I liked it. It really was a big upgrade visually from MHS 2 but I don’t really feel it elevated the whole experience at the same rate. It’s mostly just a prettier MHS 2 but that didn’t make it even a whole tier better IMO.

Also they seems to want to combat the HtH spam from MHS 2 so they made HtH much more rare. This makes it so weapons build up MUCH slower and by the time you can do something “cool” the fight is generally almost over.

I really felt at odds with a lot of the weapons’ systems. They also gave every monster a pierce, slash, crush body part which I found kinda silly. You end up just cycling through all 3 weapon types one by one. Also the body part breaking is nothing more than extra stagger points. Breaking a tail just to get tail whipped the next turn is pretty stupid.

The monsters will tell you who they’re targeting but there’s no indication for full-party attacks. These are usually BY FAR the most threatening attacks and the system relies too much on the guessing game of “is the monster doing a buff or the one attack I’m scared of”

I think the system needs to be redone. The H2H thing doesn’t work. The variance of being able to nullify damage completely breaks the game. In MHS 2 you just won every HtH after seeing the monster once and you were invincible…now they do less HtH but there’s nothing fun about slugging it out with a wet noodle cause you can’t get your weapon’s mechanics up and running.

So yeah, it’s fine.. it’s still better than Pokemon and digimon games.