YMMV / Monster Hunter

Lazy days like today make me want to hit the Felvine...
I'll just drop these YMMV Examples in your YMMV Page, nya?

Works with their own YMMV pages:

• Monster Hunter (2004)
• Monster Hunter 2 (dos)
• Monster Hunter Freedom 2
• Monster Hunter 3 (Tri)
• Monster Hunter Portable 3rd
• Monster Hunter 4
• Monster Hunter Generations
• Monster Hunter: World
• Monster Hunter: Rise
• Monster Hunter: Stories
• Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin
• Monster Hunter Orage

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A

• Accidental Innuendo:
  • The description for the Dios Katana says it can "pierce foes and detonate inside them."
  • Tri Ultimate's description of the Gigginox mentions that parts of its body harden when it becomes excited.
  • One of the items you can carry gives you stamina and makes you warm. Its name? "Hot Meat".
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Are the Ace Hunters the professionals they're made out to be, or are they merely frauds who got their positions through cheating the system? Which is very much possible, given that a given quest is counted as completed for all involved hunters no matter how much participation each one had. Adding fuel to the fire is that they are all confirmed to be G-Rank hunters, and yet they failed to defeat a Low-Rank Gore Magala. Though some are willing to make an exception for the time where they assist the player in repelling the Rusted Kushala Daora that was threatening Dundorma.
• Americans Hate Tingle:
  • The series is a blockbuster hit in Japan, and new games have been known to boost sales of the consoles they're on, but in the United States, the games are Cult Classics at best; detractors cite the lack of visible monster Life Meters, auto-targeting, PS2-era graphics, and heavy grinding as turn-offs to the series. The fact that the servers for the Western versions close years before their Japan-region counterparts speaks for itself. Additionally, while the portability of many games is touted as a major strength amongst Japanese players, Western players (other than Mexicans) feel that they would enjoy the games much more if Capcom released more of them on consoles. The early portable games having no online mode doesn't help, due to the series not having household-name status and therefore making it harder for players to find and meet up with fellow players to do multiplayer quests, which means most players not in Japan have to do the multiplayer quests themselves, enemy HP boost and all. This can leave Westerners surprised that it's Capcom's third best-selling franchise, outselling even Mega Man. This started changing after Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate sold out, selling a solid 290,000 copies in its first month, with World finally kicking this trend, as it's enjoyed incredible sales success in the west, though at the cost of some of its original Japanese audience, who typically play on portables.
  • Khezu is very popular with Japanese players due to them finding it both Creepy Awesome and Creepy Cute, to the point where it was the most popular Flying Wyvern in Japan, but is less positively received among Western players, with them seeing its design as very unappealing and its fight as bland and annoying.
  • Basarios is the third most popular Flying Wyvern in Japan, but is considered to be dull and unmemorable in the West. This can leave Westerners surprised that it's actually more popular in Japan than the likes of Rathalos, Tigrex, and Nargacuga, as well as its adult form, Gravios, who are all considered to be more interesting in comparison.
  • Kirin is highly popular in Japan due to it being the source of one of the most provocative female armors in the series, but it's hated in the West due to being painful to fight and for having a design that many Westerners find bland and nonthreatening compared to those of other monsters. World did little to help this due to its promotion to being a very nasty wall of a boss.
• Annoying Video Game Helper:
  • Bombing Palicoes have a very, very strong tendency to accidentally hit you with their bombs, which can rob you of a valuable window of opportunity as easily as it can knock you out of harm's way.
  • Palicoes will attempt to hit you out of various statuses, which is fine on its own, but it becomes a big problem on Malfestio with its Confusion status, where your Palicoes will attempt to hit you out of Confusion even if you've gotten used to your controls being reversed or worse, if you're in the middle of deploying a Hunter Art.
  • In Generations and Generations Ultimate, there are seven different hubs you can go to, and you can fast travel to any of them via an icon menu. The menu also shows if any NPCs at a particular hub have special dialogue in the form of generic speech bubbles. This could be anything from "new Village Request available" to "you have a Ticket item to claim"...and the latter case is what it will be 90% of the time. More irritatingly, some NPCs show up at multiple hubs (the Flight Cattendant in particular is in every hub), meaning that it will look as if you have a lot of new quests or other requests you can do...but it's just the Flight Cattendant awarding you a ticket for gear you probably don't care about anyway. About the only relief is that if a hub has an Urgent Quest, the speech bubble icon for that hub will be red instead of yellow.
  • In Generations Ultimate, if you don't want to get kicked out of a lobby, never ever use Round Force III as an S&S user. It launches nearby allies into the air, the idea being that they can then execute a jump attack and possibly mount the monster, however in practice it just ends up disrupting attacks and potentially sending players into a vulnerable position to be hit by another attack. Round Force II can also stagger teammates but at least it doesn't have the "helpful" launching property. The one situation where Round Force III can be useful is to save nearby teammates from a dangerous, hard to avoid attack, but that renders the move dead weight otherwise, lowering damage output.
• Anti-Climax Boss: In general, MonHun has historically had a bit of trouble with this trope. To wit:
  • Ceadeus, to most. While its attacks are fairly damaging and difficult to dodge if you're close to it, especially without the Lagiacrus armor, you can't fail against it unless you faint three times or don't cut its beard before it gets to Area 3. Upon hitting the seemingly narrow time limit of 30 minutes, it flees and you get some materials. You are then free to take the quest over and over until you've completely whittled down its health. 3 Ultimate lampshades this by demoting Ceadeus from a 6-star monster to a 5-star monster, putting it on par with more common, albeit powerful monsters. Goldbeard Ceadeus, on the other hand, is a different story.
  • Lao Shan Lung and Yamatsukami, both of whom are even more predictable than the above. Lao doesn't even have a move that targets players on the ground, whilst virtually every one of Yama's attacks is clearly telegraphed and easily avoidable even if you have the reaction time of a dead cow.
  • The Ivory Lagiacrus in Tri Ultimate is hyped up a lot in game, being the monster that eventually forced the Village Chief into retirement from his hunting career and all, and is also the last fight before the credits sequence. In practice, however, it's a slightly stronger Lagiacrus who has roughly the same (or, in some occasions, less) health as most of the fights leading up to it, fights nearly entirely on land (generally considered to be easier than fighting them in water), and whose only real additional threats compared to the normal Lagaicrus are slightly wider hitboxes on its electric attacks and slightly increased damage.
  • Shagaru Magala for some. There's a ton of build-up to the final showdown against the closest thing the series has to a Big Bad, with an epic and bombastic musical score to the fight... and then it goes down in ten minutes even with a mediocre weapon, all while having a moveset you're probably familiar with.
  • Rusted Kushala Daora, the True Final Boss of 4U's postgame. All of Dundorma fears it as they believe that it may possibly destroy the entire town, and it is the monster that cost the Master of Defense his career as a Hunter. Most of the postgame focuses on preparing for the fight against it. This unfortunately results in the fact that when you get to the fight itself, it's less of a fight and more about waiting until you can use the new superweapon you put together to One-Hit Kill it. You can't even fail the Quest; you get unlimited tries and time. Granted, you can fight it on the ground for a real challenge, but the fight is so easy otherwise, that Apex Seregios you killed a Quest earlier could feel a little bit harder than Rusted Kushala Daora, if not by much.
  • The Final Boss of Generations Ultimate's online quests, Ahtal-ka, goes down surprisingly easily for a G-rank final boss. Whereas Gogmazios of 4 Ultimate has a wide variety of explosive attacks and many other ways to inflict massive damage (even its walking can shear off a large portion of your health bar), Ahtal-ka is small enough that she can't trip you, her attacks have wide sweeps but fairly middle-of-the-road damage by G-rank standards, she's vulnerable to status effects, and it's relatively easy enough to topple Ahtal-Neset to climb on top and lay waste to its glowing cores. With a decent team of four, you can defeat her in about 15-20 minutes, even without using the Dragonator (which is frankly poorly-positioned anyways). This is perhaps for the better, given that this boss drops materials for some of the best equipment in the game. Seemingly to make up for this, the DLC Event quest "Gloom of 1,001 Nights" features a much harder version of this monster, with new and harder-hitting attacks especially for her mecha.
  • Prowler quests already pit the player against Warm-Up Boss-type monsters at best, or do pit them against bigger threats but only require them to break a specific part of the monster, but the final non-Arena, non-DLC Prowler quest, "Meownster Hunter Ultimate" is found in the last tier of G Rank quests and is a resounding disappointment for a Title Drop quest. It has Gendrome, Bulldrome, Arzuros, and Lagombi as your targets. Capcom clearly underestimated how powerful Prowlers can be in the right hands, as many Prowler mains regularly take on and defeat far more powerful monsters.
  • Thunderlord IX requires you to fight two Thunderlord Zinogres in a single-zone area. Then the final Thunderlord Zinogre quest has you fight a Thunderlord and... a Bulldrome. Sure, the potential for frustration is very high, due to Bulldrome being Bulldrome and this Thunderlord having the highest stats for High-rank, but you'd expect something like this to happen earlier in the quest line. It's not surprising that this quest was the quest of choice for grinding HR levels. Seemingly to make up for this, Thunderlord G5 is a Boss Rush against a Hyper Astalos and a Furious Rajang along with the Thunderlord.

B

• Base-Breaking Character:
  • The Fatalis trio. You either like them for their difficulty and powerful equipment, or you hate them for being stupidly overpowered. Black Fatalis gets this especially due to its uninteresting design and attacks.
  • Congalala. Some people think it's hilarious and love how it introduces Frenzied monsters, while others think it's disgusting and cheap.
  • Dire Miralis. Some people like it for its otherworldly design and its amazing theme, while others think it's an inferior replacement to the Fatalis trio. The battle is also considered to be anti-climatic.
  • Subspecies in general. You either like them for being different takes on the originals and believe they're an integral part of the series and wish they weren't removed in Generations, or you think they're a product of lazy programmers and a waste of space and are glad at their removal.
  • Malfestio. Some people like it for its design and moveset, finding them to be cool and original, while others despise it for screwing with the player's controls, claiming that it makes the fight with it unfairly difficult.
  • Tigrex is either a fun, fast paced boss for rewarding equal aggression or an obnoxious example of how too much of something can go wrong.
  • Lao-Shan Lung is either an epic siege monster that really makes the player feel like they're defending a city, or a boring DPS-fest with little to make the monster stand out.
  • Kushala Daora has slipped into this over time in comparison to its fellow second generation Elder Dragons, Chameleos and Teostra. Either it has a neat design and a unique fight that fits well within its trio, or it's a generic metal dragon who is extremely tedious to hunt due to its flight, lingering tornadoes, and varying amount of immunities. It doesn't help that it tends to be used more than Teostra and especially Chameleos.
  • The various CPU helper characters (the Palicoes in most games, the Shakalakas in tri- and 3 Ultimate) are either beloved for helping out with hunts when one doesn't have fellow players to hunt with and even helping in ways that Hunters cannot (such as having infinite traps and Nulberries), or they're Annoying Video Game Helpers that can provide "help" when it really isn't needed (such as hitting a confused Hunter when they're in the middle of a Hunter Art) and make enemy monsters' movements less predictable due to there being two AI-controlled characters alongside the player for the monster to target.
  • Deviljho is either liked for being an iconic "invader" monster that can spice up any given hunt in High Rank or G/Master Rank and is fondly known for its "giant angry pickle" design, or disliked due to its tall body making it difficult to hit and its invader schtick being perceived as done to death and overhyped, having appeared in nine consecutive mainline games (including G/Master Rank expansions).
• Better Off Sold: Eggs that are given as quest rewards, especially Silver and Gold Eggs, often sell for four- or five-digits zenny. However, silver and gold ones are also necessary to craft Fate jewels.
• Breather Boss: On occasion, you will fight a new monster who gives you trouble, but then after that, fight another monster who feels quite easy.
  • Gravios can feel like this in 4U, after following a few monsters that don't screw around with you. Gravios moves slow, has a rather large hitbox, and predictable attack patterns. For gunners, this makes it very easy to kite, and for Blademasters, it's very easy to trap.
  • Ukanlos, from the same game, is also considered to be quite easy — mostly because Dalamadur (the previous monster) is a Gimmick Boss, and Ukanlos's gimmick is a little more familiar.
  • Brachydios in Generations can be this for Adept Style users, as it has so many ways to gain Insta-Evade status; not only does it have many telegraphed attacks, but its slime patches, due to being counted as attacks, can be used for Insta-Evade, allowing you to beat down on it with your most powerful attacks.
  • Another monster that can be trivialized with Adept Style in Generations: Plesioth. You know how its hipcheck is notorious for having a bigger hitbox than it looks? Now it's an easy means of getting an Adept charge.
  • For Deviants:
    • Deadeye Yian Garuga. It's positioned in the Special Permit list between the incredibly tanky Crystalbeard Uragaan and the impossibly aggravating Dreadking Rathalos, but is more tolerable than them and regular Yian Garuga. Despite having a tougher shell, some nasty attacks, and Fatal Poison, its attacks are more telegraphed and it is less likely to use the attacks that make normal Yian Garuga a pain. It's also smaller, removing some of the Hitbox Dissonance issues and making it easier to hit its head and tail. Even in G Rank it doesn't get much harder, as its only changes are a back hop, throwing easily-dodged boulders with its beak plow, and using its very, very telegraphed aimed charge twice in a row.
    • Rustrazor Shogun Ceanataur. Being one of the easiest Deviants to fight, it basically almost keeps the moveset of it's regular counterpart with four moves, two of them at basic form and the last two at the other form. The basic form's water attack is easily avoidable if one stays close, gunners can easy avoid the attacks by evading, or using Absolute Evasion/Readiness to avoid the "charged" water attack. The second form's two new moves is has it sharpen its pincers, leaving it open for attacks. The other move, however, is easily avoidable by blocking, diving, or using any of the Absolute moves. Said second form has no ranged attacks, making it free damage for Gunners and Boomerang-build Prowlers as long as they keep their distance and don't stand in front of it.
    • Grimclaw Tigrex. It's still Tigrex, with the turning charges and damage roars that entail, but it's slower and more calculated in its movements, as opposed to the original Tigrex who's all too Ax-Crazy to attack nonstop and give you little time to recover or attack. However, once you get to the harder levels, just avoid the claw slams...
  • Diablos in Generations Ultimate, the target of the Urgent Quest required to reach G Rank, is a more straightforward and familiar fight following the gimmicky Damage-Sponge Boss Nakarkos. Diablos being the G Rank qualifying boss is likely justified in-universe, as a Deviant version of it, the Bloodbath Diablos, awaits those who reach the Post-End Game Content.
• Breather Level:
  • The Everwood expeditions in 4 and 4 Ultimate have these in the form of the treasure rooms and poogie / wild palico rooms. They never have any enemies in them, and large monsters will skip over them when changing zones. They're just a spot for you to catch your breath, heal, sharpen your weapon, eat food, gather some materials, scout palicoes, et cetera. Finding one of these rooms right after or during a tense large monster battle can be a very welcome relief.
  • Harvest Tours can also be this, giving you a chance to take a break from the constant boss fights that make up the game and just relax and gather materials for a while.
  • The DLC G-rank quest "Fan Club: Desert Training" in 4U pits you against a half-sized Cephadrome. While it hits just as hard as its basic counterpart, it's a lot easier to hit and to avoid its attacks. As a result, it's a popular quest amongst G-rank players for farming Cephadrome drops.
  • In Freedom Unite, the first G Rank quest is against a pair of Hypnocatrice. It's a nice breather after Shen Gaoren and Akantor.
  • In Generations, the ninth Redhelm Arzuros quest makes you hunt a Redhelm and a Savage 'Jho of all things. Then the tenth and final Redhelm quest (final, at least until Generations Ultimate) just has you hunting a Redhelm, a normal Arzuros, and another Redhelm in order, which is still a legitimate challenge but at least the monsters come one at a time, none of them are a giant angry pickle of death, and the normal 'zuros is basically a "cushion" monster to help you recollect yourself before taking on the second Redhelm.
  • In Generations Ultimate, "Boltreaver G5", the final non-EX quest for Boltreaver Astalos, requires you to hunt a Thunderlord Zinogre and the titular monster. While still a very difficult quest, it is notably more forgiving than other Deviant G5 quests; unlike most G5s which tend to throw in the second monster after a set period of time even if the first one is still alive, and often have three monsters, this one only has two monsters, and only spawns Boltreaver after you've slain Thunderlord. This eliminates the need for Smoke Bombs and lets you focus entirely on hunting the current monster. On top of all this, the hunt takes place at the Sanctuary, which has a large boulder you can hide behind, and even has a quest bed which allows Prowlers with Far-cat-ster to recharge their Acorns, unlike most other one-area maps that don't have a bed.
• Broken Base: Beginning with the release of Tri, the changes made to the series over time have unsurprisingly split the Monster Hunter fanbase to some degree. The argument primarily centers around whether the 1st and 2nd Generation titles were comparatively better than the 3rd Generation onwards, in no small part due to the main console series switching from being published by Sony Computer Entertainment to being handled by Nintendo. More specifically:
  • Does the game belong more on handhelds or consoles? Handheld fans argue that the portability is great for social players and those who don't spend a lot of time at home, while console fans argue that it's more comfortable to play on a bigger screen with a more comfortable controller, to say nothing about the pointlessness of local multiplayer if one doesn't live near fellow players. This is perhaps why there's a difference in series' opinion between Japan and the West: Japanese consumer gaming heavily favors handhelds and mobile devices (hence why Freedom Unite was such a Killer App for the PSP), while the Western gaming scene is all about console and PC games (which explains why the Wii U port of 3 Ultimate is better received in the West).
  • Slime / Blastblight status: a fun addition or a Game-Breaker that induces Complacent Gaming Syndrome? Made less of an issue when 4/4U nerfed it, and then reignited in Generations, where most of the best weapons in the game are blast weapons.
  • The Swimming mechanic in Tri and 3 Ultimate: Diversifying combat with full three-dimensional movement, or an exercise in patience involving slow-moving Hunters vs. monsters who can swim around in circles?
  • How dreadfully flat and dreary the 1st and 2nd Gen games looked in terms of art direction vs. how sickeningly bright and colorful the 3rd and 4th Gen games look in comparison.
  • Are the Apex monsters of 4 Ultimate a brilliant challenge or do they show that you can take That One Boss too far?
  • The issue of whether Frontier is an awesome game that deserves to be localized for international gamers, or a hilariously broken spinoff that should just stay in East Asia.
  • Monsters from the main series appearing in Frontier. Some people are fine with the main series and Frontier integrating, while others see a Double Standard; sure, monsters from the main series get to show up in the spinoff, but no spinoff monsters sans Hypnocatrice and Lavasioth get to appear in the main series?
  • The series' Competitive Balance being affected by the overall changes in mechanics (new weapons, special moves, monsters and monster abilities, items, armor skills, etc.) is another major point of contention between the fanbase, with some veterans claiming that the newer mechanics have shifted the emphasis away from methodical combat and more into hack and slash territory in many different ways^note in effect claiming that some of the Fake Difficulty was actually necessary for the game's mechanical structure while defenders of the changes are claiming that many of the additions were not only needed to breathe new life into the series, but were also necessary for addressing quality of life issues that the original titles had in spades.
  • Even the method of playing the game can divide the players. Is it more fun to find ways to speedkill monsters and therefore avoid tedium and frustration, or is it more exciting to drag out and analyze the fight in order to show that ugly wyvern some fancy tricks of your own, like cutting off its tail right in the middle of its sure-kill attack?
  • A contention that arose with Generations and its Hunting Arts + Hunting Styles mechanic is the rise of the "Meta Only" attitude among a portion of the fans. While the mentality has been present in earlier installments^note some fans will openly berate others for using what they perceive to be "sub-optimal" loadouts in the belief that the game is all about damage and speedkills, even if the party under scrutiny is using a fairly competent setup that simply wasn't meant for speedkilling to begin with — see the entry on "method of playing", the fact that certain weapon and armor skill combinations work extremely well with certain Art / Style combinations has given birth to a mentality that if you're not using Meta-approved gear and Hunting Art / Hunting Style setups, you might as well not join a lobby. This is part of what makes the Prowler a Base-Breaking Character, due to debates on whether its gimmicks make up for its lackluster damage.
  • Generations examples:
    • Is the high emphasis on style and action an exciting way to shake up how players hunt, or is it a disservice to the franchise's tried-and-true formula?
    • Is Generations' overhauled upgrade mechanics^note Short version: Upgrading no longer needs extremely rare materials that practically never drop; upgrading now boils down to feeding a weapon materials of a certain category until it Levels Up/Evolves a great way to cut down on the franchise's infamous grind and make the series more accessible for newcomers, or does it alienate older fans by removing a key component of the series that made it unique?
    • Is there enough content in the game? This is an especially sore point for Westerners, as it's been a while since they last received a Monster Hunter game with no G rank (Tri; Portable 3rd and vanilla 4 were skipped over) and thus have likely gotten used to games having three rank tiers instead of two. Then there are those who point that there's so many different monsters — more than 4 Ultimate, in fact — and equipment pieces that the game can be forgiven for it.
    • Are Hyper Monsters more fun to fight than Apex or Frenzied Monsters? Are they at least a reasonable replacement?
  • When it was announced that Generations Ultimate would add the option to transmogrify two pieces of equipment together, putting the stats and skills of the first item on the model of the second, the reception was mostly positive, with people liking that there would be more diversity instead of everyone wearing one of a few armor sets in the late game. However, some people dislike that it removes "Fashion Hunting", the art of coming up with original combinations of armor that both look and perform well.
  • The existence of World, and by extension World: Iceborne created a permanent rift between fans of "classic" Monster Hunter and modern. Classic MH fans prefer its more deliberate gameplay and focus on the monsters, and see World as casual garbage with a lackluster endgame. Fans of World prefer its more accessible gameplay and greater detail, and trying to convince them to try older games will lead to responses of "why would I want to play an objectively worse game?" The release of Generations Ultimate after World in the West solidified this, with classic fans cheering that their style of Monster Hunter is still alive, while those who started with World or see it as an upgrade in every way scoffing at the idea that Capcom would bother with a game that they view as outdated and not worth localizing anymore.
  • Showing "true attack" like in Generations, Generations Ultimate, vs "bloated attack" like in other games. Basically, in most games, each weapon's true attack is multiplied by a weapon type-specific constant not used in any damage calculations to produce the attack value you see on the screen. Some players prefer having true attack shown since it is the number used in damage calculations and it lets the player see if their weapon is as powerful as it should be given the monster they are hunting. Others prefer bloated attack since while it may not be necessarily accurate, it still gives the player a rough idea of how powerful their weapon is since true attack does not take things like "motion values" (a multiplier applied to each attack move) into account.
  • The "Deviation" stat on Bowguns. Some think it's a Scrappy Mechanic that should have been tossed as it requires heavy modification for some that might have been better spent on other stats, while others view weapons with such deviation stats as useless. And some think there's nothing wrong with deviation and one just needs to adjust their aim. Of course, easier said than done.
  • Another point of contention with the games' fifth generation (and potentially hypothetical future generations) is the treatment of the games as a live service, with updates to the main story and monster lists (rather than just Event Quests and a select few monsters like White/Old Fatalis) being trickled out over time. Some feel that this helps gives the games more longevity, as a longstanding problem of the series is that much of the playerbase gets through the multiplayer quest list within the first month or two (especially Low Rank, and in the case of 4 Ultimate in the West due to 4 not being brought over, High Rank as well), so lobbies for non-endgame quests feel quite bare after that intial hype period. Others dislike this practice due to the games being essentially incomplete on launch day, not only forcing players who progress faster to wait a month or two at a time but also being biased against players who do not have internet access (particularly in poorer parts of the world) and therefore might not be able to enjoy the game's contents past the 1.0.0 release (as opposed to some older releases like the much-vaunted Freedom Unite and 4 Ultimate being entirely playable offline with roughly 90% of the essential content there already), as Monster Hunter games don't have later Game of The Year Editions that include all the post-launch updates.

C

• Camera Screw: Try running next to a wall or rock outcropping; you'll regret it soon enough, especially if you have motion sickness. Made worse when large monsters cause this to happen by knocking you into a tight corner and trapping you there. 4 Ultimate thankfully remedies this to a good degree, though the same can't be said for when you're fighting a Najarala.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • The Plesioth, notorious for its Hitbox Dissonance-laced hipcheck, appears in 4 and 4 Ultimate...as part of a fishing minigame. Catching it causes it to die upon landing on the wharf. Revenge has never been sweeter.
  • Lopping off a Rathian's tail robs it of its poison tail and gives you more bonuses as it stumbles around looking like an idiot. As the guildmarm put it:
    Guildmarm: Nothing says "I haaaaate you, Gold Rathian!" like lopping off its tail!
  • In general, killing a monster that has been That One Boss for so long brings a ton of satisfaction to many. And after it's done, you could just carve your parts and leave its corpse alone, but why stop there? Additionally, when a particular monster suffers The Worf Effect, such as the divisive Tigrex, who gets brutally mauled by Gore Magala.
• Common Knowledge: For a while it was commonly believed that Deviljho's Horror Hunger was so ravenous that it would resort to eating its own tail if you lopped it off and it got hungry mid hunt. The earliest known recording of it was a freak coincidence where a hunter placed down drugged meat and the Deviljho's severed tail landed on top of it right as the Brute Wyvern was about to become exhausted and look for food.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Bowgun users mainly use Piercing ammo. This is due to a common misconception that more hits means more damage, which isn't always the case, since multi-hit ammo (Piercing, Shrapnel/Pellet, and Spread) tend to have very small motion values for each tick so that the player must optimize their positionings to get the most hits and damage. Starting in World, players did start using Spread Ammo, which can be a better ammo type and encourages aggressive close-range tactics...but its usage is still based on the idea that more hits always means better. Normal Ammo tends to get overlooked for looking too boring, even though the high motion value per hit can make it just as reliable as other ammo types, especially with the right armor skills and buffs.
  • One of the series' trademarks used to be the rock-paper-scissors mechanic of picking a weapon with the right elemental type to be good against your enemy, then Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate added the explosive Slime element (Blastblight in 4). Slime / Blastblight does massive damage and isn't actually resisted by anything, so many 3U players just make a good Slime weapon and then never use anything else. Capcom has noticed this and appropriately nerfed the status effect in 4, even going so far as to give a few monsters resistances against it, though it largely remains a useful general-purpose tool for breaking monster parts faster than usual.
  • Following the theme of Blast element being absurd, the Kelbi Stringshot / Great Kelbi Deershot bow in 3U was this. Being able to use Spread 3 / Spread 4 arrows and having 350 Blast made it an effective tool to stunlock a monster. There's a reason it was effectively nerfed in 4U, then had its Blast capabilities stripped from it in Generations.
  • With the exception of 3rd Gen, every generation has its own best Rapid bow leading to this: the Akantor Bow in 2, Exterminator Bow II in Unite, Kama Sedition in 4U, and The Bow Of Hope & Valor in Generations. Generations has it worst as The Bow Of Hope & Valor does not need Load Up to be useful, deals a huge amount of Blast element damage, and has 2 slots. Generations Ultimate partially bucks this trend by providing a number of viable options for a strong rapid bow, with the top 2 being the Wepwawet (If you use Load Up) and the Scylla Webdart.
  • Many endgame Blademaster sets in 4U can be reduced to a few key pieces: Grand Divine Ire (Furious Rajang) chest+waist, Rusted Daora gloves, and Dire Miralis legs. These four pieces — give or take some situational alternatives — are crucial for getting the skills Honed Blade^note Attack Up Large and Sharpness+1; formerly known as Stellar Sword in Unite and was exclusive to the Fatalis Z armor set and Challenger+2^note causes players to enter their own Rage Mode at the same time as monsters, which are both highly sought after for speedkilling monsters. If these aren't available, there are also the MiKu MiKu Mi^note Chameleos + Daora armor which provides Earplugs and Windproof (Lo) at base level and U-Ka U-Ka U^note Ukanlos + Teostra armor which provides Sharpness+1 and Mind's Eye out of the box sets, both of which were popularized by GaijinHunter.
  • In regards to the Insect Glaive, in 4U the most popular path for the Kinsect is the Effect Extender Bug, which doubles the duration of weapon's self buffs, giving the player two whole minutes of incredible power and speed, which far outstripped other final Kinsects in utility. In Generations the Effect Extender was nerfed to only add 30 seconds instead of a minute, and the other Kinsect paths were made more viable. However, the new go-to Kinsect ended up being the Speed 1 bug, which gives a massive 30% affinity boost upon grabbing a white extract.
  • Hame runs are seen by some as this. A multiplayer speedrunning method used for farming charms and Relic gear in max-level Guild Quests, hame basically consists of four hunters repeatedly stunlocking monsters using Sleep element weapons / shots and traps, then sleep-bombing them until they croak. While this method averts having long, drawn-out battles against Apex monsters if done correctly, it also led to quite a few players accusing 4U's endgame of being nothing but spamming cheese tactics over and over, leading to the derogatory nickname "Rajang Hunter 4 Ultimate"^note Rajang guild quests are highly sought after due to Rajang guild quests having the highest chance of dropping the best charms and relic equipment and Rajang being frail and vulnerable to traps. They're less common in Generations Ultimate, as the G5 and EX quests for every Deviant take place in maps that disallow traps.
  • In theory, the Character Class System of Generations encourages players to find a playstyle that suits their preferences. In practice, most players run Adept everything, with a few exceptions for Aerial; the invincibility frames and Adept dash are incredibly powerful for what they give up, which is some Art slots and a few moves. Generations Ultimate also throws Valor into the mix, as its Attack! Attack! Attack! gameplay is very appealing for crushing monsters.
  • A common set in the early game of Generations is the "BujaBujaBu set", popularized by Gaijinhunter, which consists of mixed Bullfango and Jaggi armor, provides a very good attack boost, and can be farmed within an hour or two of starting the game.
  • If you go online and see an archer in Generations, they will have one of two things: 1) The Bow of Hope & Valor, a.k.a. the Teostra Bow or 2) The fully upgraded Teostra Bow. Also, expect to see a lot of deviant weapons, especially Hellblade Glavenus weapons, online. Conveniently, both of the above examples possess the Blastblight property.
  • For players fond of creating mixed armor sets, a good portion of mix sets contain one of two different headpieces. If you're a Gunner then you likely have the Barrage Earring, a headpiece that instantly gives you the skill Load Up, which of often paired with the previously mentioned Bow Of Hope And Valor. For everything else, there's the Hayabusa Feather, a headpiece that instantly gives you Critical Eye+2 (which increases Affinity by 20%). This is mitigated slightly by the fact that the former requires you get an A-rank on every Arena quest, and the latter requires you complete every non-Advanced, non-Prowler village quest plus a tough Arena-set village quest, and both have low Defense even in High-rank.
  • In Generations, it is very common to see rooms labeled "Charm farming", "Sakura", or something similar that consists of doing the "Coal Hearted" quest, as that quest has a Good Bad Bug that allows the quest to be farmed for a large number of charms per run with minimal effort compared to other methods of gaining charms (known as the "Sakura method", hence one of the common room names used for farming this quest). Make a room of this sort yourself and watch fellow hunters pour in to join in on the fun.
  • The "Coal Hearted" glitch was removed in Generations Ultimate, but the new DLC quest "URGENT: COAL MINERS NEEDED" takes its place as the hot new charm-farming quest, with a large number of charms intentionally awarded for hunting the Brachydios that pops up.
  • In Generations, good luck finding a top-tier build that doesn't involve spamming critical hits.
  • In Generations Ultimate, expect to see a lot of players using the Ahtal-Ka weapons due to these weapons having above-average raw, decent purple Sharpness, three slots, and a sizeable Defense boost.
  • Ahtal-Ka armor is also wildly popular simply due to unmatched versatility. It comes with 12 total slots and two inherent skills: Talisman Boost^note Doubles the skill points given on your talisman, including skill points from gems and Skill+2^note Adds 2 points to the total of every skill on the armor, and this stacks with Talisman Boost, allowing you to gem in any skill you need for a particular hunt. Between these skills making even subpar talismans usable and the set's high defense (being from the Final Boss and all), anyone not using a mixed or Deviant Set will be using this armor. Compounding all of this is that Ahtal-Ka is fairly easy for a Final Boss. Mercifully, the existence of Armor Fusion allows players to run this set but still be able to enjoy cosmetic diversity, otherwise every endgame lobby would have players wearing nothing but Egyptian-looking armor.
  • In Generations and Generations Ultimate, most Prowler users swear by a combination of the Piercing Boomerangs and Big Boomerangs buffs. Piercing allows boomerangs to inflict multiple hits in one trip, Big makes boomerangs do more damage, and these two buffs can stack, allowing these easily-underestimated cats to shred through monsters' HP. As such, expect most Prowlers online in Generations to be either of the Fighting or Gathering Supports, as they are the only two that can learn Piercing Boomerangs. In Generations Ultimate, the top boomerang prowlers are Assist, Healing, and Gathering since they're the only ones that get a third boomerang in their boomerang combo.
  • And then there are those who only play Prowler, many of which are World immigrants due to World not having Prowlers. It helps that Prowler is relatively beginner-friendly, due to needing less materials for their equipment and not having to manage item use, even if the Prowler is a little weaker than Hunters.
  • One of the most popular mixed sets in Generations Ultimate is the Jho Ceana/Gugigugigu set^note Esurient XR head, arms, and legs; Ceanataur XR body and waist. It can only be made after beating the final boss since it requires G-Rank Savage and Hyper Deviljho materials, but putting it all together gives you Sharpness +2 and Razor Sharp^note These skills are extremely hard to pair normally due to their respective decorations deducting points from the other along with 11 slots to add even more skills.
  • Among Switch Axes, you'll see usage of those with Power Phials and little else. The reason is simple: while other Phial types increase elemental damage, unlock an element/status, or exhaust monsters, Power Phials increase raw damage. Element Phial SAs tend to be low on raw, status Phial SAs are often weak and early-game, Dragon Phial SAs come late in the game, and Exhaust Phial SAs are useless against Elder Dragons and Hyper Monsters, the majority of the endgame, while Power Phials tend to be on high-raw weapons anyway and are much more common than the other Phial types. This only intensifies with the continual buffs to Sword Mode in later games.^note The double sword swing in 4, Demon Riot & Energy Charge in Generations, and Amped Mode in World
  • For some reason, a significant number of players in Generations and Generations Ultimate have "Omae wa mou shindeiru" as one of their Hunter Art shouts. Others worked in memes - namely "Je suis monté."
• Crack Pairing:
  • Due to their similar hairstyles and overall body build, it's been joked more than once than Rajang is related to the Admiral of World in some way.
  • A common joke in the fanbase is that Yian Garuga was the result of Rathian screwing a Yian Kut-Ku, since the former is a Moveset Clone of Garuga, while the Bird Wyvern itself is likely a relative of the latter.
• Crazy Is Cool: The Valstrax. A dragon with jet engine turbines for wings that hunts by dive bombing things from the upper atmosphere? It's so absurd and cool that it borders on Narm, but it's killer design and awesomely fun gameplay make the Valstrax a fan favorite instead.
• Creepy Awesome: Khezu and Gigginox are popular with Japanese players because of how creepy they are. In fact, they are the most popular Flying Wyverns in Japan, with the former being #1 and the latter being #2.
• Creepy Cute: A lot of Palico armor in 4/Ultimate and Generations/Ultimate makes your Palico look spooky, in a very huggable kind of way, such as Gore Magala armor that looks like a fancy Bedsheet Ghost.
• Crosses the Line Twice: In Generations Ultimate, one quest has you hunting a Hyper Najarala who swallowed the client's friend whole. The name of the quest? "...Or Just Wait for It to Poop".
• Cult Classic:
  • A strange example because even though in Japan these games are easily considered a Killer App and very popular, internationally, it is much less popular overall but the fandom of it still very much love the games. This is one of the main reasons that half of the games are not released outside Japan. This same status meant that up until 4, players of the portable games outside of Japan had a hard time with multiplayer-capable quests due to the general lack of fellow local players.
  • While Generations Ultimate isn't anywhere near the blockbuster that World is, especially in the West where GU was released later, it's nonetheless managed to amass a dedicated playerbase who missed "classic" Monster Hunter and its more deliberate, just-you-vs-the-monster style of gameplay.

D-E

• Demonic Spiders:
  • The Egyurasu from Frontier are considerably dangerous for small monsters, being extremely quick, incredibly durable, and having a One-Hit Kill attack that can be tricky to avoid. There's a reason many Frontier players consider them to be the most challenging part of Guanzorumu's first phase.
  • Genprey, Vespoids, and Great Thunderbugs are infamous for inflicting Paralysis, rendering you immobile for about 15 seconds. This is usually a minor annoyance, like if you're just gathering items or on a small monsters quest. But if you're fighting a large monster at the moment, getting paralyzed by a small monster may well set you up for a lethal attack from the large monster. This is somewhat mitigated in later games since small Bird Wyverns become smart enough to stay out of the way and watch together from a distance, but you can still get stung by a Vespoid or Great Thunderbugs, who will not get out of the way.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • The first happens once you start doing high-rank quests; it only takes a few mistakes to get clobbered, and some previously trivial monsters can knock you out with three hits, especially the ones that get new attacks. Once you're doing G-rank quests, all bets are off. Specific examples of this case include:
  • The first big one is probably when the player fights a Yian Kut-Ku for the first time. Before this, missions were simple slaying x Mooks and gathering missions. The Yian Kut-ku shows the lengths that the player has to go to beat the bosses without getting slapped silly (analyzing attack patterns, finding weak spots, figuring out what weapons are best, etc.)
  • In Tri, the Barroth is the first sign that the gloves are coming off, and it's usually considered to be a harder fight than the next couple of fights after it, largely in part of the fact that unlike some of the later fights, it has armor, is very fast, and that its charge attack hits like a truck.
  • 3 Ultimate also has the Purple Ludroth, the first "subspecies" that the player will encounter as well as the introduction to High-Rank quests. There is a reason that most high-rank armor usually has at least twice the base defense of low-rank armor, and it is borderline impossible to have any until the Ludroth is defeated, meaning that you are definitely going to feel the difference.
  • The Jhen Mohran village quest in 3 Ultimate is part of the seven-star tier, but is so tough that most players recommend putting it off until the player has progressed well into G-rank. It's an enemy you were once expected to fight with up to four other players, solo, and the mechanics can be confusing for new players. Fortunately, merely repelling Jhen Mohran counts the mission as complete, and it's optional unless you want to fight Alatreon.
  • In 4, replacing the "role" of Yian Kut-Ku is Kecha Wacha. Not only does a newer hunter have to do everything listed above in the Kut-Ku description, they also have to deal with the new vine/web swinging and climbing mechanics that this monster will happily abuse in some areas. There are Sonic Bombs in the supply box for a very good reason.
  • Generations has Blangonga in the Hub quests due to its aggressiveness, speed, and power compared to the three-star monsters fought before it.
  • World has Low Rank Diablos, which makes the monsters encountered before it look like wet noodles. It has astounding speed and ferocity compared to anything encountered before it, even Anjanath, is rather foul-tempered, and is the first monster you encounter that can regularly hit for half your health in damage. The constant burrowing also prevents you from hitting it and lets it get surprise attacks on you, which complements its high attack power.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Yian Kut-Ku is popular with the fanbase due to how adorable it is. It helps that it served as a Wake-Up Call Boss in the 1st and 2nd Generation games. In fact, when Famitsu held a poll about which monsters should return in Portable 3rd, Yian Kut-Ku was ranked #1. That should indicate how popular it is. 4 Ultimate features an Event Quest where you can fight a tiny Kut-Ku.
  • Subspecies that have many differences to set themselves apart from the originals tend to be popular with the fanbase. Notable examples are Copper Blangonga and Glacial Agnaktor.
  • For a long time, Amatsu only appeared in one game (Portable 3rd), yet many people requested its return. Mostly because of its awesome music. The fans finally got their wish years later, when Generations marked its triumphant return with Yukumo Village.
  • Zamtrios, due to being an awesome-looking walking shark with an infamous and gut-bustingly hilarious inflation / "fat" mode.
  • While most small monsters are widely hated by the fanbase for interfering with their hunts at every opportunity, the Konchu are rather popular with players due to their adorable animations and for being funny to watch due to their infamy among players, provided you're not the one being attacked by them.
• Event-Obscuring Camera:
  • Slagtoths' large bodies and slow speed causes them to block the camera more often than not.
  • Once Najarala begins to constrict a target, the game camera then zooms out and moves upward. This effect can be confusing at first, leading to first time victims getting crushed and stunned. This can also occur if players get stuck between its body in its default pose.
• Evil Is Cool: While none of the monsters in the series are truly evil, fans have taken a liking to the especially menacing and destructive ones like Deviljho and Fatalis because they are so menacing and destructive.

F-G

• Fan Nickname: Seen here.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • The series' fandom overlaps quite a bit with the Periphery Demographic for Mons series such as Pokémon. While Monster Hunter is not a proper Mons series outside of Stories, its selling point (spotting and hunting a wide variety of unique and colorful monsters) attracts the same types of fans, and it's not uncommon to see direct comparisons or crossover/mashup fanart.
  • There's a noticeable overlap between Monster Hunter and Dark Souls fans, due to both series sharing complex and methodical melee combat, strong focus on preparation, large amount of playstyles and a lot of customization potential. Worldwide success of Dark Souls also contributed to gradual growth of Monster Hunter popularity outside Japan, due to people either stumbling upon it in search of similar games to play, or returning to the franchise after bad first impression while finally "getting" this style of gameplay.
  • Despite being complete rivals, Monster Hunter players tends to get along really well with the God Eater fandom, especially as the latter influences later entries in the franchise from tri./Protable 3rd onwards, such as increased verticality and having a more involved story and characters.
  • The series has a lot of overlap with fans of Speculative Evolution projects and media due to the generally more grounded and detailed designs and ecology of the monsters
• Game-Breaker:
  • Hammers in Tri: attack twice then windup charge, then attack immediately after you go into charge mode, and repeat. You'll attack as quickly as with a Sword & Shield for several times more damage.
  • The Slime element introduced in Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, which throws the balance of the game out the window, making the other elements obsolete. The Kelbi Bow, with the Awaken skill which unlocks its Slime element, was infamous because of this thanks to its level 1 charge spread shot, allowing it to inflict the Slime element quickly and easily for massive damage. And that's before you apply bonuses from the Bombardier skill. Granted, monsters will gradually increase their resistance against Slime elements (like any other status attacks), farming Brachydios is not easy, and slow weapons prefer high raw damage to status or elemental attributes, but Slime's utility makes it a great all-rounder. Also, explosions. Fortunately, when it returned in 4 as Blastblight, it was heavily nerfed, and some monsters gained a huge Acquired Poison Immunity level of resistance to it, particularly Brachydios and Teostra (since they use it as well), though it's still useful for breaking monster parts and in marathon hunting quests. Also of note is that the Kelbi Bow in 4 has also been nerfed in response.
  • The G-rank Chameleos armour set "Grand Mizuha", when used together with the Chameleos Insect Glaive "Caster's Rod", is nothing but this in 4U. On top of the Insect Glaive already being one of the best weapons in the title, Chameleos' version also possesses the Poison attribute, which is very effective against many monsters, including Elder Dragons. Grand Mizuha's perk, on the other hand, is that the armor set has almost every single skill you need in order to use said Insect Glaive effectively: Earplugs, Wind Resistance, Status Attack +2, and Status Crit. And the materials for both the weapon and armor all come from the same monster. It's possible to grind Chameleos for long enough and go hog wild mounting and poisoning monsters with this set, and the kicker is that it makes Kushala Daora substantially easier — which will in turn help you create another batch of strong endgame weapons and armors using Daora parts. The only catch? If you slip up and get hit by a Fire-based attack, you're toast.
  • The Star Knight DLC armor in 4U is one of the best all-purpose armor sets in the game. The blademaster version has the Steady Hand skill, which combines Mind's Eye and Razor Sharp, and has four points towards the Handicraft skill. The gunner version has Load Up and seven points towards the Unscathed skill. In addition, both versions have Rodeo God and Challenger +2 and three pieces of armor with three decoration slots.
  • The Battle Tonfas introduced in Frontier are criticized for ruining the Competitive Balance due to their highly versatile moveset. It has the mobility and versatility of Sword & Shield, the attack speed of Dual Blades and charge gauge-based special attacks like the Charge Axe, but with spontaneous damage output like the Gunlance's Wyvern Fire and the ability to do jump attacks similar to the Insect Glaive, with the added perk of being able to jump kick against the target to remain airborne for extended periods, allowing Tonfa users to perform DMC-style air combos that also serve to help dodge ground-based monster attacks. On top of that, it can also switch between both Impact and Piercing damage at will using the charge gauge and is therefore the quickest impact weapon you can use to knock out monsters with. Japanese fans have claimed that this weapon has managed to put the Lance, Hammer, Dual Blades, and Insect Glaive to shame all at once. Observe carefully.
  • In the 4th Generation, especially Generations and Generations Ultimate, spamming mounts is definitely seen as this in multiplayer as it trivializes a lot of quests due to keeping the monster down a long time.
  • The Insect Glaive and (to a slightly lesser extent) the Charge Blade are mostly this in 4U. The Glaive is the go-to weapon if you want to mount monsters (in fact, mounting itself can be considered a Game-Breaker if abused correctly), and in addition to its phenomenal air combat abilities, it's also one of the few weapons with a built-in buffing mechanic (the other two being the Charge Blade and the Hunting Horn), but without the dexterity requirements that place the Hunting Horn in Difficult, but Awesome instead of Game-Breaker territory.
    
    The Charge Blade, meanwhile, is considered one of the most complete weapons of the series, with both Cutting and Knockout damage potential, guarding abilities that rival the Lance, and quick but hard-hitting attacks. Guard Points may be considered Difficult, but Awesome, but overall the Charge Blade is an extremely decent weapon even in the hands of inexperienced players.
    
    Both of these were duly nerfed come Generations. The Insect Glaive got almost all of its motion values dropped by 15-20%, along with Aerial Style giving other weapons a chance to keep up in the mounting department; and the Charge Blade kept its old moves but got a mechanical overhaul, changing the way its phials worked and greatly reining in the Super Amped Elemental Discharge.
  • The "Coal Hearted" charm reward bug in Generations allows you to farm a large number of charms per iteration of the quest and sell them off for five-digit amounts of zenny at a time. Even better, this quest is commonly used in online rooms, dividing up the required charms needed to trigger the bug amongst all players. Never worry about being short on cash again! It was unfortunately patched out in Generations Ultimate...though there is a new quest, "URGENT: COAL MINERS NEEDED", that gives out at least three whole rows of charms for completing the subquest, which consists of hunting a Brachydios.
  • Deviant gear has caused the rise of a staggeringly popular setup. That is the Dreadking armor with any Hellblade melee weapon. While nothing fancy, this gives you a 200 damage, positive affinity, white sharp, blast element weapon along with a powerful armor that gives immunity to roars/winds, increased affinity on weak points, and attack up large. In G Rank, this is further upgraded to 300 raw and purple sharp with a defense boost at low health. In terms of pure, brutal efficiency, few setups can compare, and more people are using it the more deadly the blast weapons become.
  • The Teostra Bow (Bow of Hope & Valor/Bow of Light & Courage) in Generations makes almost every other bow obsolete. It boasts great raw, high Blastblight status, several useful coatings such as Power and Element lvl 2, has two slots, and is fairly easy to craft compared to other bows, making it very good already. What pushes it over the edge is Load Up, which gives it Rapid LV 5, the best type of bow shot in the game. As such, you'll see most Bow users wielding this bow. Case in point: A quartet of Teo Bow users taking down Ukanlos in less than two minutes. The poor sucker barely gets to move. It was somewhat nerfed in Generations Ultimate: while the Bow of Light & Courage was untouched, the fully upgraded G Rank version basically took the Bow of Light & Courage and added 50 more raw and nothing else.
• Gateway Series:
  • The Freedom handheld titles, with Unite being its Breakthrough Hit. When once the series was an obscure MMO-esque home console game, putting them on the PSP allowed players to easily congregate in public and take full advantage of Socialization Bonuses, thus spreading the hype even further. Unite then pulled out all the stops and crammed in tons of content into a single UMD, including the famed G-rank mode. To this day it's still being played by diehard MonHun fans, especially now that an Updated Re-release has been created for the iOS.
  • Monster Hunter: World is an even stronger case, as attempted by the game itself; it streamlined and polished many of the series' clunkier features for a more user-friendly experience and went on to become Capcom's best-selling initial release of all time.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • In Japan, Qurupeco and Barroth are the least popular Bird Wyverns and Brute Wyverns in the series (though the former has been Rescued from the Scrappy Heap, as shown by the latest Japanese polls), respectively. Down there, Qurupeco received scorn for replacing Yian Kut-Ku and making hunts more tedious through the use of its monster calls, and Barroth is considered to be really bland and ugly in comparison to the other Brute Wyverns. In the West, however, they're much more popular; the former is considered to be quite memorable as its unique battle tactic makes for some hilarious moments at times, and the latter is well-liked for being an effective Wake-Up Call Boss.
  • The Dog Wyverns with the exception of the Maccaos are widely disliked by Japanese fans, with many of them accusing the raptors of being uninspired expies of the Swift Wyverns, but are more well-liked in the West, with many Western players praising them for having more variety in their designs and movesets, claiming that it makes them feel more original and fresh than the Swift Wyverns, who come off as uninspired and boring to them due to how similar their designs and movesets are to each other.
  • The Insect Glaive weapon seems to be exceptionally popular within the French 4U community, which results in players on the non-Asian versions being subject to the "Je suis monté!" French-default mounting message ad infinitum.
  • The Wii U port of 3 Ultimate is better received in the U.S. and some western countries than in Japan, as Japanese fans primarily see the series as better suited for handhelds and console gaming is generally more popular overseas. Helping matters for Western fans is that it has online multiplayer unlike the 3DS version, and due to the series' lack of popularity in the West it's just more convenient to hop online to find hunting buddies than to try to meet up with fellow hunters around one's local area. This has left Western hunters disappointed that there's no matching Wii U ports of 4 Ultimate or Generations.
  • Possibly one of the few western countries when the whole series is popular is Mexico: This is partly because MH is probably the only thing similar to Pokémon in the PSP, and (at least regarding the 3DS) it's one of the few games where you can play with your friends without running the risk of other people looking you in a weird way if you had to play a childish-looking game like Pokémon. In addition, one of the problems that usually plagues gamers from the U. S. and some western countries (having to find someone to play with physically) is not much a problem in Mexico, since many large cities in that country have meeting places for both video players and those who want to play other types of games (like card games like Yu-Gi-Oh!, Magic: The Gathering, etc) named Plazas de la tecnologia^note Literally "Technology Malls'', basically shopping malls geared exclusively for the sale of computer hardware, and also videogames. In many places, you can also buy manga, anime, comics, and also play videogames there, and you can bring you portable consoles there. In fact, most of those places are meeting centers for many Mexican MH players, along with other from other franchises as well.. In the same way, other places, like comic, videogame and manga/anime conventions also work for the same purpose as well there.
• Goddamned Bats: Quite a few of them. "STUPID VESPOIDS!" and "STUPID BULLFANGOS!" is practically a catch phrase to some hunters.
  • The first generation had Apceros, huge camera-obscuring armor plated herbivores that would charge you on sight and would relentlessly pursue you until you or they died.
  • Melynxes don't hurt you and their attacks barely make you flinch, but they steal your items. What they steal could be anything from an Insect Husk to a Max Potion. Granted, you can get them back by hitting them or rummaging through their loot pile, but they are very quick to run once they snag something and in the early games, some maps didn't have a loot pile for you to check. They were toned down somewhat in Tri, which added felvine bombs to distract them and made it so only a specific, easy to avoid attack would filch your stuff.
  • The second generation has the Blangos. Like a lot of small monsters, they have an irritating tendency to interrupt your attacks during crucial moments, but they also constantly jump around, can throw snowballs and perform a quick charge attack so they can harass you from a distance, and in some quests, they respawn infinitely. The only respite is they only appear in ice areas.
  • Tri adds Goddamned Rhenoplos to the mix. Basically, they're a mashup of a Bullfango and an Apceros — they share the Bullfango's love for charging but they drag you along with their attacks, and they have health about equivalent to an Apceros. Add in armored craniums that can deflect frontal attacks of even green sharpness and you've got one annoying enemy.
  • Tri also adds Bnahabras, souped up Vespoids. While Vespoids were annoying for sneaking up on you then leaving you vulnerable to attack by a paralyzing sting, Bnahabras add in the ability to shoot a resistance-lowering goop at your hunter, making everything else hurt more.
  • In 3 Ultimate, all of the smaller minion bird wyverns. Male Jaggi are tolerable and rarely knock you down. The larger female Jaggia, however, have a full body check that sends you flying as far as a Bullfango / Rhenoplos charge plus a bite attack that knocks you down. Wroggis also have the same body check as the Jaggia and a poison breath attack. Luckily it's not as potent as a fully grown Great Wroggi, but the thing that sucks is Great Wroggi will target you with its strongest attacks when you are poisoned. Baggis are just as annoying with their sleep toxin that'll drop you in about 10-15 seconds. Like Great Wroggi, Great Baggi will hound you as soon as you get drowsy. And they sometimes attack your prey when it's sleeping.
  • Tri also introduces Uroktor, which have the ability to burrow out from right under you and interrupt your attacks. Thankfully, they don't show up in very many areas.
  • 4 and 4 Ultimate add the Konchu, small Crayfish-like crustaceans that can roll into a ball and ram into unsuspecting Hunters. Not only are they as fast as Bullfangos when rolling, but hitting them while they're standing up or curled — whether intentionally or not — will cause your weapon to bounce off, leaving you vulnerable to more lethal threats. They can even latch onto nearby large monsters just to make your weapon bounce and leave you reeling while the large monster smacks you across the room as a result.
• Goddamned Boss: Now has its own page.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • The Yian Garuga Glitch from Freedom. To activate it, take the "Revenge of the Yian Garuga" quest, go to the Veggie Elder and trade a Spiderweb for a Special Mushroom (if you don't have a Spiderweb, gather a Special Mushroom from the spot near the elder), and wait for the time to run out. The game will think you successfully completed the quest. Even better, the next time you face a Yian Garuga, it will have substantially low health, making it easy to beat.
  • In a rare example of Hitbox Dissonance working for the players instead of against them, it is possible to avoid the beginning portion of Ukanlos' swim attack entirely in Freedom Unite by simply standing in place, as long as you know the correct distance and angle at which you should position yourself. It also works sometimes where if you just graze the weak spot, the game registers it as a full hit.
  • 4U has the Infinite Earth Crystals glitch. It involves making a (Ruby) Basarios trip and then stunning it while it's tripped. Somehow this creates a glitched invisible mining spot that can be gathered from indefinitely (read: until you reach the carrying cap or you run out of pickaxes). This is especially helpful because upgrading Rusted and Worn weapons costs a lot of Earth Crystals. Grinding for them has never been easier. Patched out in Generations Ultimate.
  • Generations has the Sakura Method of charm farming which allows you to obtain nearly 15 charms per quest. In the Hub 6 quest "Coal Hearted", you need to deliver 10 pieces of coal at the Volcano, then deliver a Paw Pass Ticket. For whatever reason, delivering 12 coals one at a time instead of all at once while being on a multiplayer server tricks the game into thinking you've delivered the max amount the quest will allow, and reward you with a mountain of charms, alongside a number of ores and armor spheres to sell for zenny. Charm farming has never been so easy. Unfortunately, this was patched out in Generations Ultimate and replaced with a much more difficult method.

H-I

• Harsher in Hindsight: The Seltas Queen can consume her male to sustain herself, while the Desert Seltas Queen can launch her mate, killing him as he smacks into his target. As of Rise version 3.0, Seltas Queen and her subspecies aren't the only female monsters who kill their mates for power, as Narwa does the same to Ibushi to gain her Allmother form.
• High-Tier Scrappy: Adept Style quickly became hated because it's so good. The Insta-Evade timing window, while narrow, is much greater than it seems and allows for dodging even the most powerful attacks with ease, and the resulting Insta-Dodge attacks are some of the more powerful attacks in the game. The Lance and Gunlance equivalents can block any blockable attack without taking any damage or knockback. Even if the Style only allows for one Hunter Art and gives up a couple of moves, the incredible utility of the Insta-Evade is more than enough to make up for that. It may struggle against multi-hitting attackers like Brachydios and Zinogre, but careful movement can avoid even those. Adept Style was powerful enough to become one of the most controversial additions to Generations.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Tri on the Wii introduces the Switch Axe, a weapon that can switch between two modes. One generation of games later, Generations Ultimate got announced for a port on a console that can switch between two modes, one called the Switch, no less!
  • 4 Ultimate's Shrouded Nerscylla can perform Building Swings even in the Dunes' open outdoor areas where the webbing is unlikely to be attached to any solid objects. With Monster Hunter: Rise introducing Wirebugs, it appears that mystery has been solved.
• I Am Not Shazam: "Black Rathian" is actually just a Fan Nickname for the Unknown Black Flying Wyvern. Despite sharing some aspects of Rathian's model, it's actually a completely separate species from the Rath wyverns. Doesn't stop people from calling it that or even mistaking it for a Rathian subspecies, though.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Generations gets some flak due to the lack of G Rank, the addition of Hunter Arts and Hunter Styles (especially Adept Style), and various adjustments to damage and monster health in the hunter's favor.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: 4 Ultimate gets a fair bit of heat because of the Apex monsters, which some players feel add more frustration than fun to the game.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!:
  • Dah'ren Mohran in 4 is derided by many for being a carbon copy of Jhen Mohran from Tri with only a few key differences.
  • The Dunes in 4 Ultimate have gotten some criticism for being what is basically the original Monster Hunter's Old Desert — complete with the original BGM — except with some changes to account for the new elevation-based mechanics.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: One concern about Generations, particularly Western players who started with 3 Ultimate or 4 Ultimate (vanilla 4 is Japan- and Korea-only), is the lack of G-rank, since the two localized games before it included it.
• It Was His Sled: Thanks to Play the Game, Skip the Story, you can't really talk about the games without someone bringing up the spoilerrific endgame monsters. For example, anyone who's played 4 Ultimate for at least ten hours and talked about it probably has had the existences of the Shagaru Magala and Gogmazios spoiled to them by now.

L-M

• Low-Tier Letdown: Prowlers in Generations are heavily disliked and seen as little more than Joke Characters because they can't heal themselves except through Support Moves that take time to charge, they can't use items, they're lacking in damage output, and overall anything a Prowler can do, a Hunter can do better or more often. And that's just if you're using a Fighting Prowler; less combat-oriented Prowlers are seen as even bigger wastes of player slots that could be used by a Hunter instead. They are useful in gathering runs due to not having to manage usable items and having infinite-use gathering tools, and even then they're not used in "Sakura farming" runs because they didn't have an equivalent to the Farcaster in Generations, and by the time the Far-cat-ster was added in Generations Ultimate, the bug that enabled Sakura farming was removed. While they did get a few buffs and a new offense-oriented Support in Generations Ultimate, most players would still prefer to have an all-Hunter party.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Rajang. He's over NINE THOUSAAAAAANNNDDDD!
  • Deviljho, to the point where people began making Rajang vs. Deviljho dream matches. Just look at the number of Fan Nicknames the thing has.
  • The Argosy Captain and Neko (Means "Cat") almost approached this status in 3U, with their Gratuitous Japanese and "Dirty Fencing". Reaches a new height in 4U where Blademasters can possess the Dirty Fencing skill via wearing their armor. Sugoi!
  • Zinogre, proud owner of one of the only three Monster Hunter themes to have an electric guitar in it^note the others being Alatreon and Astalos, and proof positive that Hurricane Kicks are made better when giant wolves perform them. The fact that his BGM sounds like a battle theme from Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance certainly helps.
  • "Unknown: Black Flying Wyvern" from Frontier is slowly but surely approaching this status, being a brutal combination of Nothing Is Scarier, Dark Is Evil, Unstoppable Rage, All Your Powers Combined, and pure, unadulterated Nightmare Fuel.
  • Plesioth. To the point that Plessy's hipcheck can warp people through time and space◊ (sadly, it lost this status in fourth-generation games).
  • Hunting Horn users are treated with reverence amongst other players, since the Difficult, but Awesome nature of their weapon makes them rare but valued teammates.
• Memetic Loser:
  • The Jaggis are infamous for harassing larger monsters to no avail.
  • The Great Jaggi, the first large monster that the player faces in the third- and fourth-generation games. The "R.I.P. Great Jaggi ;_;" video shows a G Rank Great Jaggi falling into a Pitfall Trap and then getting destroyed by four Gunlance users and Barrel Bomb L+'s in less than 10 seconds. In 4 and 4 Ultimate, the Great Jaggi serves as cannon fodder for the training quests. The Great Jaggi does not appear in Generations^note Now replaced with the Great Maccao, leading to jokes about having hunted the poor sap to extinction.
  • As of 4 Ultimate, there's Plesioth, which has been reduced to a randomly-occuring Fishing Machine event and can be killed simply by catching it.
  • Gammoth has become this as of Sunbreak, being the only one of Generations's "Fated Four" to not make an appearance since its debut generation.
  • Kushala Daora has also become this in Sunbreak, being on the receiving end of The Worf Effect in two monster trailers (Furious Rajang and Gold Rathian) and getting crushed by Espinas in their turf war. What makes it worse is that Kushala Daora is an Elder Dragon, while none of the three monsters mentioned above are.
  • Rathalos and Rathian tend to get this treatment in some circles due to them getting frequently subjected to The Worf Effect as the series goes on.
  • Longsword users/"mains" have a collective reputation for being jerks in multiplayer hunts who frequently trip up their fellow Hunters with their wide-sweeping attacks, showing off and pretending to be anime-style samurai while preventing anybody else (that uses a Blademaster weapon, anyway) from getting anything done. Even though there are other weapons that can disrupt other Hunters (Greatsword's powered wide slash, Lance's charge, Bowgun barrages particularly with Pierce Shots), there are many Longsword users who do use their weapons responsibly with multiplayer-friendly positioning and playstyle, and later games introduce the Flinch Free skill that eliminates minor knockback including from teammates, it doesn't stop Longsword users from having that tryhard reputation.
• Memetic Molester:
  • Khezu and Gigginox. The sheer amount of Rule 34 that features one or both of the two monsters is somewhere between impressive and horrifying. Hell, Khezu even reproduces by grabbing a monster by surprise and laying eggs in it before the young hatch and eat them from the inside!
  • Due to his notable difficulty, there's no shortage of jokes about Rajang wanting to shove his...er..."coconut gun" up the asses of new Hunters. These players tend to use the catchphrase "Hot Rajang Dick" (itself a variant of the "Hot Monkey Dick" meme) to describe their difficulties with the monster.
  • Seregios is this in some circles, mainly due to its tendency to show up uninvited and because curing the bleeding status requires bending over. The fact that its Establishing Character Moment involves invading a wounded mother Rathian's nest does nothing to help.
  • The Gunlance is a very pointy weapon with a hole in the end. that can unleash a big, white, hot, and VERY LOUD explosion called the Wyvern's Fire, which deals splash damage. It also has to wait a while to use it again, and the animation for trying to use the Wyvern's Fire while it's on cooldown involves shaking the business end of the weapon limply. Thus, the weapon (and the people who play it) are seen as the Lance's louder, much more phallic cousin.
  • As of Iceborne, Fatalis has gotten shades of this, courtesy of its somewhat...suggestive pin attack.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • GOTCHA BITCH!
  • wen i fite aktor? ^ExplanationFrom MHF2's Gamefaqs board, someone asked (with their lackluster grasp of English) when they can fight an Akantor. Since then it's been posted there as a troll topic/shitpost in virtually every game-specific MH board.
  • NIBELSNARF^ExplanationNibelsnarf's name is infamous among the fanbase due to how comical and nonthreatening it sounds, especially concerning the nature of the monster. Some fans and even the wiki have used it as a Sound-Effect Bleep for obscene posts due to its notoriety.
  • G.I. 'Jho.^ExplanationA common and popular Fan Nickname for Deviljho.
  • Hipcheck!^ExplanationPlesioth's hipcheck attack is notorious for having a disproportionately large hitbox, allowing it to smack the player even if they aren't touching any part of the Plesioth's body.
  • Desire Sensor^ExplanationTrying to obtain the more rare monster items can take tens or even hundreds of tries to get just one of, which has led players to swear that the games have some sort of "desire sensor". It's so notorious that Capcom even sold official T-shirts with the label "Desire Sensor Begone!"◊
  • For Japanese players, "Nice ROMAN!"^Explanation"Roman Hunting", a flashy style of exhibition gaming in Monster Hunter. "Roman" is a Japanese loanword for "Romantic". It's essentially the Japanese version of "GOTCHA BITCH!"
  • Amongst North American and European fans, 4 Ultimate's release date of February 13, 2015, the day before Valentine's Day, spawned a number of jokes about people (especially those in relationships) having to choose between Monster Hunter or their significant others. Some instead plan on a third option: Playing Monster Hunter with their lovers.
  • The Argosy Captain's and Neko (Means Cat)'s frequent use of Gratuitous Nihongo. "Nihongo" means "Japanese language"!^ExplanationIn 3 Ultimate, these two characters have a habit of peppering their (English-language) sentences with Japanese in place of some English words.
  • Clawgrip^ExplanationOn the PSP games, the player moves around using the analog nub, and all camera control is done with the D-pad and the L button, meaning that character movement and camera control are handled by the same hand. This forces players to use their thumb on the nub and their index finger on the D-pad, resulting in the infamous and awkward "claw grip". May have become an Ascended Meme come the fourth generation of games, when Hori produced a special Circle Pad attachment specifically for the 3DS Monster Hunter games that places the second Circle Pad just below the L button rather than to the right of the face buttons, allowing players to once again play clawgrip-style.
  • "Je suis monté!"^ExplanationRough translation: "I climbed up!" The Insect Glaive appears to be a popular weapon within the French Monster Hunter community, leading to this default "Mounting" chat message getting spammed online when said players manage to mount a monster. It quickly became popular in the Western community before long.
  • "How many honeys you got?"^ExplanationAnswer: "Never enough." Honey is a valuable item in the series, as it is used for many important health and powerup item combinations. Naturally, it tends to get used up very quickly by dedicated Hunters.
  • Kyu! Kyu! Kyu! Nya~! ^ExplanationMonster Hunter Freedom Unite allows players to install game data to the memory stick in order to improve loading times. While the data is being installed, a dancing Felyne (with more appearing later) makes squeaking sounds and meows in time with the music. People have found this cute and made parody videos with other characters doing the dance.
  • #MHXForTheWest^ExplanationA hashtag used on social media by many fans yearning for a Western release of X. Just four months after the game's Japanese release in November 2015, fans finally got their wish when a Nintendo Direct announced the game as Monster Hunter Generations. #MHXXForTheWest naturally followed suit.
  • JhoJho's◊ Bizarre Adventure^ExplanationFanart of Deviljho as Jotaro and Brachydios as DIO is popular among the fanbase.
  • Khezu's Theme ^ExplanationKhezu's "theme" is... no music at all. This leads to extended music videos consisting of no sound, or jokes that Khezu's theme plays at a time code after the video ends or when you click the pause button. Others joke that it's a Suspiciously Similar Song of "4'33"".
  • "When are we getting Monster Hunter XXX?" ^ExplanationA joke based on the updated version of Generations being called XX in Japan. Cue various Pornographic jokes and puns. Doesn't help that one prominent MHXX database has said name as part of its URL.
  • "Akantor and Ukanlos should be Elder Dragons'' ^ExplanationBoth of these monsters hold the distinction for being flying wyverns...that don't fly, that can't be captured. They're also both Final Boss monsters.
  • White/Old Fatalis and hot fish^ExplanationOld Fatalis's theme is infamous for misheard lyrics involving "hot fish" and attempts to eat it.
  • Do Wyverians lay eggs?^Explanation Twitter users by the DepravedVile & AEGMaigen ended up causing minor discourse about whether Ena from Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin can lay eggs. This discourse caught the attention of a Monster Hunter researcher called BannedLagiacrus who also made a tweet posted a tweet where they say that they are not sure if Wyverians lay eggs or not. This lead to a chain of people asking the same thing, leading to a lot of egg-related fanart about the question and in general.
  • Monster Hunter World added English quotes rather than Hunters Speaking Simlish. People repeated the quotes so much.
  • "WELCOME to PIECES!"^ExplanationOne voice clip sounds like someone is yelling "WELCOME to PIECES!" or "Pueblo to Pieces!" And it always ends up being spammed whenever somebody has that voice as their hunter's.
  • AOUGH OUGH OGH OGH OGH OGH^ExplanationA meme that came from a dream of one user about a trend of people on Twitter "ratio"-ing others by posting a render of the Great Jaggi and typing out the onomatopoeia of its roar. Fans eventually decided to embrace the trend for real.
• Memetic Troll:
  • Plesioth. Fight him in the water? Well, it's water. Fight him on land? Hipchecks, hipchecks everywhere! In fact, you can type "hipcheck" into a Google image search or YouTube search and you're guaranteed to get Plesioth-related results on the first page.
  • Rathalos, whose idea of combat is flying around for minutes at a time just to run down the quest timer, i.e. the Rathalos World Tour.
  • The -prey series of Bird Wyverns, who love to disrupt your attacks and ruin the egg delivery quests.
  • Congala, who treats nature as their toilet.
  • The High Questrix, who loves telling you that you're going to fail. The Arena Bambina is even worse.
  • So you're just going around on the latest High Rank quest and — god damn it, Deviljho!
  • The RNG, otherwise known as the Desire Sensor. "Oh look, I cut off the monster's tail, let me carve it so I can get the tail I need for this wea—" <monster> Scale obtained. Quest abandoned.
  • The most feared monster isn't the Rathalos, or the Deviljho, or the Gogmazios... it's the all-deflecting Konchu.
  • Huh? Was that a B-52 that just carpet-bombed you and put an abrupt stop to your hunt? Nope, it was just a Bazelgeuse who heard you having fun.
• Moe: The Meowstress in Generations, a short and adorable Wyverian girl who scouts Palicoes for you and can't help but speak in rhymes. Generations Ultimate takes it up to eleven with her younger sister, the Mewstress, who rambles enthusiastically about Horns Coins, refers to Armor Fusion as "armor smooshing", and can often be seen drawing in some sort of sketchbook.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The iconic horn that plays when you and your hunting team depart on a multiplayer quest.
  • The tearing sound when you finally cut off a monster's tail, which is often used for nasty attacks and prized as a source of rare materials, tends to be very satisfying.
  • The meowing sounds the Felynes make. Subverted if you hear it coming from a Melynx instead.
  • The "SO TASTY!" clip that plays when you successfully cook a Well-Done Steak with the BBQ Spit, or cook one from the last Raw Steak on a Double BBQ Spit. And the clip is appropiately dubbed into each of the game's available language versions.
  • The sound of a monster crying in pain as it tries to retreat away from the area, signifying that it's almost dead.
  • The "Quest Complete!" jingle; very satisfying, especially if you've just defeated a very durable or very painful boss.
  • The unique fanfare that plays when you uncover a Rustshard, Battered Weapon, or a high-grade Talisman, or when a Hunters for Hire team comes back with a "Big Success", the latter of which is accompanied by the team of Hunters cheering in unison.
  • Inverted with the music stopping when you kill or capture a large monster outside of a quest to slay it or as part of a quest to defeat multiple monsters^note Unless there is another large monster in the area, in which case the music keeps going, or the monster is Khezu, who has no BGM to begin with. A Most Wonderful Lack of Sound, if you will.
  • The sound of the Palicoes' support horns, especially if it's coming from a Healing Forte Palico and you need that health recovery right now.
  • The sound that plays when a Wystone is done charging.
  • The distinct deep crashing sound that your weapon makes when you hit a monster's weakest section.
  • The "DING!" of an impact-based weapon hitting the monster's head. Which can happen in rapid succession if you're playing as a Prowler with a blunt-type weapon and the Piercing Boomerangs buff.
  • The sound of a monster sleeping, which means the perfect opportunity to put down some Barrel Bombs or lay down a Great Sword charged swing or Charge Blade Super AED for massive damage. Whatever your choice, the sound your attack makes will almost always be followed up with the "Quest Complete!" jingle and the monster's death cries.
  • The distinct whooshing sound that signals a successful Insta-Evade.
  • The high-pitched squeal of a dying Vespoid/Hornetaur/Bnahabra, signifying that you managed to kill them without splattering them and can loot their valuable carves.
  • The angry meowing of your Prowler as they go into Felyne Fury Mode. It paints the idea that whoever they're hunting picked on the wrong cat to bully today.

N-R

• Narm Charm:
  • The Tigerstripe Zamtrios. Inflates a lot more often than basic Zamtrios, but what humor can be derived out of that tends to disappate for many players as they realize to their horror it now has a few new tricks up its sleeve to take advantage of its inflated form, including a very damaging Ground Pound attack.
  • Deviljho is a Brute Wyvern that looks like...a giant pickle. However, it has a very nasty tendency to show up on your hunts uninvited, and will seriously mess you up upon doing so. When you can wipe out entire ecosystems with your massive appetite for flesh, there's a reason everything should fear you, even though you look like an oversized burger topping on legs.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • Congalala, a monkey-like beast that weaponizes farts and literal crap. Okay yes, Hunters obtain Dung as items and make them into Dung Bombs, but Congalalas make feces-tossing one of their Signature Moves.
  • Pariapuria, a monster that primarily attacks by vomiting profusely.
  • Shogun Ceanataur blasts you using its urine. You thought that cannon attack was water? Our condolences.
• Nightmare Retardant:
  • Alatreon is an Elder Dragon with world-shatteringly potent elemental abilities. However, it can be somewhat hard to take it seriously once you look at it, as it has a comically fat tail and what appears to be a purple pompadour made from its horns.
  • The Frenzy Virus is hyped up to be something horrible if it infects you...yet the worst it does is stop your natural health regeneration (i.e. the red part of your Life Meter being recovered over time). If anything, it's a case of Cursed with Awesome, as recovering out of it gives you Attack and Affinity boosts.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Najarala's scales attack is actually very similar to an attack used by the Brute Wyvern Gear Rex in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker's Monster Hunter Crossover missions.
  • Monster Hunter Stories involves playing as a subclass of Hunters called "Riders", who can tame, befriend, and ride monsters into combat. At first, this only seems like an Ascended Meme of some sort given the immense amount of fan art involving riding Kut-Kus and Raths, until you realize that one of the staple weapons since the series' beginning happens to be a Lance called the "Dragon Rider Spear", which is described in its flavor text to be the weapon of choice for mercenaries who specialize in the secret art of Dragon Riding, a potentially dangerous practice which allows them to use wyverns as mounts. The latter issue is even brought up in the Monster Hunter Stories: Ride On anime.
  • Believe it or not, Zinogre wasn't the first main series monster to be included in Frontier after its debut; that distinction belongs to Akantor and Tigrex.
  • Generations wasn't the first game to incorporate Hunting Styles in its arsenal; that distinction goes to Frontier and its 2010 update, which incorporated the Skill Rank system and allowed hunters to specialize in one of three hunting styles for their chosen weapon. Unlike Generations, these hunting styles did not change the weapon's moveset drastically, instead adding one or two new moves and / or altering one or more of the default motions on top of buffing the player's stats to correspond with the style. Frontier Z would later get a more Generations-esque Hunting Style update in the form of "Extreme Style".
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • Quests with "Unstable" environments, especially on High Rank and above, otherwise known as "pray that the intruder at least is a Velocidrome or Great Maccao and not something like Deviljho or Apex Rajang". And yes, the latter two can and will intrude even on relatively easy High and G Rank quests, which only amps up the soil-your-waist-armor factor.
  • When you get to high rank, Bazelguese will appear everywhere. It will then announce it entered and drop bombs on you.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story:
  • The Monster Hunter world is filled with robust wildlife with unique traits, various habitats, and lots of locales, many of which aren't even visited. Looking at the quest descriptions can paint a pretty good picture of the type of society the world is, and how the hunters affect them. There are also various sentient races that aren't monsters, like Wyverians, Felynes, Melynxes, and Shakalakas. There are even what are presumably maps of the world at the base camps in some locations. Even the weapons and armors have colorful descriptions, especially in regards to the origins of the weapons or the cultures they come from. But go on any forum and 99.9% of what you'll see is how to fight a monster, what equipment to use, or where to get what material. All ANYBODY cares about is the gameplay. It's even more apparent with Monster Hunter 4, which was announced to have a greater emphasis on story with the player character being part of a travelling caravan that has various colorful characters. This didn't stop western players from importing Japanese copies and not caring a bit about not being able to read one bit of the text.
  • When Fan Translations of Generations and Generations Ultimate were released, only important interface elements were translated; NPC dialogue was completely left out.
• Periphery Demographic: The series, despite being PvE games, has a fair share of competitive players who compete for the quickest monster kills, either through leaderboards or in VS formats. Capcom has been encouraging it with officially-sponsored live competitions for World but it's certainly not something they market the games for, at least in the West.
• Player Punch: In 4 Ultimate, a High-Rank quest to capture a Rathian ends in the Seregios chasing her away, resulting in a scripted quest failure. This has angered many players who went through a good deal of prep work for the quest only to have their efforts wasted. Sure, the Caravaneer and the Guild compensate you for your efforts, but all you get is 7000 zenny, a few Mega Potions, and some common Rathian parts like the Rathian Scale+; you don't get any rare Rathian drops like the Rathian Plate or Rathian Ruby, and any post-completion rewards you would've gotten from breaking her parts are nullified.
• Polished Port:
  • The Wii U port of 3 Ultimate gives the graphics a beautiful HD treatment and allows for online multiplayer unlike the 3DS version, on top of even being compatible with the 3DS version for local multiplayer. This view is mostly held in the West where console gaming is more popular, while in Japan this port is seen as So Okay, It's Average at best due to MonHun being primarily seen as a handheld series.
  • While the Switch port of Generations Ultimate (admittedly, it's only 2/3 port for non-Japanese regions) does have to sacrifice 3DS-specific functions such as StreetPass (much like 3 Ultimate on Wii U) and the customizable second-screen interface, everything looks much better on it with the 720p minimum resolution, it controls better compared to on a 3DS (especially the New 3DS and New 2DS), and when in tabletop or TV mode you get your choice of whatever Switch-compatible controller you want.
• Popular with Furries: You would not believe how much the furry fandom loves the games, if only because of the monsters, since some of them bear the characteristics of real animals while most others are wyverns and dragons of varying sizes and shapes]]. There's also the Felyne/Palico race and "Prowler" weapon class, and now the rideable Palamutes, either or both of which singlehandedly sell the games to some furries.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Various buffs to the Sword & Shield throughout the series have made it a much better offensive weapon that can hold its own in solo hunts, not just a support weapon. 4 adds a backhop charge, Generations adds the temporary buff Oils, a variety of powerful Hunter Arts (with Round Force in particular being hailed as one of the best in the game), and gives it the only jumping Adept Insta-Move allowing for some high-damage mounting-capable attacks, and Generations Ultimate gives it the Chaos Oil Hunter Art that applies all four Oils at the same time.

S

• Salvaged Gameplay Mechanic:
  • Monster Hunter 4 introduces mounting, in which the player can use aerial attacks to knock down a monster and climb on top of it, then hack away at it with the carving knife until it topples over. Unfortunately, if another player attacks the mounted monster, the one who's mounting has a high chance to be knocked off. Monster Hunter Generations makes it so that hitting a mounted monster not only doesn't knock off the player riding it, it slightly increases the mounting gauge, giving those teammates another option for something to do while waiting for the mounting minigame to complete.
  • Once you set a trap, you can't place another one until either a monster triggers it or it self-destructs, the latter of which takes many minutes to happen. Many players have wanted to throw their devices at the nearest wall because they placed a trap down only for the monster they're trying to ensnare to move to another area. This is especially problematic in capture quests, even moreso if you're hunting solo. Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate lets players dismantle any traps they've placed by walking on top of the trap and pressing a button; while you won't get the trap back, you can at least set a new one down without having to wait so long.
  • The aiming controls for Gunner weapons in the "classic" (pre-fifth gen) games are known for being terrible; you can only move the cursor in eight directions and it's really difficult to finely adjust the cursor speed. Neither aiming mode is ideal: First-person aiming locks you in place and third-person "quick" aiming doesn't have strafing, so if you want to move horizontally you have to turn yourself and the camera away from your target. It wasn't until Monster Hunter: World that Gunner weapons were finally given more refined aiming controls more akin to Third-Person Shooters. The Nintendo Switch version of Monster Hunter: Rise additionally introduces the option to use motion controls a la Splatoon.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Has enough examples to warrant its own page.
• Scrappy Weapon: This trope tends to rollercoaster as a weapon that may be a Scrappy Weapon for some monsters may be the optimal weapon for others, and additionally certain weapons fluctuate in preference depending on whether you're hunting solo or with allies:
  • Sword & Shield is widely regarded as a poor choice for solo hunts. Although S&S users have generally high elemental or status ratings on their weapons, amazing mobility compared to other melee classes, a shield for blocking attacks (including those ever-annoying flashes and roars), and can use items without sheathing (making them excellent support in multiplayer), the damage-per-second and reach leave much to be desired. And unlike most other classes, the S&S class doesn't have a hard-hitting special attack or Super Mode. However, Capcom has slowly been granting the S&S much needed improvements starting from 4U, including its own charged heavy slash. Generations furthers this by not only giving it Roundforce, a wide-ranged Hunting Art that has total invulnerability, but also introduces a new consumable item only usable by S&S users that vastly improves the weapon's capabilities, albeit temporarily.
  • The Long Sword weapon class in 4U tends to be highly reviled in group play. In the eyes of fans, while using kenjutsu on monsters and pretending to be Sephiroth can be very cool, accidentally hitting your teammates and interrupting their actions is most assuredly not. This has gotten to the point where the Long Sword is generally considered a "noob weapon", for better or for worse. It doesn't help that the Long Sword doesn't have any worthwhile benefits to make up for it like the other weapons with wide reaches.^note The Charge Blade can stun monsters and drain their stamina with Impact Phials, the Insect Glaive can mount monsters very easily with its pole vault, the Switch Axe can break the hardest parts of the monster thanks to sword mode having unblockable attacks, and the Hunting Horn's various songs make it perfect for supporting others. Compunding matters is that once the Spirit Gauge reaches red, it's not possible to reset it with Spirit Slashes, and the gauge resets to base after the timer runs out. Later games would thankfully rectify some of these issues. From Generations onward the Spirit Gauge will simply drop one level upon emptying rather than fully draining as well as allowing a successful Spirit Combo to reset a red Spirit's timer, making it much easier to maintain. World would then introduce the Foresight Slash (an enhanced Fade Slash that, if used to evade an attack, would allow a follow-up combo that instantly levels up the Spirit Gauge) and the Spirit Helmbreaker (a thrust followed by a powerful leaping downward slash that hits multiple times at the cost of one level of the Spirit Gauge). A Long Sword user with good knowledge and timing on a monster's patterns can become an untouchable Glass Cannon that carves the monster to ribbons with relentless slashes... while still frequently tripping their teammates.
  • In multiplayer hunts, Pellet Shots for Bowguns are widely despised by Blademaster players, due to their cone of damage being so wide that they have a bad tendency to constantly pelt other players trying to melee the monster. The only times they're acceptable is if one is fighting in an all-Gunner team or the monster is so large that one can use them without fear of hitting others (such as Akantor or Ukanlos), but otherwise, one is strongly advised to use Normal, elemental, and Pierce shots instead.
  • Other multiplayer-specific candidates are melee weapons with long sweeping reaches, since they tend to be loathed for the same reasons as Pellet Shots due to the knockback and tripping when accidentally hitting other players, the usual culprits being the Long Sword, Insect Glaive, Switch Axe (in axe form), Charge Blade (in axe form) and Hunting Horn (otherwise a stellar support class due to its Area of Effect buffs and healing). Unless the monster is big enough that everyone can spread out to avoid hitting each other, it is hard to avoid interrupting other players' combos with these weapons.
  • Yet another multiplayer-specific candidate is the Lance. One of its attacks is a Charged Attack in which the user sprints forward until either their stamina is depleted or they get knocked out of the attack by something or someone else, and if their weapon makes contact with the monster, it will shred through its health with a flurry of hits. The problem is is that this weapon also knocks down any Hunters who happen to be in the way (seeing the pattern here?). If you encounter a Lance user in a public lobby, chances are they will use their charge irreponsibly, becoming a human Bullfango who knocks over other Hunters, which can prolong the fight and possibly even indirectly lead to a quest failure. While Longsword spam is generally only a problem for other melee Hunters, Lance users can be problematic for ranged players as well, as charge Lancers usually space themselves from the monster first so they can build up charge, meaning you could be using Crouching Fire (as a Heavy Bowgun user) to machinegun the monster in first-person view and then get knocked over by a Lance user who you didn't see rushing into you from behind. Last but not least is the Griefer potential of this weapon; a Lance user could theoretically just intentionally charge into their teammates over and over, either because of a grudge or because they think ruining other players' fun is funny.
  • Rusted Kushala Daora weapons in 4 Ultimate — made possible due to the addition of Rusted Kushala Daora drops instead of just basic KD ones — are often ignored because despite their extremely high raw damage and natural purple Sharpness, they all have terrible negative Affinity.
  • Aside from the Hellblade weapons, a lot of Deviant weapons are ignored because, despite a slight increase in Hunter Art gauge build, many of them are outclassed by their standard forms or are much harder to upgrade for a minimal increase in element, Sharpness, etc. Unlike most other weapons, Deviant weapons have a fixed 15 upgrades, and each level requires a ticket specific to it which can greatly prolong the process of fully upgrading such a weapon; the same issue applies with Deviant armor as well, which is less suited for mix-and-match sets due to needing the full set to trigger their unique skills while having no other armor skills.
  • Gunlance in Generations gained this perception. A significant nerf to its motion values was bad enough, but then the Gunlance gained a heat gauge mechanic that often does more harm than good. Combine this with underwhelming Hunter Arts and significant flaws in armor sets^note The Seltas armor and Star Rook armor, two of the best Gunlance armor sets, have no slots, and the Star Rook armor did not return in Ultimate, and the Gunlance quickly became seen as a low-tier weapon. Ultimate provided some boons in Valor Style, improvements to the Seltas X set ^note Guard +1 and two slots, and the Rustrazor set, but even then it's still considered low-tier.
  • Element Phial Charge Blades, compared to their Impact counterparts. Impact phials can stun, exhaust, and deal consistent damage to any part of the monster, and can be boosted by the Artillery skill. Element phials deal element damage. Additionally, the Super Amped Element Discharge for Impact is a small circle that strikes instantly, while the SAED for Element is a wide fan shape with a slight delay, so not all the attacks might hit. Lastly, the majority of Element CBs have lower raw than Impact CBs, and the Element CBs that do have high raw ^note like Colossus's Edge and Oppressor's Charge Blade often have low or below-average elemental power. Subverted in Sunbreak, which gives several skills that allow Element Phials to reach up to five times the damage of Impact against particular monsters, making it the generally accepted meta for Charge Blade.
  • Sleep weapons are powerful in solo play due to allowing the player to ambush a sleeping monster for a triple-damage multiplier on the hit that wakes up the monster, either with a powerful charged attack or Barrel Bombs. However, they're very frustrating to use in multiplayer (online with random players, in particular) since you need to make sure everyone else involved stops attacking the monster, and those who don't understand how sleep ambushes work may hit the monster with an incredibly weak attack thus wasting a chance to cut time off of the hunt.
• The Scrappy: Most of the main series Piscine Wyvern-type large monsters tend to get it pretty bad from the fans for different reasons. People hate Jyuratodus because they think its design is bland and ugly, they hate the World variant of Lavasioth for being a pain in the behind, and they hate Plesioth (and Cephadrome to an extent) for being extremely obnoxious. The only real exception to the rule is Beotodus, since its snow shark design is appealing to some people, and it serves as a fair Warm-Up Boss to Iceborne's Master Rank.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Although each successive generation of games has gotten easier due to adding more quality-of-life features, Generations and Generations Ultimate in particular are notable being considerably easier than past games. The biggest source of reduced difficulty comes from the large number of ways to simply evade enemy attacks: Adept Style's and Bombing Prowler's Insta-Evade, Valor Style's Sheathing Stance, Prowler's Emergency Retreat, and various Hunter Arts such as Absolute Evasion, Absolute Readiness, and Sword & Shield's Round Force.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: Most of the early game of each version tends to consist of dull "collect gatherables or monster carves" quests and small monster hunting quests. It takes a few hours to start beating up the big monstrosities that the series is well-known for.
• Spiritual Adaptation: What with its "climb on a monster and stab it repeatedly" mechanic, eternal sidekick in the main member of a race of sidekicks, and its story centered around a dragon that threatens the world, Monster Hunter 4 is a pretty good remake of Dragon's Dogma.
• Squick:
  • The most common reaction to Khezu and its cousin Gigginox. Even the Japanese title of Gigginox translates to "creepy".
  • Conga and its variants, who basically attack using various forms of Fartillery and Dung Fu.
• "Stop Having Fun" Guys:
  • Complaining about the difficulty of monsters in later-gen games, especially 1st- and 2nd-gen monsters that got reintroduced and nerfed in 3rd- 4th-gen games (such as Plesioth), sometimes illicits mockery from veteran players who will tell you that back in their day, the monster you're fighting was much worse. Heaven forbid you have any issue about so and so monster even if it's still legitimately That One Boss.
  • Some players will give you the stink eye if you pick a less effective weapon against a particular monster. Even if it's out of not knowing that it's a bad weapon or why, you'll probably get lambasted for not using guides.
  • Heaven forbid you go hunt with friends who are dedicated to the game, locally or online, and pick quests that are not "key quests" (quests that must be cleared to trigger Urgent Quests), even if they're large monster quests. You're excused if you're trying to farm a particular monster for parts and the quest you pick is easier to farm from than key quests, or if it's an endgame quest, but other than that you'll be seen as wasting everyone's time.
  • Walking into a room as a Prowler can easily generate salt and, at best, requests to switch back to Hunter mode, simply because Prowlers aren't exactly DPS-type "weapons", even though they can still pull their weight in battle with the right builds and have several advantages over Hunters to make up for their weaknesses (the ability to mix and match status ailment negation skills at will, mid-range attacks that can inflict consistent damage, immunity to cold, heat, and stench, Support Moves that can cure any status ailment, even Frenzy, for cheap, and never worrying about item management). The harassment of Prowler players got to a point where a big-name MonHun guide creator had to step in and address the issue.
  • Planning to do a charm farming run in Generations Ultimate^note "URGENT: COAL MINERS NEEDED" HR 13+ event quest, equip a gunner weapon and bring traps, stunlock and shoot the Brachydios to death, then end via subquest for 2-4 rows of charms? Be prepared to be kicked from rooms a lot. Even if you have the appropriate type of equipment, it's still common to get kicked for no stated reason. It's understandable that people want to earn lots of charms and zenny and make the most of their time, but a lot of charm farm room hosts seem to have this attitude that you don't deserve to be in their room if you're not doing the quest and its associated prep with TAS-level speed. This is somewhat alleviated if you can find an "any weapon"/"freestyle" charm farm room, since hosts of those rooms tend to be less hardass than HBG-only rooms.
  • As the western fanbase of the game grows, so too does the number of players that demand everyone use only attack-increasing skills and absolutely nothing else. While Defense-increasing and Health-increasing skills in particular tend to get the brunt of it, Even incredibly useful utility skills such as Earplugs, Windproof, and Tremor Res, which prevent the player from being staggered or stunlocked by attacks and abilities meant purely to waste time, are increasingly derided. If your skill set doesn't include Critical Eye, Attack Up, Handicraft, or skills deemed "core" to the weapon (Evade Extender for Switchaxe, Focus for Greatsword), then you can expect to be booted from many a multiplayer room.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The Snowy Mountains battle theme in 2 is suspiciously similar to "The Chase" from Steam Boy.
• Sweet Dreams Fuel:
  • Several maps have small areas that are basically just Felyne bases, with the only monsters being Felynes and non-hostile Melynxes, neither of which you could damage. Often these areas contain a few useful items for you to grab freely, and in 4 and 4 Ultimate, houses a Palico which you can hire.
  • As scary as the Sunken Hollow is to arachnophobes due to the massive cobwebs, seeing Felynes and Melynxes at work in the webbed-up areas helps take some of the edge off. Even a Melynx stealing your last Antidote or Nulberry is absolutely adorable in contrast to the hanging displays of murdered Gypceros in Area 5.
  • Occasionally in 4, you'll find a wild Poogie during Expeditions. Sometimes, picking it up causes it to crawl onto you affectionately before taking off.
  • The Rath-of-Meow Team Attack. Watching your Palicoes hop into a miniature tank to shoot Rathalos-style fireballs at enemies is all kinds of Badass Adorable.
  • The existence of Yukumo Village. It's a mountainous village home to some amazing natural hot springs, with relaxing BGM to boot.
  • Moofahs in Generations. You can pet the adult ones until hearts float over them, and when you finish petting one, you kiss it on the nose. You can also take in a baby Moofah as a pet, and when you save by going to bed, it will sleep next to you! Poogies in other villages do the same if they're under your ownership.

T

• Take That, Scrappy!:
  • The Plesioth, notorious for its broken-hitbox hip check, has been reduced to part of a net fishing minigame in 4, and it even dies without a fight upon being landed on the wharf.
  • Given how irritating Kushala Daora can be to hunt in some games, its Butt-Monkey status in Sunbreak can be seen as this.
• Tear Jerker: Has its own page.
• That One Achievement:
  • The "Crown" awards are all notorious Last Lousy Points. If you defeat a monster that's significantly larger or smaller than normal, its size is recorded with a gold crown or a silver crown for a remarkably large specimen. These achievements require you to do this for every large monster whose size isn't constant. They combine Last Lousy Point and Luck-Based Mission to the extreme. While there are some DLC quests that are guaranteed to have gold-crown sized monsters, you're out of luck for the rest. And this list includes Deviants, Rare Species, and several Elder Dragons. Many Hunters give up before they get either of these awards. 4 Ultimate onwards at least accepts silver crowns for the "large" crown award.
  • Moofah Cheese Fondue, Simmered Goldendrome, and Frozen Meatball in Generations require you to contribute 3,000 village points to Bherna Village, Kokoto Village, and Pokke Village, respectively. Super Sprout Rice (for Yukumo Village) is easy to get thanks to Coal Hearted. The others aren't so lucky. After completing all the requests for the other villages, you'll be at around 1,500 for Bherna and 2,000 for the other two. Most request quests give 15 village points on a repeat, while the more lucrative quests are harder and less time-efficient. Prepare for a lot of grinding. Ultimate alleviates this through the addition of more, higher-reward quests.
• That One Attack: See here.
• That One Boss: See here.
• That One Component:
  • Flagship monsters tend to drop gemstones which are necessary to upgrade weapons into their most powerful forms. However, said items are exceedingly rare, generally having no more than a 3% chance of being acquired by carving the monster's body, or 4% by completing certain quests.
  • You can give anyone who has fully-upgraded Chaotic Gore Magala equipment horror flashbacks by mentioning Contrary Scales. They're often required for the final upgrade of each piece of Chaotic Gore Magala equipment, but have abysmally low drop rates and it can take dozens of hunts just to get one Contary Scale. Somewhat mitigated in Rise: Sunbreak, where you can buy Contary Scales as of a post-launch update, although it is pretty expensive at 500 Investigation Coins each.
  • Getting the Glavenus tail is a total bitch to do. For one, it's only cuttable when it's orange hot with fire, meaning you have to get in close to recieve some massive damage. That's not the worst of it, however. Since the tail makes up for a majority of the monster's more dangerous moves and is very hard to reach due to the height, it requires massive amounts of farming. Hope you like fighting Glavenuses!
• That One Level: Has its own page.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Mizutsune's claws are notoriously difficult to break. They have a tiny hitbox that covers the forearm, not the claw, so attacking the claws themselves does nothing. The claw is the toughest part of Mizutsune's body and will deflect attacks at lower Sharpness, so while you know you're hitting the right part, you're still bouncing off constantly and not doing much damage. Mizutsune is a highly mobile monster, so you're going to be chasing it trying to hit that one part. And for the subquest to count, you need to break both of the claws.
  • Generations Ultimate introduces Armor Fusion, which lets you combine a "Base" armor with a "Visual" armor, giving it the function of the former and the appearance of the latter. (For example, you can make your armor take on the apperance of Rathalos armor, while having the defense, resistance, slots, and armor skills of Astalos armor.) Fusing head armor simply requires you to reach Village High Rank to access the Soaratorium Lab to unlock and perform Armor Fusion and Hub G Rank so that you can buy Armor Fusion materials from Mewstress. The other body categories of armor require defeating Ahtal-Ka, the Final Boss of Hub G Rank. Even then, you still cannot use Deviant armor as Visual Armor or Base Armor; to earn the privilege of fusing a Deviant monster's armor for either role, you have to beat the Deviant's EX version, which is not only the toughest version of that Deviant due to greatly amplified health and damage, being fought in a one-area map with no way back to camp without a Farcaster or fainting, and no supplies in the supply chest, but doesn't even award anything else unique.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Some older fans of Monster Hunter tend to feel this way about the gameplay additions in newer titles. Swimming and the new monsters in 3, elevation and Frenzy / Apex status in 4, Hunting Arts / Styles and the revamped weapon upgrading in Gen, the changes to the weapon mechanics over time... no change is safe from criticism, be it valid or otherwise.
  • World deviating from traditional MonHun fare even moreso than Generations, especially with its focus on open-world gameplay, has caused quite a stir from series traditionalists. Fans feel like Capcom is trying to market a totally different game as Monster Hunter to the West in an attempt to appeal to what Westerners consider a good game. It doesn't help that it's the first Monster Hunter game in a while to not be released on Nintendo platforms.
  • On a smaller note, some Hunting Horn mains were particularly upset that World did not bring back Double Notes from Generations, which were seen as a game-changer for Hunting Horn that encouraged aggressive play. World still has the Encore mechanic, but now requires using the Play action twice in succession, which eats up some extra time.
  • The Charge Blade was heavily modified from its original appearance in 4 in the transition to Generations. Not only was it impossible to activate Element Up mode via Sword mode, a Super Amped Element Discharge didn't have its characteristic Shockwave Stomp and ate up the aforementioned Element Up mode, rendering its once-proud Limit Break nearly useless and forcing Charge Blade mains to rely on regular Element Discharges, causing a ruckus amongst those who felt that their favorite weapon had been nerfed into the ground.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • The Primal Forest from 4 takes place around the skeletal remains of an absolutely humongous monster, and if the ribcage you can see in area 5 is of any indication, it seemed to be significantly larger than even the Dalamadur. The game never goes into any details about what the monster was, not even its name or appearance.
  • There are quite a few that can invoke this in Generations Ultimate:
    • The Dragon (Fatalis) X armor design from Freedom Unite does not appear as an alternative equipment, despite a DLC Fatalis quest that could've been used to get the armor tickets. Instead, the High Rank variant is used.
    • Despite appearing as a corpse in the Jurrasic Frontier, having Lao Shan Lung appearing, and supposely beaten by Nakarkos lorewise, Shen Gaoren does not appear in Generation Ultimate.
    • Monoblos doesn't appear, despite its skull still being used by Daimyo Hermitaur. Even the horn item does not refer to it at all.
    • Outside of Gold/Silver Raths and the Deviants and Variants, no subspecies are present. Azure Rathalos, however gets named dropped by the Kokoto Gal and on the design of the Hero of Kokoto Sword's shield.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The Frenzy Virus in 4 is a significant plot point that is explored in detail, along with monsters overcoming it to become Apex monsters in 4 Ultimate. So it is rather jarring when Generations introduces Hyper monsters without much explanation; while they do get special Hyper drops with some Flavor Text, and many quest clients do acknowledge the existence of Hypers, virtually no lore is given regarding why Hyper monsters suddenly showed up.

U-W

• Ugly Cute:
  • Yian Kut-Ku, with its oversized beak, large ears, and reptilian body, isn't your typical picture of cute. However, its bird-like sounds, funny run, its tendency to trip at the end of its charges, and overall silly appearance has endeared it to the fanbase. Even better, a DLC Event Quest allows you fight a Fun Size Kut-Ku that's a little under half the size of a standard one.
  • Nibelsnarf is a beady-eyed, stubby-legged, sand-burrowing monster that, despite having More Teeth than the Osmond Family, looks more goofy than threatening. Even its name is comical.
  • Chameleos is surprisingly cute for an Elder Dragon, thanks to its nonthreatening design with big beady eyes, making cute sounds, and having some funny movements. Just don't look at it when its mouth is open◊.
  • The Deviljhog costume, which makes your Poogie look like an adorable baby version of the hideous and nightmare-inducing Deviljho. Just don't ask why the costume sometimes comes with a sample of Deviljho Saliva.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley:
  • 4U's Little Miss Forge has an Animesque style that looks fine in-game, but does not mesh well with the very realistically rendered cutscenes.
  • Some Frontier event monsters fall into this category due to having eerily realistic proportions that clash with their otherwise cartoonish designs. The most infamous examples of this are the producer and director dressed respectively as a Congalala and a Gogomoa (very realistic faces that show little to no emotion combined with cartoonish movesets) and the Higanjima-themed Plesioth (polygonal humanoid body combined with a realistically rendered fish head and wyvern's animations), with comments complaining about how creepy they are taking up a good majority of YouTube videos that feature them.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • In 4 Ultimate, the Battlequarters has a Demolisher, a massive cannon that fires blasts of Dragon-elemental energy at a fixed point. It can be used to hunt the various monsters that appear in the Battlequarters, such as both types of Kushala Daora, Chameleos, Apex Tigrex, and Gogmazios. In Generations Ultimate, the Demolisher appears in the Fortress map...where only one monster, Lao-Shan Lung, is fought, and hunts that take place there involve the target gradually moving along a fixed path, meaning that once it passes the marked point where Demolisher shots land (and especially once the monster moves to Area 2), that weapon will not have any use for the remainder of the quest (whereas in 4 Ultimate, you can plausibly attack the monster with it a second time if the quest drags on long enough, often with less than 3 players present). Oddly enough, despite this, the Demolisher can be used again after a cooldown, and two Dense Marcoals are provided in the supply chest, yet the Dragonator in Area 2 can only be used once even though Lao-Shan Lung will hang around the barricade for the rest of the quest once it arrives there.^note Most likely, the second chance with the Demolisher is in case a clueless player deploys it way too early.
  • Another siege weapon problem in Generations Ultimate: The Forlorn Citadel, where Ahtal-Ka and Ahtal-Neset are fought, has a one-time Dragonator as well. However, it can only be used against Ahtal-Neset, which rarely ever comes within smashing range of the rather poorly-positioned Dragonator, so in practice nobody online ever uses it seriously.
  • While a number of features in Generations and Generations Ultimate not coming back for World can be explained by those features being thematic of those games (Hunting Styles and Hunter Arts in particular), a couple of absent features were lamented by many players:
    • Sword & Shield, Hunting Horn, and Bowgun players were disappointed that Oils, beamed notes, and Internal Ammo, respectively, were not carried over to World.
    • Prowlers are beloved in Generations and Generations Ultimate (except by speedrunners and others who favor big DPS) due to their ease of use and setup (less materials needed to make equipment, far less inventory management, able to get the Prowler equivalent of armor skills without having to research armor sets, etc.) and the Badass Adorable factor. Sadly, Prowlers did not return in World.
• Unfortunate Character Design: Gogmazios has glowing markings◊ on its chin that look like a sad face. This has led to it receiving the Fan Nickname "Gogsadios".
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Frontier exclusive Elder Dragon Inagami's background lore reveals that it used to co-exist peacefully with a village situated in its domain, only for that peace to be broken when the villagers exploited its powers to help their crops grow during a bad harvest season, causing it to destroy their village and develop a violent hatred towards humans. Its rage is framed as righteous anger triggered by the selfishness of the villagers, but it ultimately comes off as a melodramatic drama queen (or as close to one as a monster can get) who is too selfish to help innocent people stave off something as devestating as a famine. This in turn makes the villagers Unintentionally Sympathetic due to the fact that they just wanted to save themselves from a catastrophe that was beyond their control.
• Values Dissonance: Not much in the games themselves, but in the game mechanics instead in a meta-level, as the games until World assumed the people playing the games are either Japanese or at least East Asians. You only had three chances, shared with all the players in a mission, to finish a quest. This is done mostly to enforce teamplay and also to make the players more aware that any screw-up from their side can either reduce the monetary rewards or outright ruin a quest, and all the blame can be easily targeted against the offender(s). Keep in mind East Asian mentality normally enforce team-working more than other western countries, and any failure can ruin the job of their peers.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: When the designs for the Fated Four were released, many players thought that Gammoth was male and that Mizutsune was female. This turned out to be the opposite of what they expected. ^note  While the monsters aren't monogender, all the ones found in Generations are exclusively female and male, respectively.
• Vindicated by History:
  • A concept for an undead, two-headed Elder Dragon called the Crypt Hydra was initially planned to be in the first game, but the idea became scrapped after receiving poor reception from Japanese fans, who felt that a supernatural monster had no place in a semi-realistic game. However, many of these fans have retracted their previous beliefs about the monster after the second generation introduced fan-favorite Elder Dragons such as Kushula Daora who fit said bill, and continue to lament its removal to this day. Nakarkos seems to be a rework of the concept, though some fans still would like the original undead creature to be included in a later title.
  • A new monster brings that concept closer to reality in World. Vaal Hazak, an Elder Dragon of the Rotten Vale, not only looks like an undead beast (it isn't, but it is wearing a corpse), it also has an ability to suck out the life force of nearby Girros and then revive them as its undead minions.
  • Generations to an extent. A Vocal Minority of fans lamented that Generations didn't have enough content due to having less monsters (4U had 75 large monsters, Generations had 73) and no G Rank, but once World came out with an even smaller list (only 31 large monsters), another faction grew and started to appreciate Generations for not only having more monsters, but for the sheer variety of monsters within it. Many of World's monsters are, aside from series staples, mostly wyverns and dinosaurs, whereas Generations and 4U featured mammalian monsters and arthropod monsters, and even some such as the Ludroth and Nibelsnarf that were very distinctive. Some feel that World is a step back, but others point out that it has various room for improvement and that it is essentially a Soft Reboot due to featuring a new engine.
• The Woobie:
  • The Lagombi looks like a bumbling cross between a rabbit and a koala. When it's low on health, it turns its head to look back at you while it's limping away, as if it knows you're going to chase it down.
  • The Kecha Wacha is a very friendly-looking monster (until it's enraged), with playful mannerisms. Townsfolk usually ask you to hunt it because it sprayed watery goop at them. Killing the Kecha Wacha for this annoying but mostly harmless prank can feel like Disproportionate Retribution. When it's exhausted, it looks absolutely pitiful with its half-closed eyes.
  • Whitescruff, the meek and sad-looking Felyne in Cheeko Sands. He wants to defend the village from rampaging monsters but is too cowardly to even approach them. He hopes that, by watching you hunt big scary monsters, he can learn what courage feels like.
  • The Seltas whenever paired up with a Seltas Queen. The poor Seltas ends up getting used as a battering ram, a food source, and a projectile by the Seltas Queen, as if the Seltas is less of a mating partner and more of a tool for her to use.
  • Chaotic Gore Magala is stuck in a terrible amalgamation of Gore Magala and Shagaru Magala. It's constantly groaning in pain as you fight it, and its fight music sounds just as jumbled and unstable as the monster. Slaying it feels like a Mercy Kill.
  • Aptonoths, mostly due to being at the absolute bottom of the setting's food chain. Other herbivores will either fight back to an obnoxious degree (Even unprevoked!) or are quite swift. The worst an Aptonoth will do is give you one weak, ineffectual headbutt, and only if you're a hunter attacking their family, they won't even bother doing anything but flee if a large monster is attacking them. One wonders if, given enough of a shortage of edible plant life, the other herbivores in the setting wouldn't just switch to eating Aptonoths in order to survive.
  • From a meta-perspective, Chameleos. Though introduced in the same game as its Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors counterparts, Kushala Daora and Teostra, as time's gone on it has been pushed further and further from the limelight. Both Teostra and Kushala Daora have gotten related species both in the main game and in Frontier, while Chameleos lacks any relatives or stronger incarnations, and it also sat out the original version of Monster Hunter 4. Chameleos was passed over as well for Monster Hunter World at least on release, but to add insult to injury made Kushala Daora and Teostra's Turf War encounters end in draws (when the nature of both animals should mean Kushala Daora dominates every time), effectively rendering Chameleos obsolete.
  • Lao-Shan Lung, once you learn why some of them are bent on running over villages: they're trying to escape from Fatalis. Hunting one thus feels like punishing the poor sap for going with its survival instincts, or at least giving it a Mercy Kill. Compounding matters is that since it's an Elder Dragon, you can't just capture the monster; the only way to spare the monster is bring its health down past a certain threshold and let the timer run out (while making sure it doesn't destroy your barriers, of course).
• Woolseyism:
  • The subspecies of a monster in the Japanese versions usually just adds "subspecies" (亜種) to its name, but the localizations make their names more descriptive to add flavor. For instance, "Lagiacrus subspecies" (ラギアクルス亜種) thus becomes Ivory Lagiacrus due to its distinct white scales.
  • In the Japanese version of Tri, Leviathans were known as "sea dragon species", which would translate to Sea Wyvern and cause confusion with Piscine Wyverns, which share many habitats with Leviathans; furthermore, you can find them in more environments than just the sea, in the cases of Agnaktor and Nibelsnarf. Leviathan describes them more accurately as the class is composed of serpentine, fish-like creatures that typically inhabit liquids.
  • In Japan, both Wyverns of various types and Elder Dragons are labeled as "dragons", using different kanji for each that are pronounced the exact same way ("ryuu"). The kanji for Wyverns implies large reptilian beasts, while the kanji for Elders implies mystical creatures of great power. Because that sort of distinction is hard to convey in English using the same word for both, the "Wyvern"/"(Elder) Dragon" differentiation not conveys the same connotations for these different types of monsters but also ties in with the designs of many Flying Wyverns including Series Mascot Rathalos, although non-Elder wyverns have also been referred to as dragons rarely both in- and out-of universe.
  • In the localization for 4U, Felyne Comrades were renamed to Palicoes, a clever play on "Pal" and "Calico". The localization of Rise dubbed the Canyne companions "Palamutes", a play on "Pal" and "Malamute".
  • The "Frenzy Virus" was called the "Feral Wyvern Virus" in the Japanese version, a Non-Indicative Name on multiple levels.^note The monsters are all wild animals, so "feral" already applied, and it infects more than just wyverns—in fact, the first infected monster you encounter is the Fanged Beast Congalala. By contrast, Frenzy describes the violent, unpredictable behavior of infected monsters much more accurately.
  • Monsters that overcome the Frenzy Virus are known as "Extreme" monsters in the Japanese version, which seems like a case of Totally Radical to Westerners. The localizations instead refer to them as "Apex" monsters. As in, an apex predator.

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How come nobody sends me any exampawls?

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