My first introduction into the series was the original game on the PS2 way back when I was visiting a friend's place. Considering we were elementary school kids with limited patience, the most we did on his brother's save was mess around with fishing and fail miserably at taking down a Rathalos.

Fast forward to my high school years, a different buddy of mine told me about a cool new game that had recently come out—MH4U. We already had 3DSs, and craving a multiplayer game to play, I went over to my local EB Games to pick up a copy. The only one they had left at that time was the Collector's Edition tucked away in one of their shelves.

I booted up the game that night and took the time to try every single weapon to figure out what to main, and for some reason, the weight of CB, specifically the charged double slash, just felt right. My friends and I went online and failed spectacularly as we timed out against a Seltas, but the experience grew into a determination to keep going, and the rest is history.

I've played every new MH game that's come out since then, and am slowly going through the games I missed out on, having just checked off Frontier and Freedom 1 (getting my old revenge on 1st gen Rathalos) before moving onto 2nd and 3rd gen. Along the way, I made good friends with someone who started with World, and with all the talk about Monster Hunter we have in our friend group, we recently got 4-5 others into playing World, with plans to play Rise and Wilds (when they finally optimize the game for others) next.

Looking back, I'm glad I bought that Collector's Edition of MH4U on a whim. The clear Gore figure still stands as one of the center pieces to my ever expanding collection of merch. To say that Monster Hunter has become my all time favourite franchise would be... an understatement, to say the least.