It's Monster Hunter except made to be palatable for Westerners. At least that's what they tried to do.

It removed a lot of the jank that other MH games used to have. Less gathering quests, no key quest system, item boxes available at camps, sprinting while using items, comprehensible weapon trees, etc. I only consider the last one a positive, the rest is pretty whatever in my opinion. It also simplified armors and didn't distinct between Blade Master and Gunner anymore. They used an alpha/beta system instead where armor would either have more skills but less sockets for decorations or the other way round. I thought it was a decent solution, but I liked the old system more.

Instead of having maps with numbered zones and loading screens between the zones, MHW had singular, large maps with no loading zones in between. That was pretty cool in theory! It was nice having no loading zones, and I liked seeing monsters fly off in the distance and stuff. But then they really got into the whole idea of verticality in maps and jerked that idea off way too much and created the abomination that is Ancient Forest. I HATE this map. It has like 5 levels and it's a fucking mess and you climb around forever through the stupid trees and by the time you find the fucking place the monster escaped to it's already leaving. They also made the hub very vertical, which was very annoying for traversing in it - which you do a lot, turns out. The hub was wayyy too big in general. It should've been like <40% of the size it was.
Another new feature they included in this game was sliding. Since maps got all this fancy verticality now and stopped being all flat, they made it so you could slide down inclines and such. But it was so incredibly inconsistent that there was almost no way to use it reliably. It happened all the time that you couldn't slide even though there was a steep incline or that you slid against your will on almost flat terrain - this was especially frustrating for certain weapons that didn't want to use sliding attacks at all cause it interrupted their combos or whatever. This feature shouldn't have worked with unsheathed weapons if you ask me.

There were also other aspects of the game where they really liked to jerk off the whole "World" aspect. It tried very hard to emulate ecological environments, a "lively living and breathing eco-system" etc., with all the small creatures and such. It was kinda neat I guess, but I hated the whole monster tracking bullshit. I don't care about "immersion" and needing to track down a monster by looking for tracks or whatever. In the end you just followed those dumb lighting bugs. It added nothing to the game except tedium. Let me bonk the monster on the head already!

This also ties to the "story". Monster Hunter does NOT need a story. All the story it really needs is "Yeah so there is this monster causing trouble, can you smack it with your weapon until it's dead or something? Thanks bro."
World however tried to be cinematic and epic - because that's what Western gamers like, right? Sadly the story was an absolute snore, yet it was forced into your throat. Quite literally, especially if you wanted to play multiplayer because you can't go on a quest with other people unless you have watched the stupid fucking cutscene! Nooo, you had to watch the whooole cutscene, THEN you could start the quest for real and THEN you had to fire the signal or whatever so other people could join - but ONLY if they've ALSO seen that dumb cutscene!
Let's not even talk about the Handler. There are very few fictional characters that I hate as much as I hate her. She doesn't do shit, yet the game makes you follow her to trigger some kind of dumb event, then she talks about how "we" did it and then you can finally go back to actually playing the game. By the way, the Handler really likes food! Haha that's sooo quirky! Look she's stuffing her face again haha such a funny and nuanced character.

The monster selection was kinda meh. I liked some of the new monsters, but they all had pretty tame/boring designs. Guess they didn't want to weird out new players or whatever. The toned down color palettes didn't help either I guess. Same goes for the weapons, they "upgrade" system that just slapped monster parts on a boring bone weapon was lame and pretty lazy. Checking out all the wacky weapon designs is fun, and World took most of that fun away. It also removed silly weapons like the Corn Gunlance and the Pizza Charge Blade.

The end game felt pretty barren too. Tempered monsters felt pretty slapped on and didn't really make me wanna play much more.

Monster Hunter Generations except:
- new quests, armors and weapons!
- EVEN MORE monsters!
- with more maps!
- in 1080p / 720p!
- thee new styles, including one which sucks and one which is broken!
- a new flagship! It's a fucking jet fighter dragon that crashes into the ground!! He fucks!
- G rank!

The "visual upgrade" isn't all that good since most textures were obviously not made for 1080p but whatever.

This game introduced me to the Monster Hunter series - probably not an ideal start for a beginner, but I had a veteran to play with who helped me.

As a new player I couldn't really appreciate all the old gen pandering, but I get the idea behind it. I did however notice how the older gen monsters were noticeably more boring and/or had terrible hitboxes. Oh well, with that many monsters in the game you're not really forced into hunting everything a lot, and most of the boring ones were early game monsters. The flagship monsters however are all really cool and fun to fight.

As a pre-World game, this game was a lot less streamlined than the newer entries in the series. I personally don't mind either way.

Graphically the game was pretty underwhelming since, yknow, it was on the 3DS and I didn't have a New 3DS XL or whatever the fuck it was called.