Short, sweet, fun, pretty, Meiling is there,

One of the weirdest difficulty curves I've ever seen in a video game. It's not hard in the first place, but I've never played a game where its systems are made so that it's about 20 times easier to die to random mobs and stage hazards than it is to bosses.
Fine enough metroidvania otherwise, basically a trimmed-down SotN.

monster hunter for boring people

Good co-op fun with a bunch of nice designs that skirt the line of Bayformers clusterfuck but remain in the colorful recognizable zone, but mostly still a prototype for the much better sequel.

Exploration and progression from the base game trimmed away exclusively in favor of stringed-together combat arenas, paired up with some obnoxious enemy design. Story beginning to hit the shitter big time.
Feels like a $20 canonical nuts.wad.

I can't blame the game itself for everything it did to the survival horror genre for 7 years straight, buuut I'm gonna do it anyway!