What are you playing?

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

FFXII mainly triggered me because the combat is boring*, the Summons can be fucking worthless the moment you get them, I couldn't care less about the characters and settings, and the Star Wars references made me die a little inside.

*) Many bitched about how the Gambit system caused the game to play itself. I actually would've like for other JRPGs with AI buddies to rip off the system because it gave you full control over their behavior. What I mean by boring is the presentation. Not even casting a fucking spell looks fun or exciting. Combat in friggin FF5 looks like Advent Children in comparison.
Maybe it's because combat in FF12 looks very much like a MMORPG, which I can't stand either.

MonHun 4U and Freedom Unite have about as much story as I want in a MH game. I don't really like it when I'm forced to do quests because they're "story" quests, especially if it's a story I'm not really interested in. The story for Freedom Unite was perfect. You're just some guy, then a Tigrex attacks you and sends you flying off a cliff, you wake up in the main village, recover your strength and start doing easy quests to help out the town. You're given an unused, busted-up farm to work on. Perfect. Eventually you get to hunt a Tigrex, and I think it's supposed to be the same one that attacked you.

MH4U might've overdone it a bit with the end-of-the-world bit at the end, but both games do a wonderful job at showcasing the career of a hunter from his humble beginnings to being a badass, while even managing to feature a monster "rival" of sorts.

[Kugelfisch]

GenU does it pretty nicely. You're again just some upcoming guild hunter noob and there's pretty much no story so to speak. But it brings back four villages and all kinds of characters from every mainline MonHun game. It's nice to get a quest from the 3U guildmarm or the smith from 4U Bane Edition. It's nice to see them again but not overdone or too on the nose. If you haven't played the previous games they will just be like any other NPC.

Otherwise the story is very much the normal stuff of some new elderdragon monster and having to clobber it.

[Sex Cannon Big Brown Titties]

Last game I played on the PC was Goblins 3 so I have no idea what most of you are talking about. Console 4 lyfe!

[Pepsi Man]

GenU does it pretty nicely.

GenU is still probably my favorite of the series just because it's impossible for me to go back to 4U bow after having access to power shot on everything and Brave style. I also quite like the bug-mech final boss. It's so over the top that they barely even try to explain it and that's exactly how it should be.
Even with all of the styles the game still retained that slower paced gameplay but some of the enemies really pushed it and forced you to think and act quicker (specifically Valfalk who was 100% designed with GenU's unique mechanics in mind).

It makes me sad that they're probably going to push forward with more World-styled games in the future. The meta in that game is pure offense, just like in all MonHun, but the ease of which you reach it and the lack of any actual challenge is disappointing. The hardest part of that game was realizing that they created this living, breathing world but didn't know how to make the hitboxes work properly for it and dying to Anjanath as a result of getting hit by the 5 feet of air around his body.
Oh, and whoever thought up the Kulve Taroth mechanics can go jump off a cliff. The most pointlessly obtuse way to get RNG weapons I've ever seen in my entire life. Essentially forces you to pay for PSN+/XBL, if you have it on console.
Oh, and for that matter, Behemoth. He's not even hard but the fact that they force him to have 4-player health AND cut your timer down to 30 minutes is just absolutely retarded. It's what, ultimately, killed my interest in the game.

[Vione]

FORZA HORIZON 4

[Kugelfisch]

The biggest problem of World is the shitty performance, really. It runs worse than it has any business doing.
That aside, it's just not good value. Too few monsters, too few locations. There's an expansion on the way but where is G-Rank? Then again, how do you even put a G-Rank in a game with so few monsters and everything?

The weapons are okay. the GL combo flowchart is pretty alright but shelling soon falls off in damage and the wyvernstake becomes a total waste of time. The new move in the upcoming expansion seems overwhelmingly lame as well.
They should've at least adopted the heat gauge from Gen. Shelling increasing heat and thus amplifying the damage of the lance seems plausible and ads some risk reward. Also quick reload reloading all shells was a massive mistake and is the reason they made shelling too weak in the first place. Creating a problem where there wasn't one before.

[rabidtictac]

It's an even worse value when you compare it directly to the previous games. The average MonHun game now is about $10-20 for an Ultimate version. Freedom Unite is just Gen 2 Ultimate btw (Kugel knows, but maybe some folks here don't.) In English alone, there are 2 definitive MonHun games on 3DS, 1 on PSP (easily emulated), 1 on Wii U and I believe there will be one on Switch before too long. There's also monhun1 for ps2, but nobody cares about that. The 2 on 3DS and the 1 on PSP have waaaaay more fucking content than World. Way more hunts, tons more questing, loads more armor and weapon sets + additional mechanics like farming that aren't in World.

World costs 2-3x as much money (if you consider the Iceborne pack as the version most people nowadays will buy) and has much less to do. It's also not portable. There's a reason a lot of monhun oldfags want older "style" monhun games to keep being made. World streamlined a lot of things. Some of those streamlines were necessary. But others, like the piles of infinite-use items and free traps, removed a lot of the depth to the grind. When you can flip over a frog for free and get a shock trap, or grab a nut and fire it to stunlock a boss, that removes a big part of the prep from previous games. But that's just, like, my opinion, maaaan.

I really felt the lack of monsters in World when trying to figure out what armor sets I wanted.

[Kugelfisch]

It's an even worse value when you compare it directly to the previous games. The average MonHun game now is about $10-20 for an Ultimate version. Freedom Unite is just Gen 2 Ultimate btw (Kugel knows, but maybe some folks here don't.) In English alone, there are 2 definitive MonHun games on 3DS, 1 on PSP (easily emulated), 1 on Wii U and I believe there will be one on Switch before too long.

Generations Ultimate is the definitive MonHun on the Switch. It's western Doubberu Curossu (XX).
Naming conventions have gotten a bit easier to figure out over the years. There's the base game, a year after that or so it releases outside of Japan while they get the G version and then a year later we get the Ultimate version which is like the G version but it also has all the DLC that the G version got over the span of that year. DLC used to always be free.
Back then it was a bit different. Freedom is basically MonHun 1's Ultimate version, Fredom Unite is a bit more than a G version of MonHun 2, and Portable 3rd and 3 Ultimate are almost two entirely different games with how many things are changed.

In short, the definitive versions of the games are Freedom, Freedom Unite, Portable 3rd, 3 Ultimate, 4 Ultimate and Generations Ultimate.
There are also the online ones but nobody cares about them here. Frontier is Japan only and Online is China only. Both feature time walls and extreme grind that'd make a Korean tear up out of boredom.

[Pepsi Man]

The other problem World suffered from was the ability to restock at any base camp. Forget the easier crafting-- how can I lose when I can just constantly restock my bombs and healing items?

I actually cheesed Arch-Tempered Kirin by weakening it and letting it sleep, then bombing it, then going back to camp until it fell asleep again over and over just to prove my point.

[Kugelfisch]

That mechanic only makes sense from a free roam standpoint. At the very least the number of times you can resupply and what you can resupply should be limited. Stuff like hot/cold drinks for example would be fine. I've restarted some quests in previous MonHuns over forgetting to pack something I really needed or forgetting to restock after a hunt.
GenU has those mid-quest deliveries via feline rockets and I like those. Spend some Wycademy points to get additional hot drinks when you run out of them. Nice quality of life addition without just getting shit for free.