(Logged as a shoe-in for both the base Monster Hunter: World game, and the Iceborne expansion.)
Lavish & deathly exciting at practically all times - varied and expressive social MMO tissue connecting its numerous multi-layered terrariums of gorgeous arenas and silly monsties.

I do have some background with the series, with much history on Freedom Unite, and far less with the fantranslation of Portable 3rd + 3Ultimate at various points through highschool, and hit the credits of Rise. Freedom Unite came packed with FMV cutscenes that demonstrate how the monsters lived in their downtime - characterising the monsters to assure the player that they weren't merely thoughtless models with movesets to memorise, but individual links in the food chain with roles that keep the world biodiverse & strong.
It was always my favourite part of the game, and what felt like the series' missing hook to really sell me on the core conceit was in how this aspect is somewhat downplayed or unexplored.

By God's grace this was the kind of ecological focus MH:W absolutely relishes in. An interlinking tapestry of ecosystems ticking away, living & interacting in countless ways to make the New World feel so gd raw. And it's not just pageantry either, it plays into behaviours and environment interactions from traps to turf wars. So so so good to head out for a simple hunt to watch it blossom into a scrappy mess of tooth & claw, so so so good to go on aimless expedition to a zone and notice a new handful of behaviours from their endemic life. I’d not be able to sleep at night if I didn’t compliment the chefs on all of this, every monster in every zone is given so much purpose it’s inspiring.

One thing this series has always been great at is its environment design - the world of Monster Hunter is a land of plenty, and everything is blown out of proportion to match. You're eating sirloin steaks the size of your head, oyster side dishes that can feed an army. The tooth you built your hammer out of can sink a ship. Zones and skyboxes that coil across different unique biomes rich in visual stimuli, adding heaps of context for the world and how things are as they are. Pan the camera up at any point and you can assuredly see a spire of choral, ice or crystal towering over you from what appears to be a mile away. Hoarfrost Reach is gorgeous I need to live there NOW.

Moment to moment combat is of course good as hell. I love that it’s slow and weighty enough to separate it from a more typical Capcom character action affair. Even with the amassing layers of QoL the series has glazed itself with, World still focuses on hefty player move commitment and punishment. Every weapon here feels great and each individually recontextualises your approach to any fight, but I found a home with the Dual Blades I’m afraid. I love these stupid ale blades man!!! Basically adored the progression right up until the Furious Rajang, where the game takes a very steep swerve into grind and Raid-like Design territory I find catatonic & diagnostic. The Fatalis fight is so much fun I wish I could solo it 😢

This is for both World & Iceborne.

Wilds got me roaring in some kind of way that made me crave MH for literally 2 months since it's announcement. All single player is how this game should be played unironically, that way you aren't bogged down by inflated near MMO levels of stat increase from part damage all the way to stun values.

Those aside, this is Capcom's so far, MH masterpiece in terms of worldbuilding and ecological care, joyous game.

Holy shit now the game is hard lol.

Amazing expansion, fun new mechanics for the weapons and the new fights are very hard. Loved my personal hotsprings in my room.

Now let's grind until my LeftShift finger break!

World: Iceborne, the Monster Hunter game that gave the franchise the spotlight it deserved! The game is truly good. Monster Hunter is never a graphical beauty kind of game since most of its previous games are playable in handheld consoles, and yet MH made a big comeback to the home console scene and for the first time ever, the PC scene. With them entering a new hardware they finally went all out with the graphics, it is beautiful a monster hunter game that is so detailed and yet so beautiful. The story for World and Iceborne is pretty actually well-written, yes, its not RDR kind of story but it is a pretty decent one for the franchise. It finally has NPC talking to you like they are actually part of the hunt and they feel alive which is pretty neat. The story still has that MH formula with you hunt down a flagship monster but there is a bigger and bader one, but the continuation of the story is pretty good. The combat is pretty fucking sick! It's one of the greatest combat in all of the franchise coming second is Rise. Every combo feels like you are doing Hunter Arts (MHGU) and if you time it perfectly well you will have the most satisfying hunt of all time. The combat and the weapons for the game is pretty well-balanced and I must say World and Iceborne has got to be top 1 best combat in all of the franchise. The only downside of this game is the weapon designs, it sucks ass, Its just barebones tape together to a piece of metal. All of the previous MH has beautiful and awesome looking weapons but in this game its so trash no inspiration at all, though the armor sets looks nice. The new monsters for this game is pretty good too, some are just straight up dinosaurs and some are actually pretty good and fighting them feels like an actual fight. Overall, Monster Hunter World: Iceborne is a great Monster Hunter game and a solid game. It might have a less monster hunter-ish feel to it but nonetheless its pretty great!

So I had a previous review that was a bit more negative on the game and very similar to my lame shitpost review of Xenoblade 2 where I simply said "objectively better than the first game." I feel I was a bit too harsh on Iceborne then. Now a lot of the problems I had back then are still there but 3 years away from this exclusively playing Rise and Sunbreak definitely helped in giving me a newfound outlook for Monster Hunter World and Iceborne. Especially the latter.

Post Monster Hunter 3 I haven't really disliked any Monster Hunter game. 3 has a really lackluster roster, but I understand why it was like that. I don't like it, but I get it. P3rd on though? Banger after banger full on 10 on 10 games baby. P3rd? Banger. 3U? Banger. 4U? ALL TIMER THE POPEYES CHICKEN OF MH. Gen? Banger. GU? Banger. World would be the first one to really sort of shake up this streak for me as while I never did find the game terrible I always felt it was lacking something. A sort of charm the previous games had that the 5th generation wouldn't really bring back until Rise. Iceborne only exacerbated this despite the return of some of the more vibrant and odd monsters from older games. Didn't stop me from putting over 2K hours and now another 295 into it with this replay lmfaooo.

So yeah getting it out of the way now. Iceborne is a bit of a janky load still. The clutch claw sucks. This is a lukewarm take, but man does it suck having to do this to even make WEX work. The movement of the characters also feels really off compared to the previous games and even Rise. There's a bit of that Rockstar Euphoria bullshit going on where I feel some control responses take like 3 hours at times and cool I just got one shot by Fatalis epic. I'd talk about the deco grinding (still sucks), Guiding Lands (kill me), or the FOMO events, but those are mostly a nonissue now. If you're playing MHWI in 2023 (enjoy by the way if you got it on the current sale that shit is a steal) none of these things will really matter as naturally grinding out what you want or deco events may just get you decent decos. For The Guiding Lands unless you really want to augment some gear (and there's no reason to really care about attack and health augments I didn't use any at all this playthrough) you can just avoid it besides the mandatory story quests or Raging Brachydios event (one of the best fights). FOMO events nonexistent since Fatalis dropped back in late 2020 and the game is so much better for it. This is what it should have been all along and it rules. Yeah I still have my issues with some annoying shit. Why does the game punish me for playing good by having that dumb Rajang wall grab and Fatalis falling over knock me down? But the good out weighs the bad. Also while I find Rise's art direction to be much better as I feel MH should be a very stylized (yet realistic) franchise I can definitely at least say that the environments in this game are gorgeous and the HDR is so goooood when you figure out how to make it work. Just the wonderful contrast and colors you can give it. On a technical level yeah World is genuinely impressive especially for a PS4 game, and now on PS5 with the minimized loadtimes and unbroken 60fps lordy... All that paired with the amount of content makes this at this point in time one of the most bang for your buck games. If you've ever been interested in Monster Hunter and wanted an idea of what the franchise is then yes this is the game to play. I may prefer Rise and feel in many ways it is more representative of the franchise as a whole post Tri (goofy yet earnest) World is the game Wilds will definitely build off of more than the former even if it takes some elements from it.

It's a bit of a mess (why is Nergigante turned into Monsterverse Godzilla and why are the ledges so fucking annoying and why are the maps so tight and cramped) and some things really feel like the devs at times are trying to counter the player trying to have any fun (CC tenderizing), but MHWI is in my opinion still one of the gold standards of what a AAA release should be. This doesn't just end at release content wise, but in post launch content with free additional monsters and events to keep the game alive. Yeah it may not be the best MH, but I'm thinking it's a pretty damn good game.

Now if you'll excuse me I'll be playing Monster Hunter Rise and the older ones until Wilds releases alongside any other games I want to play.

Tienes que ser un juego realmente bueno, para que respetes tan poco el tiempo de tus jugadores y aun así ellos dediquen tantas horas a tu juego y que con un simple tuit, vuelvan en masa a jugarlo.

Eso es lo que pasa con Iceborne y te das cuenta que te tenias que haber cogido la versión de PC, pero no lo hiciste en su momento y ahora estas jodido.

No te pilles un MH en consola, nunca.

Don't mind me just writing a love letter for this game--

This is my first entry into the Monster Hunter series and I had no idea what the freak I was doing, lol. Like I was LOST and veterans were talking about older monster and the new changes while I was just ???? Switch Axe go brrrrr. But once you get past that initial learning hurdle and put some hours in, it gets extremely addicting. I ultimately put in about 1K hours into this game? Played the majority of the events and joined the raids. It was some of the best time I've ever spent grinding, lmao. Joining SOS and helping others was also really fun. You’ll meet some of the coolest and helpful players. No two SOS missions are ever the same, haha! Even if you fight the same monster over and over. The devs truly cared for this game and it was amazing seeing all of the new content being added for Iceborne. There’s no “endgame” so it’s ultimately up to you and what your goals are once you finish all of the main storyline. I’ve never been the one to enjoy games where the focal point is to grind, but MH is truly a master at creating good gameplay loops for those who can get into this series!

Overall, I loved World/Iceborne and I absolutely can't wait for the next big game in the series!

I haven't finished Iceborne, maybe I will in the future but not right now because of two words, clutch claw. It genuinely ruins what I believe to be a solid expansion and an overall improvement of base Monster Hunter: World.

So what's so bad about the clutch claw? The clutch claw is a tool that lets you grapple onto a monster. From there you can do a few actions, soften a part of the monster, as well as rotate the monster and slam them into a wall toppling them. I honestly don't have issues with what the clutch claw allows you to do, what I do take issue with is that the clutch claw isn't a supplemental tool like the slinger but a mandatory mechanic. And to pour salt in the wound, it's incredibly finnicky to use. I'll be targeting a monster's head with no obstructions and end up attaching to its thigh while it's kicking and get knocked off. However, none of that stuff really matters when compared to the largest issue, softening.

Softening a part of the monster turns that part into a temporary weak point that'll take more damage and allow skills involving weak points to activate on softened parts. All of that on paper does not bother me, just seems like a way to speed up hunts. WRONG! The health pools of monsters have been massively inflated compared to base game because of softening. The finnicky clutch claw is no longer a supplementary tool but now mandatory if you don't want hunts to drag on.

All of this is such a shame, because the monsters in iceborne are all fun to fight, (outside of clutch claw shenanigans). The story still sucks and cutscenes are still unskippable, but the hunts could've been so fun if not for the clutch claw. The clutch claw even infects the base game. There is a new type of stagger, which the community calls clagger, that monsters can experience. Monsters will sometimes get launched away from you, making you miss parts of your weapon combos. So you gotta clutch claw onto the monster to keep the momentum going. Clagger also affects base game monsters making it really annoying when you locked into a super element discharge, missing, and wasting all of your charged phials; all because the designers desperately want you to use the clutch claw.

Iceborne could've been great, but it just serves how one mechanic can ruin a whole experience. There is still fun to be had here but I'm just sick of the clutch claw to keep going for the time being.

haven't finished all the optionals but the main story is over, and given how big everything is, i don't really plan on 100%.

while this is a massive improvement from the main game, the main issues still stand, those being :
-hunting for clues is silly
-a absurd downgrade of weaponry from Generations, given how the main focus is the visuals and feel of the world to attract new players
-astere is still too big for no reason other than ''LOOK HOW AWESOME THIS NEW HUB IS''
-The absurdity of grind to get mantles.
-the cryptic way of unlocking certain equipments and missions.

but speaking of the DLC itself, its much more of the same, some classics come back, the addition of guildlands is a interesting way to grind and upgrade old gear.
however i still prefer rise, simply put a more straightfoward and fun experience