This is definitely the best Monster Hunter in the franchise, its not my favorite, but undeniably the best.

Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate has very few shortcomings, some of them are related to small quality of life things, most related to gathering, which was improved on Generations, and since these are things that exist on the franchise until that point, is not worth that much pointing out.

The story is well built, I didn’t find myself wanting to skip dialogue, and it ties in with the game’s progression extremely well, speaking of which…

MH4U’s progression is absolutely the best compared to every other MH title I played, all of them coming after this one. Starting with few tutorial quests to teach you not to die, a few small monsters, and all large monsters from there onwards, with the frenzied mechanic eventually introduced to keep the monster fights fresh. Hub quests not staying behind due to a good variety of Subspecies like Brute Tigrex and Stygian Zinogre, and topping on G Rank with even more cool Subspecies like Shrouded Nerscylla and Desert Seltas Queen, and progressively harder challenges even after the final Elder Dragon quest.

Monsters are incredibly aggressive, but have a reasonable amount of health to pair with the weapons overall high damage, making single player quests very short and forgiving, and Hub quests quite solo-friendly, a good challange for 2-3 players, and generally easy with a full party.

Endgame quests peaking due to incredibly high damage output from the monsters, but since their health is kept at a fixed amount independent of player count, solo damage is still high, just asking of you a lot of knowledge and preparation for the target, and on full party, though they will certainly deal sufficient damage faster, the game will ask the same knowledge from the hunters on a higher regard since failing the quest can be easier with multiple people carting.

This is something good that’s completely ignored in the New World with its adjustable difficulty based on player count, and counteracted in certain quests on Generations where monsters have massive health pools. Monster Hunter 4 manages to still have difficult quests on a full party without health scaling, preventing late game challenges from feeling like damage sponges, something that MHGU G Rank Hyper monsters and a lot of Iceborne content fails to achieve.

This constant variety and incresingly higher difficulty, with some possible walls but nothing that spikes the difficulty in an unreasonable manner, makes this game an absolute pleasure to play through, none of the subsequent Monster Hunter games reached this level of finesse with its progression.

Weapons are also handled exceptionally well, due to the added verticallity to maps, weapons have aerial attacks that build up to the mounting minigame that, although it may feel a bit overpowered at times, with the Insect Glaive being overwhelmingly good at that, it is a very short minigame, that does get difficult to perform on certain monsters, and gives a great reward for executing it successfully in the form of the monster being toppled, and some breathing time for your party members for them to disengage and recover before dishing out damage. Letting Gravios not play is always the correct option, and mounting makes it easier.

Equipment progression is very visible on weapons, since they will visually evolve after a couple upgrade stages, and even morph completely for some Subspecies, giving quite a tangible reward for repeatedly hunting the same monsters. The only setback in terms of equipment is having a Kinsect bound to a single Insect Glaive, making it a obscenely expensive weapon if you’re planning to have multiple Glaives, since you’ll have to level a Kinsect from scratch every single time.

Material gathering gets progressively easier because of the existence of item multiplication through the Wycoon and Maximeld, and the former’s points shop for certain items. The game will not require unreasonable amounts of materials from start to end… except for Earth Crystals for Worn and Rusted weapons, 100~120 for each is VERY unreasonable.

Expeditions are a miss feature for me, it isn’t bad, it is pretty well made, and is the tool to unlock certain monsters on G Rank, plus is useful for gathering certain materials, such as Kinsect upgrade items, but it wasn’t for me, much like MHW expeditions failed to catch me. The strongest gear in the game is locked on the highest level quests of this feature, but since I do not care for them, I simply ignored its existence for a long time, and the game does not enforce you to interact with it and lets you easily progress without it, which is great.

Aside from gathering problems and general lack of QoL features introduced in MHGU, the only major problem MH4U has is… the fact that it is abandoned on the 3DS. A rerelease on modern platforms with MHGU QoL changes would easily make this THE ULTIMATE MONSTER HUNTER game. Please Capcom, free MH4U from the 3DS.

Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate gets really close to be quite the perfect video game, it is almost unreal the job Capcom made with this one, and, as is already proven, reaching its highs is getting to be an extremely difficult task for the games released after. The team missed really hard with Worldborne despite its success, I pray for Wilds to deliver a modern experience that matches MH4U's greatness.

I've always personally considered getting the G rank crown special permit from beating [spoilers] the point at which you've "beaten the game", so even though I've played this one a lot over the many years its been out and in my hands, I don't think I've ever really "finished" the game until today, hence why I'm logging and reviewing the game now.
Of course there's still a couple tougher monsters I'll one day have to take care of, and I'm not even at the point of being able to try Lv140 GQ monsters, so overall there's still a LOT left for me to do in the game. Tutorial complete I guess.

I've been feeling pretty sentimental the past month, because I picked up the game again and have been hunting online again with some friends. This game came out during a bit of a rough part in my life that I'm still feeling the aftereffects of to this day, and it was my first Monster Hunter game. The online shutting down really feels like the end of an era. If I've ever been having a rough time this was one of my go-to's and I knew that even if friends weren't around to hunt together, there was always something I could chip away at on my own, or there was probably at least one person still playing the game that I could get to know for a couple rounds of hunting.

Looking at it now, MH4U is probably one of my favourite games period. Playing off and on over these 8-9 years, I feel like there's always been a new challenge around the corner. G rank in the older MH games really does not fuck around and being totally honest, it took me many years of chipping away at this game's, and also jumping between other MH games before I got to a level where I really felt like I could contend with the monsters at their quickest and smartest. Even then I still get caught out by shit all the time and it still feels like I have more to learn and improve on. I think the same can easily be said for most monster hunter games but it's just something that really jumped out at me coming back to this one.

Overall, it's a fantastic game. The loss of the online functionality is a tragedy and I really hope a project like pretendo network will be able to get the servers up and running again. Maybe one day Capcom will port some of the older MH games with some upscaling for larger displays, and a better-constructed online mode that won't have to inevitably shut down one day. I still plan to do as much online hunting as I can in these last few days, but for now I'll just say it's been real, you legends.