YMMV / Monster Hunter Freedom 2

• Once Original, Now Common: Players who got into the series through later games in the series may scratch their heads wondering why Freedom Unite in particular even has the reputation it has amongst old-school MonHun fans, due to FU's dated controls (most infamously, the game, much like the PSP MonHun games before it, mandates a rather unusual and uncomfortable grip on the D-pad to move the camera and analog nub for character movement) and graphics, and it doesn't help that the game only has ad-hoc mode available for multiplayer and no online infrastructure-based multiplayer, which mandates a solo run of the game's multiplayer-tuned content if one doesn't live near other players by chance^note Or use third-party tools like XLink Kai, which allow LAN-based multiplayer games to be played over the Internet. While most veterans of this game won't deny that it has its share of glaring problems that have caused it to age poorly, at the time, FU was seen as a very ambitious game for having every single monster and almost every single map in the mainline games prior to it (which is no small feat given that the PSP's Universal Media Discs have less storage space than the DVD discs used by some PS2 games), and for being a culmination of the core aspects of the series; as a result, it became one of the best-selling PSP games alongside its successor Monster Hunter Portable 3rd.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Players who embraced the battle themes of the Dos hunting areas, played in Dos itself as well as Freedom 2, didn't take well that Freedom Unite replaced them with the Frontier versions. While the new themes for the Swamp and Jungle areas have their fans, there's a consensus that the other themes, especially the Desert one, are worse than their original counterparts.
• Tough Act to Follow: For many years, Freedom Unite was hailed by fans as the pinnacle of the Monster Hunter series. Not only did it feature nearly all content from the series up to that point, but it was often seen as a major turning point for the series' popularity outside Japan. Subsequent games, while well-received, often had to be compared with this installment (and with rare exceptions, the comparisons almost always favored Freedom Unite), usually due to removing monsters (tri- infamously removed nearly every large monster from the first two generations) and/or adding rather divisive mechanics (such as underwater combat in tri- and 3 Ultimate and maps with more vertical features in 4 and 4 Ultimate). The only installments that, depending on whom you ask, either came closest to dethroning it or actually did dethrone it, are Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate and Monster Hunter World: Iceborne (a good portion of fans nominating Generations Ultimate also exists).

---