Full review one sentence: Beneath the veneer of a living, breathing ecosystem is a tedious, system-convoluted friction-heavy loop that confuses complexity with depth and tedium with difficulty. Now go ahead and buy it anyway.

This is all just a personal rant, but I’ve earned it:

I’ve played 2, Tri, 4GU, and platinumed World and Iceborne on PS5 before doing the whole thing over again on PC. So while I don’t have 1,000 plus hours on Steam, I do have my fair share of experience. Also, I main insect glaive which in World is the best its ever been.

From the outset, you’re presented with a mess of different systems or quest givers (however you want to call it, the minutiae is irrelevant). None of which is explained beyond a brief text blurb, and while experimenting and figuring things out for yourself isn’t an issue, there is a bevy of detail you simply can’t take advantage of if not make use of at all simply because there’s no explanation or in game application aside from having to rely on google. What good is the handler if I have to run around to half a dozen bulletins and people just to sift through everything. What a worthless NPC. God I hate the Handler. Even when you can quickly navigate through nested menus nested in menus it’s only because you’ve done it a thousand times, but did no one making the game stop and ask if it was a good idea that the food menu has sub-menus. ‘B-but the other monhuns, th-they’ -yes the other monhuns have a lot more going for them that makes such tedium of little note.

It’s like when you realize you don’t like someone, and suddenly EVERYTHING they do irritates the hell out of you. And when it’s someone you do care about, you can so easily look past their flaws. God I hate the Handler.

The grinding was just not fun? It was a constant back and forth of the same things and the same places and the same monsters fought in the same ways. That’s always been this series, but for some reason it just didn’t work for me this time. I really took the time to understand and utilise the various systems, research, buffs, weaknesses, items, etc to maximize my hunting but it would always degenerate into beating an hp sponge. I would see how other people played and it was no different, a lot of times exactly the same as an IG. And every region at every rank, the same bs: I take a quest for two rathalos or w/e, I’m about to capture one and an Anjanath appears like what are the chances, it runs off and theres another?! Trying to finish things up a herd of gastadon decide everything in the area is in their way and then guess what shows up again. The dynamic environments and interacting fauna are great until they aren’t. I could keep going but I’ll quickly say. MR grinding was exhausting. Maybe I’m just getting older but this time around, I don’t have it in me. It just feels like I’m wasting my time, a been there done that feeling. I did it all and now I’m done with it all.

And god how the characters are so frustratingly worthless, Capcom couldn’t even be assed to give them names. B-but the previous games… The Man, Argosy Captain, the Moga Chief. Yeah, but they had personality. The only character of interest was the 3rd fleet master, and you know why. Besides who plays MH for compelling characters? I don’t but when they do little else but get in the way, force your engagement with an equally worthless story, and suffer you through asinine cutscenes again and again then they become worse than the soggy cardboard their cutout personalities were printed on. At least if they were cliches, they would have some purpose. But we were left with the handler, worse in every way than a literal bulletin board because at least the bulletin board doesn’t go around saying ‘we’ did it, or how grateful we should be for all her hard work. Just tutorial narration through the entirety of the game. If you play solo, it is just you and your weapon, mp its you and your team. There’s no ‘us’ there’s no ‘we’ because I never wanted to deal with ‘her’ in the first place. Just me and my swamp. Quest board was always there, never asked for recognition, never wandered around, never opened its mouth and refused to shut up, just as solid as the tree it was made from. God I hate the Handler. ‘B-but in icebo-’ No. It does not change anything.

Story. There isn’t one. ‘B-but who plays monhun for the story?’ I don’t. And yet I’ve never seen any game take so interesting a premise, a new unexplored land of monsters to study, capture, and hunt and make it so unbelievably bad. Just give us the areas and say here you go. Don’t convolute garbage and force us to sit through it. Storyline cutscenes in mp, and you can’t skip them? Is this by Kojimbo? I know people complain about AT multipliers and late to end game difficulty spike but the franchise has always had grinding at its core. So let us do the thing we’ve been doing for years and drop the pretense of anything other than what the game is: monster hunting. God I hate the Handler.

I will say, while the cutscenes are a drag, making a casual friend group out of strangers wasn’t too difficult, really just names you would see often enough to recognize and at similar levels. It’s the usual online annoyances, things like people responding to a flare in OP endgame gear and smurfing the monster(s) in a minute which takes out the point entirely (i get it’s HR but come on dude) or having others respond to your flare and being worse than useless, fainting 3 times or doing nothing at all, like why bother? I got some help when I was new, time has passed and now I’m the one doing the same things people did for me, so I have no issue with new players, fact of the matter is I’m really bad at the game, full-stop. But I don’t make excuses for myself. You obviously should have solo experience with a monster beforehand in LR, even HR but I stopped with flares altogether.

In all, I look back on this game as a waste of time, but that mistake is my fault and one you'll make too.
Oh look, Rise is on sale.

I love monster hunter and the only reason I still play world is because wilds doesn't run on my steam.deck and my pc is broken. I pretty much got every achievement except for hunting the crown sizes that is the biggest pain in the butt because getting the large or mini gold crown is all RNG based so it is all up to chance. If anyone wants to help me crown hunt be my guest. I am also planning to reach the max hunter and master rank so this game is gonna take a while. I can't stop humming the music in Astera, sometimes I leave it running just to hear that song.

https://youtu.be/5C21ln9supc?si=emgdmKlyTkk_dVZJ

My friend code in Monster hunter now (phone game) is 3358 4035 7429 and referral code for those first starting the game is 9HRNV23E

https://monsterhunternow.com/en

This game is in the MH Hall Of Fame next to MH4U, MHGU and Frontier. Highly recommend. Especially while Wilds cooks... slowly.. lol.