My favorite, most played game AND intro to the series was MH 4 Ultimate on the 3DS. I had a total of 1,000 hours just on that game, across two saves (the first one went to 850 hours) and later I moved on to Gen and GenU on the Switch several years later when I found out I could carry over my save file. GenU is literally a game with infinite content and I don't think I'll ever fully finish it, but I'll keep coming back to it every now and then. I only wish they hadn't crippled the moveset of my favorite weapon, the Charge Blade.

I played World and Iceborne, but only for 200 hours, didn't enjoy it much. I liked base Rise on the Switch a lot, and I'm finally playing Sunbreak now on the PC, and it's instantly become my favorite modern monster hunter game.

I also plan on eventually playing Portable3rd and Freedom Unite on emulators.

[–] fishbone@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 hour ago

Hell yeah, 4U is a great intro to the series. I started with Freedom Unite but it didn't stick. Played Tri for the wii and that's what really got me into it (which is weird cause tri is clunky as hell and I think has the least content of any mainline game).

Never really got into charge blade, but GenU did a lot of favors for my two favorite weapons at the time, great sword and gunlance, and the online bosses are absolutely nuts.

Rise is probably my favorite gameplay wise, but I prefer the pre-world armor skill system, and I'm not too keen on the Sunbreak endgame grind.

As far as old titles go, Freedom Unite is very iconic and has a ton of content, but I like portable 3rd way more. The general atmosphere of the areas and town are excellent, and it introduces Zinogre to the game so well. There's also an english patch floating around for it if you can't read japanese.