YMMV / Monster Hunter Generations

• Base-Breaking Character: Prowlers as a whole are either loved for their unique twist on the series' signature gameplay as well as having some distinct advantages over Hunters (such as not having to carry and use items and the ability to tank the first two hits that would otherwise cart them), or hated for having lower DPS and defense than the Hunters' weapons. As a result, entering a Hub as a Prowler can get you harassed or instantly kicked out of the pub depending on how serious the existing players in the Hub are about damage rate.
• Breather Boss:
  • While Deviant monsters are generally meant to be harder than their nominate counterparts, a few are considered easier instead:
    • Deadeye Yian Garuga. It's positioned in the Special Permit list between the incredibly tanky Crystalbeard Uragaan and the impossibly aggravating Dreadking Rathalos, but is more tolerable than them and regular Yian Garuga. Despite having a tougher shell, some nasty attacks, and Fatal Poison, its attacks are more telegraphed and it is less likely to use the attacks that make normal Yian Garuga a pain. It's also smaller, removing some of the Hitbox Dissonance issues and making it easier to hit its head and tail. Even in G Rank it doesn't get much harder, as its only changes are a back hop, throwing easily-dodged boulders with its beak plow, and using its very, very telegraphed aimed charge twice in a row.
    • Rustrazor Shogun Ceanataur. Being one of the easiest Deviants to fight, it basically almost keeps the moveset of it's regular counterpart with four moves, two of them at basic form and the last two at the other form. The basic form's water attack is easily avoidable if one stays close, gunners can easy avoid the attacks by evading, or using Absolute Evasion/Readiness to avoid the "charged" water attack. The second form's two new moves is has it sharpen its pincers, leaving it open for attacks. The other move, however, is easily avoidable by blocking, diving, or using any of the Absolute moves. Said second form has no ranged attacks, making it free damage for Gunners and Boomerang-build Prowlers as long as they keep their distance and don't stand in front of it.
    • Grimclaw Tigrex. It's still Tigrex, with the turning charges and damage roars that entail, but it's slower and more calculated in its movements, as opposed to the original Tigrex who's all too Ax-Crazy to attack nonstop and give you little time to recover or attack. However, once you get to the harder levels, just avoid the claw slams...
  • Diablos, the target of the Urgent Quest required to reach G Rank, is a more straightforward and familiar fight following the gimmicky Damage-Sponge Boss Nakarkos.
• Broken Base: Over the charm farm method in Generations Ultimate (join the G Rank Event Quest "URGENT: COAL MINERS NEEDED" with a full party, hunt the Brachydios, then exit via subquest and end up with several rows of charms). There are those who demand that charm farming be done only with Heavy Bowguns to maximize damage and therefore minimize time spent on the quest. Others argue that one shouldn't have to learn a weapon they may not like just to rake in the easy cash and charms and that the quest can be completed almost as quickly with nearly any other team composition. Tip: If you're not using a Heavy Bowgun and you see a "charm farm" room, check the room name to see if it mentions "any weapon" or some variant thereof, or if the host has a weapon other than a Bowgun; if the answer to either question is "no", expect to be kicked as soon as you enter the lobby.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Wanna use a Bow? Just use the Teostra Bow and nothing else. Has since been subverted thanks to a subtle Nerf to the weapon in Generations Ultimate.
  • In Generations Ultimate, you'll be hard-pressed to find endgame players not using the Neset armor pieces. When either full set is equipped, it comes with two skills: Skill+2 (adds 2 points to every equipment skill you have) and Talisman Boost (doubles the amount of skill points on Talismans, including whatever Decorations are equipped on them), on top of a lot of Decoration slots. This allows for immense versatility; rather than having to farm for and swap out armor pieces, you just need to slot in Decorations and change your Talismans (just having +4 of any skill on a Talisman will increase the points to 10). Compounding this is that this armor uses parts from the Final Boss of the Hunter's Pub, Ahtal-ka, which is a relatively easy fight for a 4-player party.
  • If you find someone not using Neset armor, and they are using Blademaster weapons, there's a high chance they'll be using the "Jho Ceana" set^note named in part after memetically popular wrestler John Cena, which consists of G-rank Hyper Deviljho and Hyper Shogun Ceanataur pieces. This set has both Razor Sharp (halves the rate at which weapons lose sharpness) and Sharpness+2 (significantly extends the sharpness gauge, sometimes adding a new sharpness level on top of it), which is normally hard to both get on a set because their respective Decorations cancel each other out. Like the Neset set, Jho Ceana also has a considerable number of Decoration slots, allowing the player to further fine-tune their build to their liking.
  • Many people online will be rocking either Adept Style or Valor Style. Adept Style adds a large number of invincibility frames to your dodge roll, while Valor Style features some extremely potent attacks for each weapon as well as a sheathing stance that serves at an auto-dodge at the cost of a fraction of the damage that would've been suffered otherwise. Valor-Style Heavy Bowgun in particular is notorious for not only having an unsheathed dashing move that somewhat offsets Heavy Bowgun's otherwise sluggish unsheathed movement speed, but also having some of the highest DPS in the game thanks to its ability to fire off high-power shots like a machinegun.
  • Most Light Bowgun users will be using the Avidya Eye or the Hurricane Gaze, which are made from nominate Nargacuga and Silverwind Nargacuga parts, respectively. Both of them have Pierce Shot Lv1 as their Rapid Shot type with that particular shot type being able to match Lv2 shots in damage but requiring only three ticks through the monster instead of four, as well as both levels of Slicing Shot as their Internal Ammo, which can not only sever tails but are also great damage-dealing shot types due to their Sticky Bomb gimmick not requiring the player to be within critical distance and can quickly build up Hunting Arts gauges.
  • The majority of endgame Prowler players — when they're not being harassed or kicked by Hunter players — use builds based around Piercing Boomerangs and Big Boomerangs to inflict lots of damage from mid-range. As such, most Prowlers you see online will be Healing, Gathering, or Assist Prowlers, since they have three boomerangs to their combos instead of two. Most of them will be using either the Silverwind Star XX or Deadeye Fan XX; both weapons have higher ranged attack than melee attack and have purple sharpness, with the Silverwind Star having a higher Affinity and the Deadeye Fan having the Poison element.
• Evil Is Cool: Bloodbath Diablos is well-liked for being not only being a more dangerous version of the original (as is the case with all Deviant monsters), but for its gimmick of being a Misanthrope Supreme despite being a herbivore, its bloodstained look, its absolutely hellish roar, and its strategy of intentionally charging at Hunters who are immobilized by said roar.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Aerial Style gives every weapon the ability to jump off a monster to inflict jumping attacks, and with the right armor and food skills it allows a player, or better yet a whole party, to trap the monster in a Cycle of Hurting by mounting and toppling it ad nauseam, greatly reducing the difficulty of hunts.
  • Adept Style is infamous for adding such a powerful defensive option — it grants a number of invincibility frames to your dodge roll, or your block if using a Lance or Gunlance. If you are hit during these frames, you'll go into a special roll animation and for a brief period of time, you can perform a special, often-powerful Insta-Move (for example, Sword & Shield can perform a jumping attack that can mount monsters, while Bowguns automatically perform a special reload and gain buffs to their shots' attack power for a brief period of time). The timing for performing an Insta-Evade/Block can be tricky to learn at first, but get to grips and you'll find it hard to use any other Style. In fact, what counts as an attack is pretty loosely-defined by the game; it's just anything that can cause flinching, which includes not only being hit by an attack and taking damage, it also includes roars, flashes, and stationary harmful objects left on the ground by monsters (such as Brachydios's slime patches and Dreadqueen Rathian's poison spikes); for roars in particular, this means when engaging a monster for the first time or which has just entered rage mode, you can roll through the roar and gain the upper hand on the monster while it's still stuck in its roar animation.
• Good Bad Bugs: The original Generations is well-known for the "Sakura glitch" involving the "Coal-Hearted" quest. First, the player must engage the quest in a multiplayer lobby (even a local wireless or online lobby with no other players will suffice). Then, by delivering 12 pieces of Coal, one at a time, for some reason the game thinks the party has delivered the maximum number of Coals and thus reward players with a huge number of Talismans, greatly speeding up charm farming as well as providing a very lucrative way of generating zenny. This can go faster if you have other players with you to (6 pieces per player in 2P, 4 pieces per player in 3P, 3 pieces per player in 4P), but it's not necessary. This was patched out in Generations Ultimate.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: As the Bherna Gal describes some early tutorial quests, she mentions "And there's got to be one collect-the-unique-mushrooms quest. We don't mess with tradition here at the guild!" This was the last time such a quest was ever issued - Monster Hunter: World and Monster Hunter: Rise both make a point of skipping such busywork quests by making them a separate mechanic.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Series veterans have always complained about each new game "dumbing down" Monster Hunter, but this got a fair share of it for introducing a lot of features to alleviate the classic games' clunkiness and difficulty, such as having Hunter Arts with generous invincible frames, equipment upgrades being streamlined (in particular, many upgrades accepting materials from a wide group of them instead of requiring specific ones), and certain Hunting Styles being perceived as "broken", such as Aerial Style's mount-spamming and Adept Style also making it very easy to dodge attacks, often making defense irrelevant.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: Generations Ultimate ironically gets a lot of this too, mainly from players whose first Monster Hunter game was Monster Hunter: World (which was released first outside of Japan) or Monster Hunter: Rise (the newer Switch MonHun game) and who got too used to the quality-of-life touches improved in those games. Can't change equipment or restock items after starting a quest? No Turf War system, therefore resulting in two monsters within the same area double-teaming the human? Hub quests being scaled for multiplayer, and thus taking much longer for a solo player? Overall less smooth combat that can punish missteps or pressing the wrong button? And so on and so forth. That said, there are players who began with fifth-gen do get accustomed to this game's limitations, but it tends to be a minority.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: One concern that many players had with Generations during the first year since its release was the lack of G-rank — the tier of quests that comes after High Rank and is only added in Updated Rereleases of "vanilla" Monster Hunter games — particularly in the West which hasn't had a Monster Hunter game without G-rank since Monster Hunter 3 (Tri) in 2010 (this is because the games without G-rank that were released during that period, Monster Hunter Portable 3rd and the original Monster Hunter 4, remained exclusive to Japan and Korea). Something of note is that a Monster Hunter file that reaches the end of High Rank usually has about 100-150 hours logged, with G-rank adding another hundred or so hours; the concern wasn't that "100 hours is too short for a game" so much as "we're so used to three tiers of quest difficulty that it feels weird having only two". The overseas Late Export for You of Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate, which does have G-rank, only aggravated this particular sore spot for much longer than necessary.
• Polished Port: The Nintendo Switch version of Generations Ultimate (and, in fact, the only version of the G-rank expansion for non-Japanese markets, as the 3DS version never made it out) upscales the graphics, maintains a consistent 30 FPS^note albeit dropping a bit during Area 8 of the Marshlands (as opposed to the 3DS version struggling to touch that once combat with a monster begins, especially the non-"New" version of the system) and, due to being on a system with two analog sticks built in, eliminates the need to have specific version of the console, use touchscreen controls, or use an external, separately-sold accessory for camera controls. Also, since a docked Switch is compatible with USB-to-LAN accessories, it allows players to use a wired connection for improved online play. And if you're playing docked, you can use a USB keyboard for lobby chat, instead of having to rely on the rather slow method of typing on a 3DS on-screen keyboard. About the only real downsides are that it does not have StreetPass features unlike the 3DS version and touchscreen widgets like item shortcuts are removed, but the game is still quite playable without them.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: This is more or less the Sword and Shield's finest hour after having been written off as a low-damage noob weapon" for so long, as they get a variety of extremely useful Hunter Arts (Round Force for an attack with invincibility frames, Shoryugeki for stuns and even mounts, and Sword Dance for a concentrated damage to even the hardest monster parts), the Oils to buff up their offensive capabilities, an Adept Style Insta-Move that can inflict aerial and mounting damage, and of course all the enhancements they got in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate (like the back-hop charge and multiple jump attacks). Generations Ultimate makes this weapon type even better with the Chaos Oil line of Hunter Arts, which apply all four Oil buffs at the same time and can be stacked with other Oils; with Chaos Oil III in specific and an Affinity Oil stacked on top of that, one can gain a boost to their Affinity by 60%, which makes S&S the perfect weapon for critical-based builds.
• Salvaged Gameplay Mechanic: Monster Hunter 4 introduces the monster-mounting mechanic, but was criticized by many players due to the potential for another player to knock off the mounting hunter with attacks, be it due to an honest mistake or otherwise. This game changes that behavior by having attacks on a mounted monster not only no longer knock off the hunter, but actually contribute a small amount to the mounting gauge, although the gauge is still balanced around not requiring this, so non-mounting playerse can still use this period for recovery and other preparation if they so please.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • As Hunter Arts are optional to equip, some players do a "classic MonHun" file in which they exclusively use Guild Style and never use Hunter Arts at any point.
  • Some players opt to only play as Prowler, not even playing as a Hunter just to gather Prowler equipment materials. Prowlers face many unique challenges, such as fewer means of health and status effect recovery.
• That One Component: A major reason why there aren't many players who use Deviant equipment is unlike other weapons which generally have around 6-8 upgrades to reach their ultimate G-rank forms, Deviant equipment each requires not only monster materials but also monster-specific tickets, one for each quest for each monster, and each new level of equipment requires a successively higher-level ticket. Meaning that for the Deviants that debuted in Generations, and thus have 15 quests not counting the EX Special Permit quests, you need to get all 15 levels of tickets to maximize your Deviant equipment, meaning you need to hunt the monster as many as 15 times minimum. Granted, sometimes you may get not only a ticket corresponding to the level of quest completed but also a ticket corresponding to one or two levels below, but it's still a lot of hunting just to max out your equipment compared to non-Deviant equipment. Thankfully not the case for Prowlers, whose equipment crafting is far simpler and only requires hunting the monster one or two times.
• That One Sidequest: If you want to use armor made from Deviant monsters as part of Armor Fusion (whether as base armor or visual armor), it is not enough to just beat the G-rank main campaign to unlock Armor Fusion for the remaining four armor categories. You also have to defeat the EX version of that Deviant, which is much harder than even their G5 version thanks to beefed up HP and attack power, no supplies in the supply chest, and being set in a one-area map where the only way to leave the area is to use a Farcaster/Far-Cat-Ster or faint.
• Vindicated by History: The game was originally seen as a downgrade from 4 Ultimate in the west because Generations did not have a "G Rank". Combined with a less developed story (by series standards anyways) and fewer monsters, it felt like the game had less content. Some purists particularly hated the addition of Hunting Styles, which were the main draw of Generations, and felt it was derailing the gameplay. However, since Monster Hunter: World released with not even half of the large monsters present in Generations and 4 Ultimate (combined with new content releasing at a glacial pace, only rectified much later with the Iceborne expansion) along with the vast majority of monsters being some form of wyvern (with very few beast-type monsters and leviathans being Put on a Bus due to technical problems), some of the games' critics have started to appreciate Generations for the sheer variety of content, including the much-vaunted Prowler mode which lets you play as a Felyne (here, and in future games, known as a Palico for comrade Felynes). It helps that its Updated Re-release, Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate, added back many of the much-missed monsters from previous games while adding variants to some newer ones, making it the biggest Monster Hunter game (aside from Monster Hunter Frontier) in terms of content.

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