Tell your Monster Hunter origin story

My origin story is similar to many others. Monster Hunter 4U was highly recommended by a friend and I bounced off of it initially, only to fall in love with the franchise many years later. My 2DS was a dedicated Pokemon machine until the release of MH4U. The whole premise was something that interested me, as I already loved anything with cool creature designs. My friend tried to explain everything as we played, which would have been a great introduction to the series if I had stuck with it. The one thing that held me back from any enjoyment was the camera control system. I felt the lack of a right stick made looking around near impossible. I was too stubborn to use the touch screen or willing to upgrade to a 3DS model with the C-stick. Looking back I missed out on a great time in the series.

It wasn't until I bought a new PC in 2019 that I heard about the franchise again. Somehow I had missed the hype and release of Monster Hunter World. Funnily enough, it was Girlfriend Review's video on MHW that reminded me the series existed. I knew there was a good game underneath the "clunkiness" of the 3DS controls, and the video showcased the charms of the series like poogies and palicos in ways I hadn't experienced with MH4U. Since World was on PC, it had completely fixed any issue I had with camera control. No longer able to complain about camera, the slowness of movement was my last hurdle to get over, so I ended up choosing Insect Glaive as my main weapon. I helicoptered my way through high-rank before I started looking into older games in the series. I consider myself a Fifth Fleeter due to it being the first game I connected with. Once I played Generations Ultimate on Switch, I fell in love with the series as a whole, not just for one game. It was there that I picked up Hammer, now my main weapon. It was also then that Monster Hunter had officially replaced Pokemon as my favorite franchise.

Collectively between World, Iceborne, Generations Ultimate and emulating 4U on the Steam Deck, I probably have ~500 hours under my belt, which to me, for any other game or franchise outside of Pokemon would normally be a lot. Knowing that veterans easily put 2-3x as many hours into any one of those games, I still to some extent consider myself new to the series. Although the recent stream for the release of the bonus update did make me reconsider, as Rise: Sunbreak was the first game I had participated with the community during the whole game cycle.

Outside of the games themselves. I've recently enjoyed reading more about the lore, ecology, and the community surrounding MH. There are a few Youtubers I have a lot of respect for, as well as BannedLagiacrus on Twitter. I'm not normally one to collect merch for games, but I have been collecting the Japanese guide books for all of the games through ebay. They're all in Japanese, so I have used Google Lens to help translate specific pages I'm interested in. I've laughed at myself for buying them since I can't read them directly, plus most if not all of the information is available on the wikis, reddit, google docs shared by the community, or asking people on the discord. There are likely translations in communities outside of those places as well. I'd at least like to contribute some knowledge of these books toward this community here, as it took me some digging to find out these books existed in the first place. Once the last package arrives, I can at least make a list of all of the titles and ISBN numbers if anyone else is interesting in purchasing them as well. There's a definitively an aspect of nostalgia at play, as I had spent many hours reading the strategy guides for Pokemon back in the day. This was the first community that I joined on the fediverse. I hope to help make it a welcoming and enjoyable place to chat about a franchise we all love.

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.