After putting in over 800 hours into this game's predecessor, Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, this game plays with the gameplay mechanics a bit while still retaining the good feel of victory after each hunt.

Like the other games in the series, the main gameplay focuses around your character hunting monsters, with the key focus of avoiding their attacks and attacking at opportune moments between their attacks, often times hitting their weak points for massive damage. And, like every game in the series, you can't heal and attack super quickly; you need to get out of the way of an incoming attack and heal, then continue avoiding attacks until the opportune moment to strike.

There's a smaller weapon variety in this game, but each weapon is still unique in how it plays, as how you attack with each weapon slightly differs, so I'm glad they retained that feature. Another feature that's also in this game is the limited inventory space, so you have to manage your inventory as you progress; you can't hold everything, after all.

One thing I'm sort of iffy about is the limited hunter rank; in the previous game, it was 999, but in this game it's only 20. This makes it much easier to cap your rank, and it doesn't feel as rewarding, but the grind it takes to get there is a lot quicker so I guess that's a plus.

Perhaps the best part of the entire franchise is that the main 'large monsters' get their own battle theme, and this game is no exception, providing intense battle music for the two flagship boss monsters, as well as the usual recurring map theme for regular hunts.

One mechanic that I abused greatly seemed to have been removed until the final boss, and that is the popular tactic known as sleep bombing; towards endgame, you're given the only weapon with the sleeping status effect. Nothing quite satisfies like putting the monster to sleep then destroying it with one devastating unseen strike to finish it off.

All in all, this game plays quite differently than the other Monster Hunter games, but still retains many of its core features and that's why I recommend it. It has significantly less content than the other Monster Hunter games, but it's also significantly cheaper so it balances out nicely.