Tell your Monster Hunter origin story

A friend in college first introduced himself when he saw my PSP sticking out of my pocket saying, "aww shit, you on Monster Hunter?" I said who are you and what is that. On his suggestion, I tried Freedom 1 and bounced off it so hard I questioned whether or not it even counted as a video game, having not even been able to figure out who to talk to to do quests (recall, in the early games the village elder always first tells you where the hub is, they don't offer the tutorial hunts until you talk to them again, so when I went into the hub and could only select the HR lass because the UI sucked, I just turned the game off and walked away.)

He tried again with FU, which I played the tutorials for, but felt like it probably wasn't for me. He said "it's better with other people." Ah, a multiplayer game, not my scene.

Ten years later, World was getting a lot of hype from people whose opinions I trusted, and my old friend tried one last time saying it was much more accommodating to new players than the series had ever been. He was right, I went down the rabbit hole, and now even the older games retroactively make more sense. I've since traveled through time as a filthy Fiver to Pokke, Moga, Yukumo, the lands visited by the Caravan and the endless Everwood, I've served at the Wycademy, Dundorma, Astera and Kamura, even hatched eggs in Hakum and Mahana. My love for these games is now a facet of how I see myself.

I wish he'd tried a little harder to get me into it earlier on, but sometimes it just takes the right combination of factors to make an entire franchise click. The same thing happened with Souls, I didn't "get it," until Elden Ring, and now Bloodborne is one of my all-time favorites, even though I'd bounced off that a few times.