Been on my mind a bit, thinking about the post where you said MonHun players did a bad job selling the game. While I don't think you're wrong, there is a bad habit of overemphasizing the grind, I've been thinking about why that is, and I came to the conclusion that they may have been trying to sell you on the wrong game. World and Wilds are very different in terms of speed and pacing than older MonHuns. Rise is a bit closer, but still quite different.
The biggest I think is that the newer games have a much greater emphasis on aggression, defensive moves, and mobility. Things like Longsword's foresight slash and counter, Greatsword's tackle and 3 distinct charge slashes, using consumables while moving, and even having a single contiguous map were all new in World. Previous games had maps that divided into discreet "rooms" separated by loading screens. The concept of a counter attack or parry didn't exist until MonHun 4 with the charge blade having guard points on some attacks, so defense was pretty binary between dodging and blocking, both of which meant stopping your offense. Blocking and dodging were much stronger in those games, and using items causing you to stand in still and not act for like 3 seconds meant every fight was significantly slower, which is where I think the old Dark Souls, mainly DS1 and DS2 I think, comparisons come from.
It's also where all the player stereotypes came from, like bowgun players stunlocking an entire team with spread shot, longswords constantly tripping people, and greatswords launching you with the upswing. In those older games, there wasn't a "disable friendly fire" skill, and people ruining each other's combos, interrupting item use, or otherwise causing issues was a significant issue. And even if there had been, I think it would've been a hard sell because decorations and skills worked differently in the older games, which resulted in most armor sets capping at maybe 4 or 5 skills if you were building for weaker, more niche skills.
All that to say that much of the ideas of Monster Hunter as a franchise come from gens 1 to 4, spanning like 9 games prior to World, which took the series in a very different direction, and it's possible that for the longest time, people trying to sell MonHun were trying to sell you on their idea of the concept of the franchise, rather than a specific game like World or Generations Ultimate.
Interesting! So, yes and no.
You are completely right about the, let's call them, Legacy Complaints: Things like how skills used to work, the tripping, launching, etc, those are all things before my epoch, given I started with World, so it took a bit of time before I realized people were complaining (to a hilariously annoying degree) about things from well before my time.
But, you do miss, my dear Abby, on why I think people suck at selling the game, and my personal experience that informs this opinion. For around 10 years, people basically were like, "Drimo, you like Dark Souls, you will love Monster Hunter, try it" -> "Oh, why is that?" -> "Well the grind sucks and it's intended to be played with people, I hate playing with randos and your roll sucks though, you have to fight the same boss over and over for parts and each fight lasts 30 minutes and they only have 3 moves". Ok so nothing like Dark Souls, then, a game renowned for being designed around a solitary experience (that you can, through intentionally clunky means, make multiplayer), where your i-frames are most people's main defensive tool, where fights are for the most part 3-5 minutes long in which the boss will use its wide array of moves and you don't have to farm nigh anything with the exception of Blood Vials in Bloodborne if you run low and specific pieces of gear from very specific enemies usually for specific builds, an enemy that dies in 3 to 6 hits at that.
What I'm saying is, people were really insistent not only in misrepresenting Monster Hunter with that description, they were really insistent in also being objectively wrong about the comparison besides, and they were really insistent on... Mentioning anything bar surface level about the game at all? For 10 years? When I played World, I was looking for the level up system before realizing, "oh wait this is all gear and player skill, dope, it's just like Armored Core", I started realizing little by little about nuances like how hitting different parts of the monster has different effects, such as making the monster trip by focusing their legs, breaking parts to reduce effectiveness of attacks that use that part, traps, items, the balance of economy of action vs mobility vs attack power weapon classes possess, the sheer level of identity monsters can have in their movesets (THIS is the part that it has in common with Soulsborne!), such as Odogaron being very fast and actionable but also very linear so it's very easy to counter as long as you are not directly in front of its attacking limb or mouth, even with the lumbering Great Sword, or how Deviljho's main gimmick is that it pushes the rules to their limits with its long body by using it sideways for very wide attacks, and outright breaks the rules when it "equips" a monster, gaining access to immensely powerful and fast debuffing sweeping horizontals.
After a decade of people's sales pitch about Monster Hunter being complaining about it, misrepresenting it, and even "oh yeah, I had an awful time grinding the endgame super monsters for all of their gear for my friends, I hated doing that, here's three other horror stories", @kc5rings was the first person to ever speak to me about the gameplay at all with any level of depth. And that was like the third time we had talked! You are telling me troves of people, not just a closed circle or anything, during an honest to god decade (10 mcfreaking years) COULDN'T try to sell a game on more than making it sound awful and completely alien to what I explicitly enjoyed, with some people talking about how much they hated the experience themselves, and even then misrepresent the damn thing? It's fucking hilarious.
You, Abby, in THIS VERY ASK, talked more about gameplay than people in the double digits did for enough time for a kid to almost reach the welcoming mat of puberty. It was horrendously, comically bad. I had friends that weren't Kat help me even after starting playing World, and they couldn't. I kept getting misinformation and non-answers! It's like this game is a magnet for people that can't explain worth shit! I started just asking Kat exclusively and looking up videos from reputable channels! Abby, it's one of the funniest things that's happened to me in the long term but even if it's funny, holy shit, it's impressive how bad at it people were at every step of the way. That's why I say that people suck ass at selling Monster Hunter.
