People have tried to get me into Monster Hunter several times, with little success. There’s just a lot of work involved.
Lots of crafting and farming, and once you’re ready, the fight itself is a lot of work. It takes a long time due to large HP pools.
There are a zillion builds, and the story isn’t exactly deep enough to engage me despite the shortcomings. To me, it’s basically Elden Ring, but with the aspects I don’t like turned to 11.
I’ve only played World so far but I really enjoy it. At its core, it has some of the funnest combat of any game I’ve played. However, it’s one of those games that tries its hardest to keep the fun part away from you, at least in the first ~15 hours.
They cover up the actual gameplay with convoluted, stereotypical RPG-ness to the point where it feels like a parody of RPGs. Constant crafting and item gathering with inventory management, overly busy and clunky UI, an unskippable videogame story (genuinely this describes the entire story, there is nothing more to say about it than that it is a videogame story).
I know everyone compares these games to Dark Souls, but I have to admit the multiplayer is like Dark Souls’ in the sense that it is also extremely bad. You can’t play with your friends during those missions in the first 15 hours until you ALL solo run to the monster and watch a cutscene first after starting the mission. Why? This has made playing with my friends so miserable and I feel embarrassed explaining the system to them.
It also has microtransactions to change your character appearance and get some skins which is ridiculous and should always be made fun of. If Street Fighter 6 is any indication of how awful the microtransactions in Wilds will be I may just have to skip it.
I push through all this because when you do finally get to just do the monster hunting part, it’s incredibly well done. The maps are beautiful and fun to explore, the weapon combos have crazy depth and all sorts of hidden mechanics to learn, and the monsters themselves have great animations. But it’s exhausting to push through it sometimes.
lets goooooo, my favourite franchise of all time! Techbically, my first monster hunter game was tri on thr wii, when I was a wee bab. I say technically because I was a tiny idiot and I did not know how to do quests so I just spent hours wandering around moga woods in free roam, just hanging out. I still had an absolute blast doing it though!
The game that really got me into the franchise though, and my favourite game, would be world! I just love the incredible attention to detail, and the clear love that went into designing everything! I have more hours in rise because that’s the game my friends all play, and it’s a phenomenal game no doubt, but I always find myself creeping back to World.
The next game, Wilds, is looking like it will far surpass World for me though, the 2025 wait is killing me! The gamescom previews really showed that they have been listening to thr community, and are making the monster hunter game we’ve all dreamed of.
That’s one of my favourite things about the monster hunter teams in fact, that they clearly know how to learn from their previous works! I would readily argue that every generation has been an overall massive improvement over the previous one. I say generation rather than game, because comparing Rise and World is rather unfair. They’re two different games made by different teams for different hardware with different goals in mind, and if you ask me they both achieved their goals spectacularly, no matter what some nerds will say about Rise… Grouping them both into 5th gen and looking at the series by generation, each one has so far been an improvement in nearly every aspect, and I think that’s an amazing track record. That is why I am willing to put my wholehearted trust in the monster hunter teams that they will absolutely deliver with Wilds and any games after that.
A friend got me into Monster Hunter and now I have nearly 5000 hours split across various games, the bastard. I guess I won’t be doing cocaine or gunpla or toy car collecting anytime soon! XD
It’s a really great experience, I often say good MH games (that is, MH games in general: bad games are a rarity in this franchise) bring out my three preferred Ms: music, monsters and marvels, the latter one meaning the landscapes, the maps, the exploration. You haven’t experienced what kind of comfy immersion can game developers go for until you wander about the Sandy Plains at night to bbq up some Aptonoths and Rhenoplos into steak, and you watch the shooting stars in the night sky. And then you get distracted from the bbq serial griller and you end up with 2x Burnt Meat instead…
Started out with 3U. Underwater is great btw, don’t listen to people who say it shouldn’t return. The first time I tried the game I just Didn’t Get It and thought it was not for me… but man the music was so cool (the Sandy Plains battle music!) and the monster designs (Barioth!) insisted that I should make another try. Grabbed it back after a long break, followed the instructions this time, found a weapon that was to my liking (switchaxe, or as we call it, the Swag Axe), and haven’t really stopped much since then. I take good care to backup my saves often as well, juuuuust in case I don’t really like to grind hundreds of hours for the most random rewards on the double. By this point the only gen I have not played is Gen1, I’ve played Dos, FU, Tri, P3rd, 3U (1400 hrs), 4U, XX, Gen, GU (1200 hrs), Rise, Sunbreak and Stories 2 (800 hrs). Nowadays I can sometimes be found on the LanPlay network on MHGU and MHRS, and I’m waiting to get a better computer so I can try Frontier and maybe Iceborne.
Now, everyone has an opinion and so do I, so I’m clear on a number of things. Starting with World the game has casualized so much. Some casualization is fine, as a treat, and I like some QoL such as the tree view for weapon upgrades as much as the next person. But sometimes a game can be casualized to the extreme, to the point even TDS and NCH have taken jabs at it at points, like getting you infinite Ancient Potions, or the loss of most technical inventory management or environment management in Rise. It’d be nice to see Monster Hunter come back to form, with a properly numbered game (Monster Hunter 5, maybe call it “Quinto” or smth!) and fights that are more about besting a monster in its own turf rather than simply hiding under a beast’s legs (or far away at a ledge) and spamming X or R (hey, gunners!) to win.
But the music… oh, the music! And the ambience SFX. Now that has never faltered. Despite its many mishaps, World has some of the best and comfiest music in the series.
My favorite??? Thats tough, started on the PSP with with the three up to MHFU, and have played just about all of them since. The best would probably be MH4U, I’m a big fan of the older style gameplay. World and Rise are fun, but they feel a lot different, a bit too many changes for my taste
MH4U on the 3ds was my first introduction and I actually kinda miss being able to quickly tap the items that were up on the touch screen to use them. World on PS and Rise on the switch scratch the itch but I was visibly upset that tracking didn’t make it into Rise; it was just a great mechanic and it felt extra satisfying to build out the monster knowledge, and it added some wonderful depth to the gameplay.
I’m not really all that crazy about the fort defense mechanic in Rise, I’d genuinely skip it if I could.
As much as I enjoy the series and still play it, there’s a certain amount of ennui that I’m experiencing when it comes to hunting Jaggis and the rest of the same monsters every time. New mechanics help to make up for it by having the hunt be slightly different, but wow what I wouldn’t give for a totally new experience playing Monster Hunter.
I just started playing Stories yesterday in order to learn Japanese. It’s wild how different some of the names are. Hopefully the language barrier will keep me occupied until Wilds is released.
I’ve been playing since Freedom 2 and have played almost all of them to at least village completion. Exceptions are Tri and Frontier(s?). Def my favorite series by far and even if they have had their failed experiments, I’m glad they tried them.
I’ve tried fair share of clones as well but they usually don’t hit the mark.
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