. The only problem is, Sony’s court looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland meets Wall Street on any given business day: they have bigger things to worry about.  Still, what Capcom is asking for doesn’t seem out of the question given the popularity of the franchise and the relative amount of difficulty in the task at hand (we did get ad-hoc for Monster Hunter: Freedom Unite after all).  In the meantime, we need to be patient and appreciate that Capcom is gunning for us (more or less); it’s just a matter of letting the dust settle with the Playstation Network.