I started with World, and put hundreds of hours into that and Rise, plus their expansions. I tried the GU demo on Switch, but it felt too clunky.

The thing that hooked me was the first large monster you hunt, Great Jagras. He's a pushover for any hunter with even a slight amount of experience, but for me as a new player, it was an epic battle and I certainly didn't expect that much intensity that early in the game. I also liked how even after you had a monster on "farm status" a hunt could still easily go from good to bad if you weren't careful. It emphasized that these monsters were incredibly dangerous, and even seasoned hunters could be in trouble if they get too cocky. It also helped keep farming more interesting as you needed to pay attention if you wanted to be successful.

Overall, I like the... world, in World more, but the gameplay mechanics and combat more in Rise. In World, the maps were larger, with more detail and felt more alive. I also liked the tracking aspect, and was disappointed that aspect didn't make it to Rise. It felt like you were actually hunting your target, instead of just sprinting to their location on your doggo friend and beating them up like in Rise.

I'm definitely looking forward to Wilds releasing next year.

Ive put hundreds of hours into monster hunter portable 3rd with the english patch. Also played a decent amount of Rise and will be playings Wild when it comes out

I've never played these games. It all just feels extremely overwhelming with the large amount of menus and systems. I'm also unable to focus on long games (I also have issues with long open world games like Breath of the Wild for example), so that is another thing that pushes me away. But the idea of a cosy grind while listening to podcasts does interest me.

However, I have seen the film: an absolute masterpiece in the "bad film genre". Just beautifully brainless action, similar to the amazing Resident Evil films of the same creator.

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.

One of my best friends introduced me to this series back in MH4U for the 3DS.
As someone mentioned in other comment, these games are definitely not newbie friendly haha. I started it and left it after a few missions, I don't remember what rank I was, but definitely the starting village. Afterwards we finally got time to play and he mocked me since my character had less armor than his palico :D
We played more often and he helped me reach higher ranks until G-rank.

Each game has had a different kind of end game.
For MH4U were the guild quests which were randomly generated, I loved this, it made the game not feel like a total grind, but it only made it feel like that, because it really was a grind to both get the correct quest and level it up to get the relics you wanted.

The one I enjoyed the least was MHGen/MHGU because there's no end game loop, once you reach G-rank the game doesn't have anything else to offer, so you can just grind the same missions you already have. Of course this can be considered an end game loop since maxing your armor and weapons takes a long time (and IIRC some older fans mentioned this was ad-hoc with the theme of remembering old games since they where like that).

For MHW were the investigations which felt a bit like MH4U guild questions but without the random map.
The only downside of this game and the Iceborn expansion was the game as a service aspect, you could only access some quests on some days of the week, you had to connect to the internet to get them, and also one of the last bosses is tied to multiplayer, which if you have bad internet or only time for a single quest is impossible to properly finish.

I've bought each game. Around 200 minimum in each one. IIRC 450+ in MH4U and around 500 in MHW (mostly because it's harder to pause in PS4). MHRise/Sunbreak

MHRise is one of the most relaxing ones with the sunbreak expansion since you can take NCPs on all missions, they help a lot to de-aggro the monsters and enjoy the hunt.

I was with some friends from work when the trailer for MHW released and we literally screamed when we realized it was an MH game haha.

The only change they've made between games that I found really annoying was to the hunting horn. It was really fun to have to adapt your hunt to each horn's songs and keep track of what buffs were active and which ones you needed to re-apply (in reality you always rotated your songs over and over so you never ran out of your buffs).
But in Rise each song now is X -> X, A -> A, and X+A -> X+A, there's no combinations.
Every hunting horn only has 3 songs, previously some horns could have up to 5.
When you play a song twice the buff applied goes up a level, well, in Rise they made it a single attack to play all your songs twice.
It feels like they tried to simplify the weapon but two teams got in charge of providing ideas and they implemented both solutions, which made the weapon have no depth at all.
Also, previously you felt like the super support playing hunting horn, each time you applied a buff a messages appeared showing the buff you applied. Yeah, it was kind of spammy, but it felt nice having a hunting horn on the hunt.
In Rise they decided to only display a message the first time you apply the buff and that's it, so if you re-apply it there's nothing, even when you keep buffing your team. Ah, but if you use bow the arc shot does spam the buff message, so you feel less than a support than the bow :/

Due to work I haven't followed all the news of MHWilds, but I'll definitely buy it.

For the next posts my recommendations would be the series Sniper elite, Mario and Luigi, Pokemon mystery dungeon, and Disgaea.
(Maybe also another theme of posts could be genre/mechanic, like tactics games or colony management in general)

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.

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.

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 have a slightly different perspective as someone just starting Rise as my first ever experience with this series.

Holy shit, the tutorials are terrible. Massive info dump walls of text explaining too many systems at once, cryptic warning messages to confirm you want to dismiss the tutorials are extra confusing... And despite the massive info dumping, they don't even tell you everything you need to know to complete the tutorial missions as you complete them. When you go to trap your first monster, there's no tooltip to teach you how to use items in the "how to trap" explanation or NPC dialogue. I needed to google it.

And no ability to pause in a singleplayer game? I googled some explanation about pause being on one of the menus, but I couldn't find it. Thankfully, suspending the game on a Steam Deck pauses it, so it's playable.

Also, why was I given massively OP equipment and piles of loot just for logging in? The entire early game is now so easy that it's not fun. I'm only 3 tutorials + 1 "real" mission into the game, so I'm going to try starting over without the EZ-mode loot and give it a second chance, but so far, I'm not impressed.

If I'd bought this through Steam, I'd have refunded it already before the 2-hour playtime window closed.

TL;DR: Terrible new-player onboarding has me questioning if I should push through.

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

The only one I've played is generations on switch, it was fun! I played it last year but there were still some people to co-op with.

I've started the serie with MH Freedom on PSP. Too overwhelming for a first play (timed mission, needing to find the monster, weapon sharpness?) , I left it aside.

Few years latter we started MH 4 on switch with a friend. Beeing more motivated to play it as we were two, I took more time to understand it and play with the various weapons and Oh god it clicked ! The combat system is so deep, you have so many options, then there is the monsters, majestous beast giving you a tough battle !

From there I followed with MH World and it's improvement on about everything and finally Rise. Battle in rise are so fun, you can play on the ground or in the air or both, every one of the 14 weapon type has sub choices in how you want to use it, making your own way to play the game.

It is definitely one of my favorite franchise and I'd really like to try wild when it comes out :)

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 played the 3DS one (unless there more) as one of my first 3DS games, and I just couldn't get into it. To put it simply, it wasn't clear what I should be doing, even when I understood and did the objective.

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.

monhun could be so good if they made it a little more soulslike instead of instanced fights and menus