2.1
They got rid of a lot of the handholding with the tutorial, which is great! You can outright skip it now after a point, and my issues with the challenge race seem to have been addressed. You still gotta do some setup before starting but at the very least it doesn't feel like you're being forced to understand every little thing about the game with exhaustive detail. It's ok to not know every little thing and get lost in a game. You also unlock addons at the same time as online now, which is nice. The "Wi-Fi Warrior" and "McDonalds" passwords will still get them both unlocked if you just want to get things going asap with some friends though.

Overall I've been playing the game some more and a lot of the mechanics I was iffy on are warming on me. As I've said the tumble state still feels extremely punishing but you have a good amount of tools to get back into the race. My biggest issue with the game at this point is how much slopes will slow you down if you don't have any rings to boost up them. Like yeah it makes sense that they would slow you down a bit, but most of the time the amount they can slow you makes it feel like you're going up a much steeper surface than what you're looking at.
Also the rubberbanding in singleplayer is just a little absurd, I could get it on the higher difficulty but even on normal it really feels like you're better off playing from the middle and trying to boost into first at the last minute with how aggressive the AI gets.
If the minutiae of new features and adjustments aren't your cup of tea, SRB2K isn't going anywhere though I don't blame people for feeling divided on all the new stuff, it really does feel like a totally new game at this point, even if previous knowledge of SRB2K will still get you pretty far.

It's also kinda unfortunate that addons from SRB2K aren't forwards compatible at all. I want to play as JP Arle :(

I've always personally considered getting the G rank crown special permit from beating [spoilers] the point at which you've "beaten the game", so even though I've played this one a lot over the many years its been out and in my hands, I don't think I've ever really "finished" the game until today, hence why I'm logging and reviewing the game now.
Of course there's still a couple tougher monsters I'll one day have to take care of, and I'm not even at the point of being able to try Lv140 GQ monsters, so overall there's still a LOT left for me to do in the game. Tutorial complete I guess.

I've been feeling pretty sentimental the past month, because I picked up the game again and have been hunting online again with some friends. This game came out during a bit of a rough part in my life that I'm still feeling the aftereffects of to this day, and it was my first Monster Hunter game. The online shutting down really feels like the end of an era. If I've ever been having a rough time this was one of my go-to's and I knew that even if friends weren't around to hunt together, there was always something I could chip away at on my own, or there was probably at least one person still playing the game that I could get to know for a couple rounds of hunting.

Looking at it now, MH4U is probably one of my favourite games period. Playing off and on over these 8-9 years, I feel like there's always been a new challenge around the corner. G rank in the older MH games really does not fuck around and being totally honest, it took me many years of chipping away at this game's, and also jumping between other MH games before I got to a level where I really felt like I could contend with the monsters at their quickest and smartest. Even then I still get caught out by shit all the time and it still feels like I have more to learn and improve on. I think the same can easily be said for most monster hunter games but it's just something that really jumped out at me coming back to this one.

Overall, it's a fantastic game. The loss of the online functionality is a tragedy and I really hope a project like pretendo network will be able to get the servers up and running again. Maybe one day Capcom will port some of the older MH games with some upscaling for larger displays, and a better-constructed online mode that won't have to inevitably shut down one day. I still plan to do as much online hunting as I can in these last few days, but for now I'll just say it's been real, you legends.