This game felt like a mixed bag---the highs were fantastic, and the lows felt really, really bad. A lot of this game was super fun: the mid to late game fights are super memorable, it's got a great roster of monsters, and the movement and weapons feel great (on the Wii U, at least). The underwater fights aren't nearly as bad as the reviews I'd seen had led me to believe, but I still didn't enjoy them very much, they were just too slow and movement was janky. The big sticking point for me here was progression: it really didn't age well, not just with modern monster hunter games, but modern games in general. Acquiring any piece of gear, an upgrade, any extra quest requires a ton of grinding. Fighting monsters four, five, even six times can feel like a rewarding grind to achieve some pieces as you master the battle completely, but fighting something ten or more times to get one pieces just feels terrible. Worse, in my opinion, is wandering around the world and trying to gather herbs, minerals, and other necessities. It's a slow, clunky, and inefficient process that's a hassle at the beginning of the game and feels just terrible at the end of the game, where farms never quite seem to provide enough of what you need. There's a million tiny annoyances that wouldn't be a big deal on their own (needing paintballs to know where a monster is, for example) but together they're a huge hassle that takes away from the really cool and enjoyable monster fights. The barrier to getting new gear really cuts into the true fun of monster hunter: the cycle of hunts for gear for hunts for gear just turns a little too slowly for my tastes in this one. After a big list of complaints, imo this is a great game with a really solid foundation, but it's a got issues that keep it from being as good as it could be.