honestly pretty bummed with this one. new switch skills and switch skill swap feel pretty worthless and almost every weapon i play just feels better the way i played it in vanilla. new content was doled out much too slowly and hearing that postgame content is at 50 and 100 is baffling to me. already feels thin on content so to put things at such extreme ranks feels like padding. jungle map is a mess and not really fun.

i liked the characters and cinematics and the citadel is maybe my favorite mh map of all time. malzeno owns hard and so does the last boss. maybe my expectations were just set too high from iceborne? i dunno. hopefully patches add more.

Very nostalgic for me. It was my first taste of next gen at the time. Those HD snow storms and fiery explosion effects blew my young mind coming from Star Wars Battlefront and Jak and Daxter. The jump from PS2 to PS3 was the last console jump that I think really felt special. Even if the games weren’t all masterpieces, it was still incredibly exciting seeing all these developers push what was possible with the new hardware right out the gate, compared to nowadays where the transition feels more like a formality, and most launch titles are held back by the need to keep them playable on the last generation so as to not hurt the sales numbers.

I’m not going to sugar coat it’s flaws, the story’s nonsensical, the instant harmonizer healing makes it very hard to die, trivializing any challenge, and getting ping ponged between explosions when fighting enemy Vital Suits is annoying as hell. If I were being “objective,” this would be getting a lower score. But the wide open levels, the punchy feedback on shooting things, the forboding, atmospheric setting, the variety of different Akrid and V.S. designs, and that musical score all left an impression on my young mind and hold up on a replay. The multiplayer as well was fun back in the day.