The core of the game is very fun and addictive, from playing the beginning (or the demo) you instantly feel "this is a good game", but I think capcom made a good game accidentally here, seeing how flat it falls and how many bad decisions there are too.
Overall, MH Stories 2 is a much better game. Even so, for just the main game, a little side content, and to just finish it once, this game is fine, and I would recommend it. But only barely for full price - wait for a sale is better.
The gameplay in the beginning feels really good and fights seem difficult too. The story also starts strong with a proper conflict and many mysteries. We also have an interesting cast of characters.
But after 1/4 of the story and when the game opens up, it all falls rather flat. The story doesn't really go anywhere and any of the answers to the mysteries we get make not much sense or are just the most boring they could be. The conflict and war don't really go anywhere apart from in cutscenes. The characters also never evolve any more than the stereotypes they appear to be in the beginning. At least there is no Navirou, but Rudy is hardly much better (he starts less annoying but gets more annoying during the middle of the game).
In general, while the story is OK and entertaining, it is also driven by so much cutscenes incompetence and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, it gets frustrating. The side content isn't much better. Basically only fetch / kill quests with 0 context. It's fine really, to just get some EXP and items or other rewards. The actual character side stories are slightly better as they at least have some unique elements, with every character having certain "types" of side content to do. It's again just OK but better than all the other "quests". They at least unlock new weapons and monsties for your companions, which helps with combat.
Just don't bother with the Rudy DLC, a complete waste of money and time, embarrassing for capcom to try and sell that.
Also, please capcom, stop forcing Rathalos on us. For the first game it was fine, in the 2nd game it was already silly and annoying. Now again? And this time you can never get rid of it. It doesn't even have any actual special abilities or anything.
This is like if every Pokemon game forced Pikachu on you as a permanent pokemon to use. So weird. Please, stop it. Put Rathalos in the story, whatever, have it somewhere, sure. But let us use the monsters we want, give us some other choices. Also to be honest, maybe try to vary up the stories a bit, and not have every ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game just be "prohphecised Rathalos has to fight a big monster". This is getting tedious.
The gameplay then, it starts strong imo, and there is a lot of flexibility, cool skills, and some improvements here, but overall, it just has now become a generic JRPG combat system. The unique thing was the rock-paper-scissors combat system (literally) and trying to learn monster patterns and winning the head-to-heads. That is essentially gone. The majority of attacks are skills, so nothing can be countered. Most things are also just AoE attacks, which is annoying. The combat is now just a generic JRPG min-maxing to kill stuff quickly, completely ignoring the unique factor the previous games had.
There is also no endgame or post-story game to speak of. An update added HP sponge royal monsters which serve no purposes other than wasting your time. The grind to get the current best gear is already very tedious. The invasive monsters have to be fought manually every time and need specific strategies - it just gets tiring to have to manually grind them for hours for materials, and they can even drop nothing after the whole fight!
The elder dragons are cool but for reason capcom designed the worst possible system for them, and you have to do battles at night (sometimes a handful, sometimes dozen) for a random one to spawn in one region. You never get the one you want. Wasted literal hours just to try and get the ones I need for materials and quests later. Of course again, you have to fight them manually every time, no matter how often you beat them already, just to waste more time.
The grind and RNG here is soul crushing. Such a waste of time, it feels really disrespectfully designed. Purposefully made to waste your time for no good reason. Really, don't bother. Do some basic "min-maxing" but stop when the grind would take hours and just finish the story. It's not worth it.
At least, the game is pretty, I guess. Just not that important how it looks at the end of the day, but yes, they nailed the style here imo. Too bad the game overall feels more disappointing the more you invest into it.
