So this game is incredibly fun... but it suffers from so many awful decisions to where I can't recommend a purchase at full price. Here we go:

* This is supposed to be an ambitious open world Monster Hunter, and yet you're railroaded super hard through the story and put on very bizarre linear paths for some cinematic gimmicks that feel like they're aimed at trying to appeal to some sort of imaginary greater audience that exists outside of the Monster Hunter crowd.

* Multiplayer is hilariously obtuse and even worse than World's. You can see other players if you're in the same lobby as them within camps... but you need to form link parties to actually connect up with friends. And those link parties don't let you actually link worlds together unless you do an environmental link, but then you can't do quests and it's essentially just free roam mode with friends. So if you DO want to do quests with friends, you first have to start the quest (which if you're doing the story, requires going through often quite a bit of dialogue, cutscenes, or slow and annoying railroaded trails before you finally get to fight the monster and start the quest) so that others may join.

* The story is a bizarre B movie plot pretending it's some sort of grand epic that'll attract... non Monster Hunter fans or something? Idek. The characters are obnoxious and it feels like this was a product of Capcom wanting to reach a wider audience so they hired SBI or some other DEI consulting firm to come up with the characters. You got half a dozen girl bosses, the handler has permanent resting b*** face, the only cool white dude is absent until you beat the "Low Rank" (HR1-7) story, and there's some annoying bipolar kid we're repeatedly forced to care about because reasons. I don't know who this story is supposed to cater to, but you can tell the dev team really wanted to show off the engine's capabilities for hair. The only bright side is they didn't go full-throttle DEI because the girl boss Blacksmith actually has curves, but as usual MH female characters can't get those curves. Which brings me to...

* Character creation is obnoxious because they lumped male and female voices together to where male voices are 1, 3, 5 while female voices are 2, 4, 6, giving the illusion that there's more voice options than there truly are. Same goes for the hair, and to play as safe as they could, the sexes (or body types) don't even have labels lol; it's just option 1 or 2. Then I guess they allow you to crossdress as each armor set has its gendered variations as normal, but you can wear the female armor as a dude or male armor as a lady. So hurray for progressive muddying of the waters?

* You have to buy DLC to recustomize your character/palico beyond a single freebie. So they're doing the same nickel and dime BS they did with Dragon's Dogma 2 lmao.

* Denuvo being Denuvo which led to tons of complaints from users who couldn't launch the game on launch night thanks to all the stupid false flags from the anti-tamper system. And of course the game suffers performance issues and even heats higher end PCs up quite a bit.

* Game's difficulty was nerfed again in pursuit of this imaginary greater crowd that doesn't exist. Though to be fair, it does get more challenging as you get further into HR... but some of the challenge comes from certain monsters having oneshot mechanics if you don't react in specific fashions, like a return of Behemoth's meteor attack except it's on a giant fire-ice lizard and you have to break ice chunks from above yourself to hide behind.

* In their effort to try and make things feel all seamless, it really just obfuscates a lot of features that require additional menus that weren't needed. Getting to supplies for example is obtuse as hell because you first have to start a quest by attacking a monster or going to the handler, and then you have to mount your not-chocobo and hit a button to access your supply pouch rather than just going up to a supply box near your camp and pulling supplies from there. There was also no indicator that you can cook meals for yourself through the portable BBQ grill. It's like for each new convenience/streamlined feature it requires unlearning previous features of the past games.

* There is no "do X quests and then do this big upgrade battle to jump to the next tier" setup like in the past. Instead the story just drags you along and you have to deliberately stop and do side quests if you want to. Otherwise they go unnoticed rather easily until you're presumably done with the story.

*I can't overstate how cringe the main story is during the LR run at least. The story focuses so hard on this little kid who's super emotionally wishy washy, one moment wanting revenge against the thing that wrecked him and then the next going all, "THE ARKVELD IS MEEEEEEEEEEEE!!" And his special chosen one macguffin pendant is rendered completely pointless because violently brutalizing giant monsters solves everything. So it begs the question why he was even necessary for the story in the first place because spoiler alert: he isn't.

* The game essentially doesn't start for real until you hit HR 8, i.e. beat the main story.

All in all, most of their attempts to try and cater to a wider audience is going to piss off long time Monster Hunter fans, or even just those who were fans of World and Rise. The story directly conflicts with the gameplay and their attempts to do an open world thing leads to the most bizarrely dysfunctional multiplayer setup.

So here are the good parts:

* The actual gameplay, when you get to experience it? It feels phenomenal. The combat feels absolutely top notch for the most part, like Dual Blades getting a perfect dodge and a wound exploit attack that has you go absolutely ballistic on monsters.

* The visuals are incredible. Armor sets look like they've got some flair from whoever worked on the costume/visual designs for Devil May Cry 5. The environments are stunning, and the effects on some monsters' attacks are jaw-dropping.

* The fact that multiples of the same monster can exist in a zone and you can actually battle multiples of them at the same time is really cool and creates a challenge/chaos factor.

* The portable camps are cool, but the system behind them feels a little mediocre unless side quests expand it out further.

* Squads being akin to guilds or clans is a nice idea but due to the way multiplayer works right now it doesn't seem all that great.

* The ACTUAL game can be played once you get past HR 7 and the credits roll. Only THEN does it start feeling like an actual Monster Hunter game and the story is more what you'd expect after playing World. Not to mention you get a lot of the classic older monsters like the Yian Kut-Ku, Gypceros, and of course the standard Rath couple. But for some reason it takes "High Rank" to finally unlock the greater amount of monsters to tackle due to the "Low Rank" story zooming you through every zone.

All in all, this game has the potential to be amazing and likely will be in five years from now after they remove Denuvo, put in all the content, iron out issues, etc. But right now? This doesn't really feel worth it as a $70 Monster Hunter game. It very obviously needs time to get further updates, so just wait until it's on sale come summer or fall. By then it'll have some further features like Wilds' iteration of the Gathering Hub. And hopefully they'll figure out a fix for this ungodly awful system where you can't even sync up with friends outside of very specific setups.

So this game is incredibly fun... but it suffers from so many awful decisions to where I can't recommend a purchase at full price. Here we go: * This is supposed to be an ambitious open world Monster Hunter, and yet you're railroaded super hard through the story and put on very bizarre linear paths for some cinematic gimmicks that feel like they're aimed at trying to appeal to some sort of imaginary greater audience that exists outside of the Monster Hunter crowd. * Multiplayer is hilariously obtuse and even worse than World's. You can see other players if you're in the same lobby as them within camps... but you need to form link parties to actually connect up with friends. And those link parties don't let you actually link worlds together unless you do an environmental link, but then you can't do quests and it's essentially just free roam mode with friends. So if you DO want to do quests with friends, you first have to start the quest (which if you're doing the story, requires going through often quite a bit of dialogue, cutscenes, or slow and annoying railroaded trails before you finally get to fight the monster and start the quest) so that others may join. * The story is a bizarre B movie plot pretending it's some sort of grand epic that'll attract... non Monster Hunter fans or something? Idek. The characters are obnoxious and it feels like this was a product of Capcom wanting to reach a wider audience so they hired SBI or some other DEI consulting firm to come up with the characters. You got half a dozen girl bosses, the handler has permanent resting b*** face, the only cool white dude is absent until you beat the "Low Rank" (HR1-7) story, and there's some annoying bipolar kid we're repeatedly forced to care about because reasons. I don't know who this story is supposed to cater to, but you can tell the dev team really wanted to show off the engine's capabilities for hair. The only bright side is they didn't go full-throttle DEI because the girl boss Blacksmith actually has curves, but as usual MH female characters can't get those curves. Which brings me to... * Character creation is obnoxious because they lumped male and female voices together to where male voices are 1, 3, 5 while female voices are 2, 4, 6, giving the illusion that there's more voice options than there truly are. Same goes for the hair, and to play as safe as they could, the sexes (or body types) don't even have labels lol; it's just option 1 or 2. Then I guess they allow you to crossdress as each armor set has its gendered variations as normal, but you can wear the female armor as a dude or male armor as a lady. So hurray for progressive muddying of the waters? * You have to buy DLC to recustomize your character/palico beyond a single freebie. So they're doing the same nickel and dime BS they did with Dragon's Dogma 2 lmao. * Denuvo being Denuvo which led to tons of complaints from users who couldn't launch the game on launch night thanks to all the stupid false flags from the anti-tamper system. And of course the game suffers performance issues and even heats higher end PCs up quite a bit. * Game's difficulty was nerfed again in pursuit of this imaginary greater crowd that doesn't exist. Though to be fair, it does get more challenging as you get further into HR... but some of the challenge comes from certain monsters having oneshot mechanics if you don't react in specific fashions, like a return of Behemoth's meteor attack except it's on a giant fire-ice lizard and you have to break ice chunks from above yourself to hide behind. * In their effort to try and make things feel all seamless, it really just obfuscates a lot of features that require additional menus that weren't needed. Getting to supplies for example is obtuse as hell because you first have to start a quest by attacking a monster or going to the handler, and then you have to mount your not-chocobo and hit a button to access your supply pouch rather than just going up to a supply box near your camp and pulling supplies from there. There was also no indicator that you can cook meals for yourself through the portable BBQ grill. It's like for each new convenience/streamlined feature it requires unlearning previous features of the past games. * There is no "do X quests and then do this big upgrade battle to jump to the next tier" setup like in the past. Instead the story just drags you along and you have to deliberately stop and do side quests if you want to. Otherwise they go unnoticed rather easily until you're presumably done with the story. *I can't overstate how cringe the main story is during the LR run at least. The story focuses so hard on this little kid who's super emotionally wishy washy, one moment wanting revenge against the thing that wrecked him and then the next going all, "THE ARKVELD IS MEEEEEEEEEEEE!!" And his special chosen one macguffin pendant is rendered completely pointless because violently brutalizing giant monsters solves everything. So it begs the question why he was even necessary for the story in the first place because spoiler alert: he isn't. * The game essentially doesn't start for real until you hit HR 8, i.e. beat the main story. All in all, most of their attempts to try and cater to a wider audience is going to piss off long time Monster Hunter fans, or even just those who were fans of World and Rise. The story directly conflicts with the gameplay and their attempts to do an open world thing leads to the most bizarrely dysfunctional multiplayer setup. So here are the good parts: * The actual gameplay, when you get to experience it? It feels phenomenal. The combat feels absolutely top notch for the most part, like Dual Blades getting a perfect dodge and a wound exploit attack that has you go absolutely ballistic on monsters. * The visuals are incredible. Armor sets look like they've got some flair from whoever worked on the costume/visual designs for Devil May Cry 5. The environments are stunning, and the effects on some monsters' attacks are jaw-dropping. * The fact that multiples of the same monster can exist in a zone and you can actually battle multiples of them at the same time is really cool and creates a challenge/chaos factor. * The portable camps are cool, but the system behind them feels a little mediocre unless side quests expand it out further. * Squads being akin to guilds or clans is a nice idea but due to the way multiplayer works right now it doesn't seem all that great. * The ACTUAL game can be played once you get past HR 7 and the credits roll. Only THEN does it start feeling like an actual Monster Hunter game and the story is more what you'd expect after playing World. Not to mention you get a lot of the classic older monsters like the Yian Kut-Ku, Gypceros, and of course the standard Rath couple. But for some reason it takes "High Rank" to finally unlock the greater amount of monsters to tackle due to the "Low Rank" story zooming you through every zone. All in all, this game has the potential to be amazing and likely will be in five years from now after they remove Denuvo, put in all the content, iron out issues, etc. But right now? This doesn't really feel worth it as a $70 Monster Hunter game. It very obviously needs time to get further updates, so just wait until it's on sale come summer or fall. By then it'll have some further features like Wilds' iteration of the Gathering Hub. And hopefully they'll figure out a fix for this ungodly awful system where you can't even sync up with friends outside of very specific setups.