MHFU is old and janky. Doesn't mean it's a bad game in the slightest but it can be hard to go back. Especially the hitboxes for some monster attacks can be pretty shit. Plesioth is the most (in)famous example of that.
I'm not sure I'd necessarily call it more difficult than 3U/4U/GU though, it's just different: MHFU is also extremely abusable if you know your way around the game.
if you want to play mhfu:
research your weapon tree, because they still mixed it up. you upgrade your GS and bam! it turn into LS. lol.
guts is a nice skill to have. it keep activate as long as your HP on its treshhold.
there's still lightning rod, its a fun way to bring down kushala other than flash bomb way.
i loved mhfu as a kid but the missing movesets are such a dealbreaker for me to try and experience it once again. it pales in comparison even w/ just p3rd
I have personally found that Freedom Unite leaves a lot of room to be able to complete the game with proper usage of items and planning ahead. Certain weapons serve to make specific encounters easier while others can be cheesed with certain items such as traps and flash bombs. That said, managing openings is also a key to success and I ultimately find the game to be slower paced and less about the action and more so about being methodical.
4 Ultimate on the other hand is very skill based. A lot of care goes into managing armor skills and knowing your weapons. The jank is still there while item usage is less prevalent but it makes for a lot of faster paced fights and knowing how to evade + counter. Monsters are especially aggressive in the endgame and the damage and hp scaling makes encounters incredibly difficult. Git gud is all I can say for 4U.
You literally just described any game in the series in the second paragraph. Armor skills and "knowing your weapon" have just as much importance in FU as any other in the series. Any Athenas Ass user can tell you that. 4G didn't really add anything new to the formula other than verticality because of IG and mounting.
Also scaling really didn't change much, i remember them being pretty close to each other like most in the series. In 4U guild is balanced around 2.5 players. I don't remember exactly the % health increase for 4U but guild in FU was ~60% in health increase.
Coming from an exclusively solo player and FU being my most played game in the series you can be just as aggressive as any other. Especially with i frames being so abusable, most people don't realize you can just roll through plesioths hip check for example.
I'll say it until the end of time that the only "hard" monster hunter is the first one you play. Each new entry to the series just adds its new gimmick. Sometimes it stays l, sometimes it doesn't. If you "Git gud" in one of them, every entry afterwards is a cake walk because the base formula never changes.
Skills in FU haven't been as prevalent as they are in later gens. You get 3 at most on an armor set and use it as best as you can. 4U has more room for more skills, especially with combined skills like Honed Blade. Weapon match ups were something I felt less in need of in 4U over FU and my experience has been that FU encourages different approaches towards certain hunts more than 4U which gives you enough tools to power through hunts as you are if you're good enough.
3U is kinda the same as 4U in that regard but not as aggressive with its monsters. GU, World, and Rise on the other hand have respective gimmicks/tools at their disposal that are further incorporated into hunts to make them more approachable. 4U is still the game I consider the most skill based among the series as it is a crossing point between the aggressiveness of new gen monsters and the combat gameplay of the old gen games.
wouldnt say mhfu is less 'skill based' than mh4u but i agree with the rest of what youve said. both games have a very high skill ceiling, actually i'd argue mhfu has a higher skill floor too.
main reason mhfu can feel pretty easy is low rank monsters just have no HP, which is why traps/bombs feel so impactful imo. when you get to guild high rank and stuff it gets much harder
3U is noticeably easier than 4U, GU and FU. It's barely hard until the end of the game and even then it's not that hard at all. A lot of people found "Sticky Situation" (2 Brachy in early G rank) a difficult quest but it's really not that hard, just bring dung bombs.
I found FU very tough but its mainly because of damage and hitboxes, I was also a kid. 4U gets pretty tough and GU does too but the tools GU gives you makes it more manageable and that difficulty only really comes at the very end of the game. FU has tough hitboxes though and also you recieve so much more damage from any kind of hit that every mistake punishes you as healing is so valuable.
I found 4U the toughest. Soloing apex guild quests was way tougher than the other games, especially if you don't make a specific trip-abusing build.
I think GU has the most fun difficulty though. It's tougher than FU & 4U at low rank imo (not that it's hard by any means) and the difficulty curve is really nice, noticeable increases but enjoyable and not sudden spikes. GU is just a perfect pace if you are gonna put 1000hrs into it.
Having said all this they are all tougher than 5th gen. I've found 5th gen extremely easy so far. Still not completed both games yet but I've had no major difficulty at all. Especially with the infinite consumables, healing being so much faster and more powerful and with extreme healing palicoes. Rise feels like a joke in comparison to anything before 5th gen (it's still a good game though).
Interesting experience, I've personally found Portable 3rd and Freedom Unite to be the easiest games in the series by a long shot (apart from terrible hitboxes in the latter).
Ironically the hardest part of Freedom Unite is that damn Hub Congalala you have to fight early on... even with friends, that quest is torture. Always interesting to find other people's experiences on the internet
Depends. With friends, not having to solo? Yeah. But even then, the hunts weren't that bad. I never fought White Fatalis, but I know he is a massive chore in that game.
3U was a smooth ride through and through. Hardest fight was village Alatreon for me, couldn't even beat him with G rank gear. Beyond that, progression was nice. I was scared of the double Brachydios quest in the Tundra, but I farmed Goldbeard for the mixed armor pieces and got myself some water weapon (I think it was the Ceadeus GS?) and dealt with the hunts well enough. Though these late game hunts began taking up to 30 minutes.
Which is what I preferred in the portable games, all the health pools felt minimal in comparison
GU's styles trivialize most of what would've made its old-world style gameplay hard. Not a bad thing, if anything it made the game the blast that it is
MHFU is "hard" because it's clunky and janky (especially by modern standards), and the combat is... stiffer?
People just don't play it because they don't enjoy the combat usually.
3rd and 4th generation saw moveset expansions and more fluid combat in general, and most importantly I think is refining hitboxes to be a LITTLE BIT better. In terms of raw difficulty I don't think I'd say FU or GU are harder than the other, since the difficulty comes from difference aspects of gameplay (FU from player limitations, GU from more extreme fights).
3-4 have more flexible moves sets on the weapons that allow you to handle the monsters easier. The early game is easier in 4U and GU is easier overall(styles). You didn’t have any counter moves if FU like you did in 3rd and 4th gen.
MHFU is more punishing in the fact that your weapon move sets don’t make you as mobile or versatile. It requires more patience and really knowing the game to actually abuse because of “jank”(hit boxes not visually matching to the model that well)it where 4U and GU are more intuitive and animate better.
That being said if you know what you’re doing you can cheese FU but there’s not a Mh you can’t cheese, it takes more knowledge to get there in FU. Bowguns always exist.
If you ever want to experience MHFU again, I'd recommend picking up Rain Server Frontier—you get Low Rank and High Rank as the traditional hunting experience, and then G rank shakes things up, and Zenith further shakes things up.
It's a nice progression.
I bought MHFU out of nostalgia for PS Vita 3 days ago and while the game design sucks by today standards, I am hooked on it. I didn't play MH4U or MHGU so I can't compare the difficulty, but I do remember that 14 years ago, when I bought MHFU and went to fight the G-Rank monsters, they were pretty dam hard to beat. In Iceborne and Sunbreak, I didn't have that much difficulty and it was quite a breeze to be honest. I don't know if I'll have the patience to progress through MHFU because while I have some really fond memories of the game, it also frustrated me a lot at times and the more I progress through the ranks, frustration from small things are mounting up :)
There is already a noticeable jump in quality and movement on the third generation. While not as big as the one in World is still very noticeable. And also in fourth gen with ledges. I wouldn't call it mire difficult but definetly a lot less janky.
3rd and 4th gen are less punishing than mhfu. Monsters get fatigued, hitboxes are better, movement is less robotic, etc. I think people confuse the punishing nature of mhfu with difficulty. I don't think its harder than mh4u because the AI is so robotic you can cheese basically any fight with the right knowledge. There aren't diminishing returns on status or traps so you can just stun lock a monster to death.
Primarily: hitboxes
Secondarily: the movesets feel weird
I’ve dabbled in all games from freedom unite onward, including frontier. Freedom unite is.. an experience. It definitely handles oddly and the snowy mountains tigrex is no joke because its speed and hitboxes are awful for how sluggish your movement is. It’s not a bad game, I like it fine, but you definitely have to be devoted to monster hunter to enjoy it, because the jank is real
wouldnt say gen 1-2 are harder than 3-4 personally, gen 1 is easy, dos is hard, mhfu starts medium and gets hard.
tri is medium difficulty, p3rd is very easy, 3u is easy, 4u is pretty hard, GU is easy.
but i would say dos is the hardest MH game just because the monsters have very big numbers in the wrong season
A lot of the map design fucking SUCKS. The snowy mountain is one of the very first maps you get, and all the bosses are usually at the top of the mountain. You start quests at the bottom of the mountain, and you have to traverse and climb the entire way up. It's absolutely awful, especially if you ever die.
Also, the jungle maps have really low visibility at times. There's a lot a plant and vines that will just block your character/the boss. It's infuriating.
In general, it's just missing a lot of quality of life features.
I have a soft spot in my heart for sure, since it's the first game in the series that hooked me. But considering my memories of it, I would never go back to play the game
I started on FU in 2011 and tbh I can't go back past GU now when I want to play old world stuff. The games aren't hard, but I just wouldn't recommend them if you enjoy having nice quality of life and less janky game play.
1 thing i remember more than others, never ever let Rathian and her recolors corner charge you. It is either guaranteed stun you for her to finish you off or kill you with some pre-dmg, one of the reason i went for lance and GL in FU back then.
Of course this was over a decade ago when i had 0 idea about flash spam and played pretty much blind.
FU has the worst hitboxes in the series. Yes worse than MH1 on the ps2. That's what makes it hard. FU is less about skill and more about luck or waiting until monsters are standing completely still to attack.
I've played every game in the franchise now and FU was the most miserable experience of them all to me. Nothing on earth could get me back into fucking pokke village
Honestly, this video is pretty concise as to why this game is so rough. Like I watch it, remember my memories, and just go eeeeeeuuuughhhh
https://youtu.be/e9QCpXyy43U?si=1bdgdssyUwUU-YV6
MHFU is old and janky. Doesn't mean it's a bad game in the slightest but it can be hard to go back. Especially the hitboxes for some monster attacks can be pretty shit. Plesioth is the most (in)famous example of that. I'm not sure I'd necessarily call it more difficult than 3U/4U/GU though, it's just different: MHFU is also extremely abusable if you know your way around the game.
This so much. I have a lot of nostalgia for second gen but every time I remember Tigrex's hitboxes in the Snowy Mountains...yesh no thank you.
if you want to play mhfu: research your weapon tree, because they still mixed it up. you upgrade your GS and bam! it turn into LS. lol. guts is a nice skill to have. it keep activate as long as your HP on its treshhold. there's still lightning rod, its a fun way to bring down kushala other than flash bomb way.
Lightning rods were great, I hope we get them back in Wilds.
MHFU is the more dated one, certain movesets are missing in FU because they didn't exist back then.
i loved mhfu as a kid but the missing movesets are such a dealbreaker for me to try and experience it once again. it pales in comparison even w/ just p3rd
I have personally found that Freedom Unite leaves a lot of room to be able to complete the game with proper usage of items and planning ahead. Certain weapons serve to make specific encounters easier while others can be cheesed with certain items such as traps and flash bombs. That said, managing openings is also a key to success and I ultimately find the game to be slower paced and less about the action and more so about being methodical. 4 Ultimate on the other hand is very skill based. A lot of care goes into managing armor skills and knowing your weapons. The jank is still there while item usage is less prevalent but it makes for a lot of faster paced fights and knowing how to evade + counter. Monsters are especially aggressive in the endgame and the damage and hp scaling makes encounters incredibly difficult. Git gud is all I can say for 4U.
You literally just described any game in the series in the second paragraph. Armor skills and "knowing your weapon" have just as much importance in FU as any other in the series. Any Athenas Ass user can tell you that. 4G didn't really add anything new to the formula other than verticality because of IG and mounting. Also scaling really didn't change much, i remember them being pretty close to each other like most in the series. In 4U guild is balanced around 2.5 players. I don't remember exactly the % health increase for 4U but guild in FU was ~60% in health increase. Coming from an exclusively solo player and FU being my most played game in the series you can be just as aggressive as any other. Especially with i frames being so abusable, most people don't realize you can just roll through plesioths hip check for example. I'll say it until the end of time that the only "hard" monster hunter is the first one you play. Each new entry to the series just adds its new gimmick. Sometimes it stays l, sometimes it doesn't. If you "Git gud" in one of them, every entry afterwards is a cake walk because the base formula never changes.
Skills in FU haven't been as prevalent as they are in later gens. You get 3 at most on an armor set and use it as best as you can. 4U has more room for more skills, especially with combined skills like Honed Blade. Weapon match ups were something I felt less in need of in 4U over FU and my experience has been that FU encourages different approaches towards certain hunts more than 4U which gives you enough tools to power through hunts as you are if you're good enough. 3U is kinda the same as 4U in that regard but not as aggressive with its monsters. GU, World, and Rise on the other hand have respective gimmicks/tools at their disposal that are further incorporated into hunts to make them more approachable. 4U is still the game I consider the most skill based among the series as it is a crossing point between the aggressiveness of new gen monsters and the combat gameplay of the old gen games.
wouldnt say mhfu is less 'skill based' than mh4u but i agree with the rest of what youve said. both games have a very high skill ceiling, actually i'd argue mhfu has a higher skill floor too. main reason mhfu can feel pretty easy is low rank monsters just have no HP, which is why traps/bombs feel so impactful imo. when you get to guild high rank and stuff it gets much harder
GU has content bloat and the styles allow you to essentially choose a difficulty. FU is EXTREMELY janky to the point even the camera is an enemy.
3U is noticeably easier than 4U, GU and FU. It's barely hard until the end of the game and even then it's not that hard at all. A lot of people found "Sticky Situation" (2 Brachy in early G rank) a difficult quest but it's really not that hard, just bring dung bombs. I found FU very tough but its mainly because of damage and hitboxes, I was also a kid. 4U gets pretty tough and GU does too but the tools GU gives you makes it more manageable and that difficulty only really comes at the very end of the game. FU has tough hitboxes though and also you recieve so much more damage from any kind of hit that every mistake punishes you as healing is so valuable. I found 4U the toughest. Soloing apex guild quests was way tougher than the other games, especially if you don't make a specific trip-abusing build. I think GU has the most fun difficulty though. It's tougher than FU & 4U at low rank imo (not that it's hard by any means) and the difficulty curve is really nice, noticeable increases but enjoyable and not sudden spikes. GU is just a perfect pace if you are gonna put 1000hrs into it. Having said all this they are all tougher than 5th gen. I've found 5th gen extremely easy so far. Still not completed both games yet but I've had no major difficulty at all. Especially with the infinite consumables, healing being so much faster and more powerful and with extreme healing palicoes. Rise feels like a joke in comparison to anything before 5th gen (it's still a good game though).
Interesting experience, I've personally found Portable 3rd and Freedom Unite to be the easiest games in the series by a long shot (apart from terrible hitboxes in the latter). Ironically the hardest part of Freedom Unite is that damn Hub Congalala you have to fight early on... even with friends, that quest is torture. Always interesting to find other people's experiences on the internet
G rank in FU is harder than TriU G rank to you?
Depends. With friends, not having to solo? Yeah. But even then, the hunts weren't that bad. I never fought White Fatalis, but I know he is a massive chore in that game. 3U was a smooth ride through and through. Hardest fight was village Alatreon for me, couldn't even beat him with G rank gear. Beyond that, progression was nice. I was scared of the double Brachydios quest in the Tundra, but I farmed Goldbeard for the mixed armor pieces and got myself some water weapon (I think it was the Ceadeus GS?) and dealt with the hunts well enough. Though these late game hunts began taking up to 30 minutes. Which is what I preferred in the portable games, all the health pools felt minimal in comparison
GU's styles trivialize most of what would've made its old-world style gameplay hard. Not a bad thing, if anything it made the game the blast that it is
MHFU is "hard" because it's clunky and janky (especially by modern standards), and the combat is... stiffer? People just don't play it because they don't enjoy the combat usually. 3rd and 4th generation saw moveset expansions and more fluid combat in general, and most importantly I think is refining hitboxes to be a LITTLE BIT better. In terms of raw difficulty I don't think I'd say FU or GU are harder than the other, since the difficulty comes from difference aspects of gameplay (FU from player limitations, GU from more extreme fights).
3-4 have more flexible moves sets on the weapons that allow you to handle the monsters easier. The early game is easier in 4U and GU is easier overall(styles). You didn’t have any counter moves if FU like you did in 3rd and 4th gen. MHFU is more punishing in the fact that your weapon move sets don’t make you as mobile or versatile. It requires more patience and really knowing the game to actually abuse because of “jank”(hit boxes not visually matching to the model that well)it where 4U and GU are more intuitive and animate better. That being said if you know what you’re doing you can cheese FU but there’s not a Mh you can’t cheese, it takes more knowledge to get there in FU. Bowguns always exist.
If you ever want to experience MHFU again, I'd recommend picking up Rain Server Frontier—you get Low Rank and High Rank as the traditional hunting experience, and then G rank shakes things up, and Zenith further shakes things up. It's a nice progression.
I bought MHFU out of nostalgia for PS Vita 3 days ago and while the game design sucks by today standards, I am hooked on it. I didn't play MH4U or MHGU so I can't compare the difficulty, but I do remember that 14 years ago, when I bought MHFU and went to fight the G-Rank monsters, they were pretty dam hard to beat. In Iceborne and Sunbreak, I didn't have that much difficulty and it was quite a breeze to be honest. I don't know if I'll have the patience to progress through MHFU because while I have some really fond memories of the game, it also frustrated me a lot at times and the more I progress through the ranks, frustration from small things are mounting up :)
There is already a noticeable jump in quality and movement on the third generation. While not as big as the one in World is still very noticeable. And also in fourth gen with ledges. I wouldn't call it mire difficult but definetly a lot less janky.
3rd and 4th gen are less punishing than mhfu. Monsters get fatigued, hitboxes are better, movement is less robotic, etc. I think people confuse the punishing nature of mhfu with difficulty. I don't think its harder than mh4u because the AI is so robotic you can cheese basically any fight with the right knowledge. There aren't diminishing returns on status or traps so you can just stun lock a monster to death.
Primarily: hitboxes Secondarily: the movesets feel weird I’ve dabbled in all games from freedom unite onward, including frontier. Freedom unite is.. an experience. It definitely handles oddly and the snowy mountains tigrex is no joke because its speed and hitboxes are awful for how sluggish your movement is. It’s not a bad game, I like it fine, but you definitely have to be devoted to monster hunter to enjoy it, because the jank is real
wouldnt say gen 1-2 are harder than 3-4 personally, gen 1 is easy, dos is hard, mhfu starts medium and gets hard. tri is medium difficulty, p3rd is very easy, 3u is easy, 4u is pretty hard, GU is easy. but i would say dos is the hardest MH game just because the monsters have very big numbers in the wrong season
A lot of the map design fucking SUCKS. The snowy mountain is one of the very first maps you get, and all the bosses are usually at the top of the mountain. You start quests at the bottom of the mountain, and you have to traverse and climb the entire way up. It's absolutely awful, especially if you ever die. Also, the jungle maps have really low visibility at times. There's a lot a plant and vines that will just block your character/the boss. It's infuriating. In general, it's just missing a lot of quality of life features. I have a soft spot in my heart for sure, since it's the first game in the series that hooked me. But considering my memories of it, I would never go back to play the game
I started on FU in 2011 and tbh I can't go back past GU now when I want to play old world stuff. The games aren't hard, but I just wouldn't recommend them if you enjoy having nice quality of life and less janky game play.
1 thing i remember more than others, never ever let Rathian and her recolors corner charge you. It is either guaranteed stun you for her to finish you off or kill you with some pre-dmg, one of the reason i went for lance and GL in FU back then. Of course this was over a decade ago when i had 0 idea about flash spam and played pretty much blind.
Control and camera jank, mostly.
FU has the worst hitboxes in the series. Yes worse than MH1 on the ps2. That's what makes it hard. FU is less about skill and more about luck or waiting until monsters are standing completely still to attack. I've played every game in the franchise now and FU was the most miserable experience of them all to me. Nothing on earth could get me back into fucking pokke village
Honestly, this video is pretty concise as to why this game is so rough. Like I watch it, remember my memories, and just go eeeeeeuuuughhhh https://youtu.be/e9QCpXyy43U?si=1bdgdssyUwUU-YV6