The Monster Hunter series is soon going to leave the portable realm to move onto home consoles with Monster Hunter World, but there is still going to be one way to play it on the go, via Sony's often-overlooked PS Vita remote play.

Below you can check out four videos (courtesy of YouTube user PS Vita Remote Play Guru) showing what the game's recent beta looks like on Sony's waning handheld console. The first video is filmed off camera, while the other three clips show footage captured directly. 

It looks quite great and gives us a glimpse of what could have been in a few different scenarios that never happened. One is if Sony Interactive Entertainment managed to keep the Monster Hunter series on its platforms instead of letting Nintendo sweep it for its 3DS lineup. It's quite likely that we would have gotten at least a couple of mainline Monster Hunter games on the Vita, and the console would have probably been more successful, at least in Japan.

A second scenario that comes to mind, is if Sony decided to create a successor to the PS Vita, this is quite possibly what Monster Hunter World could have looked like on a fictional PS Vita 2.

The third scenario sees Capcom porting Monster Hunter World to the Nintendo Switch, which many consider pretty much a replacement for their dying Vitas.

Of course, history isn't done with ifs, so those scenarios are simply mental gymnastics. If we want to play Monster Hunter World on a handheld platform, remote play is pretty much the only way we have at the moment.

If you want to see more of the game, you can also check out our comparison between the three graphics mode on PS4 Pro, and read about the updates planned by Capcom after the game's release.

Monster Hunter World will launch worldwide on January 26th, for PS4 and Xbox One, with a PC version coming at a later date.