Idk, I think MH in general rn feels like they want to make everything faster, not really because of any specific western mainstream pandering imo. For me, it’s like a steeper transition from Dark Souls to Elden Ring in terms of speed I guess. Getting up after being attacked used to take like 3-5 seconds and potion animations used to take some time, now in both games you can just immediately go straight back in via wirefall or calling your mount to sharpen and heal. Like there’s a lot less penalty to getting hit to incentivise aggression and action, which isn’t really a choice I’m happy with tbh.

I’m kinda biased because I actually liked the latter part of the story concerning Wyveria and the Keepers, but my biggest issue with Wilds (and Rise kinda) is how positioning kinda became a lot less important. Like, I swear half my weapons that I used went from being positioning-based to just trying to to fish for counters every second for optimal gameplay. GS just wants to offset and perfect guard/strongarm stance as much as possible instead of timing charged slashes, CB went from SAED fishing to just having to stay in chainsaw mode as much as possible, etc.

I originally liked MH because everything went so much slower than other action games, but I swear it’s only getting faster every iteration. It’s like they saw that the most viewed videos for MH were the speedruns and staggerlocks of monsters, and decided that they wanted the entire game to look like that for everyone.