Here is a long rant about Monster Hunter, the two dev teams warring over it's identity, and how it's changed so drastically since it's early incarnations.

Monster Hunter, now one of Capcom's flagship series, had humble beginnings as a multiplayer-focused game on Sony's PlayStation 2 back in 2004, or 2005 if you lived outside of Japan. It was a moderate success, with an iconic cast of Monsters to hunt, a tedious but relaxing emphasis on foraging, and archaic controls even for the time. It's not where I started with the series, but it is one of my favorites. It's undoubtedly a frustrating and flawed game, but I just can't help but love it. The push and pull between the time spent mining and foraging in the game's lush environments and quiet atmosphere and the time spent using your resources to do the titular monster hunting is such a gratifying loop.

There is exactly 1 game that I think does this specific loop better than MH1, and that's Monster Hunter Dos. Capcom understood that the foraging was tedious but it was necessary for their vision of the game so they improved upon it, in my opinion as much as they ever could, in the sequel. The environments now shift and change with the time of day and the seasons, helping to break up the repetition of MH1. In addition, there is a distinct lack of quests specifically for gathering, as well as new subquests that let you leave with your goods, without completing the main objective of a given quest. The quest selection too will change based on time of day and season.

What this means in practice is that the player now has to learn the environments themselves and how to optimize their foraging routes, which will be constantly shifting with the days and seasons, but you also have to complete a rotating selection of quests or subquests to make out with your gathered materials. So, your experience gathering is way more dynamic than before, as well as more rewarding to master, and you are also forced to complete other objectives to break up the monotony. The time spent gathering adds a certain weight to the fights when you do get to them. The items that you've crafted also provide huge benefits for some fights, to the point where they are practically mandatory. Thus providing a solid payoff for all that gathering and crafting. It's an amazing loop! Dos is my favorite Monster Hunter game and a perfect sequel.

Now, here comes the 2nd dev team, known as "The Portable Team", entrusted with padding the time between mainline titles with mobile games. This team decided to take a different approach to the tedium of gathering in MH1: reduce gathering entirely. Freedom Unite features a new "Farm" feature that will allow you to easily farm items between quests, an expanded role of the peddling Granny NPC who sells rare items, and gathering quests that have no objective meaning you can get in, get what you want, and get out faster than in Dos.

Dos did not get an international release. Freedom Unite did, and it outsold Dos by a massive amount even within Japan.

Dos' attempts to make gathering interesting were overshadowed by the Portable team's method that embraced the monotony, and simply reduced the amount of it the players would have to do. This marked a fundamental shift in the series. Over time, greater and greater emphasis was put on the Hunting in Monster Hunting, and everything else was steadily reduced. The designs of the fights themselves shifted to be less reliant on items amd more reliant on player skill. The weapons got more complex, the monsters got faster and more bombastic. The farm kept getting more useful. Crafting recipes got simplified.

Out comes Monster Hunter 4 a decade later and it is ostensibly just a portable game. It has fully embraced the design philosophy of the portable team and is just focused on getting the player to the next monster fight as fast as possible. It was even released exclusively on a handheld console, the Nintendo 3DS. Don't get me wrong, 4U is a fantastic game, but I think the mainline devs and the long-time players both knew the formula was getting stale.

So, they released Monster Hunter World, basically a soft reboot. Combat was smoother and flashier than ever before. Crafting recipes have been massively simplified by this point, gathering spots are bountiful everywhere you look, and most gathering animations are now near instant, even though there's rarely the need to do any dedicated gathering anyway. The player can now also resupply mid-quest for the first time, eliminating the need for even emergency gathering mid-hunt.

However, the mainline devs have cooked some ideas to bring back some of the exploration and time spent soaking in the game's beautiful environments. Monsters can now be tracked via footprints, dung, territorial markings, etc. You need to look around for this stuff to reveal the location of the monster on the map. This new system is fantastic and my favorite thing about world. There is also now a huge amount of endemic life that can be captured and displayed in the player's home as a side objective for completionists. This breathed some much needed life into the series and World catapulted Monster Hunter to mainstream success for the first time.

Then the portable team released Monster Hunter Rise and got rid of all of that cool stuff and was still a massive success. For the first time in the series history the portable game did not outsell the mainline title, but for the last time it made abundantly clear that the players want to hunt monsters and largely just do not care about anything else.

Enter the newest game in the series, Monster Hunter Wilds. Monster Hunter has now deviated so far from MH1 and Dos it feels like a parody of itself. They brought back the idea of changing seasons from Dos but their effect is more for the story and is barely perceptible in gameplay. There is a new mount that will autopilot the player straight to the monster, which is always displayed on the map. Gathering feels like it's only included as an homage to the series' roots and the player will almost never have to engage with it, even thought they also brought back finite meal supplies from Dos. Endemic Life makes a half-hearted return and you can no longer display captured creatures. The environments are a lot simpler than in World, though they are still gorgeous. Wilds is the culmination of the portable team's philosophy from all the way back in Freedom Unite. Remove everything that is not hunting monsters. You don't even have walk around to find the monster anymore, the game will do that for you.

I love Monster Hunter, and as much as I've shit-talked later games, I still love 4U, and World, and even Rise. However, I can't help but see the series as a shambling, hollow shell of the dev's original vision. Gone are the days of foraging simulator with monster hunting as payoff, and the series has fully shed pretty much every game mechanic that isn't direct combat with monsters.