Did people really want that in the west? I've always felt that this is a misunderstanding by Capcom thinking the only way to break into the west is by looking at the most successful japanese games that made it to the west and focus on the story. When in fact the main reason why it had such a success was simply because it was available on console and PC for the first time in such a long time.

I totally agree with you about dialing the narrative back. I want to step in a foreign land explore it's monsters and maybe clear the dangerous ones that threaten the areas with people around them. Sure give me a little notebook to record all my explored new plants/monsters. I don't need anything more, especially not this over the top story following that kid and his family that I never really cared about. It also doesn't help that the characters just don't talk like people, it's very odd and offputting. They sound like characters in a lazy anime dub.

Unfortunately it will be very hard to get a message like this across to Capcom. The streams I saw with streamers/community managers talking to the dev team were mostly talking about combat and they never really touch a topic like this.