Start:
Fighting a boss in several different flat arenas. The boss is bigger than you and has priority over your actions. You are slow, largely vulnerable, will get punished severely for acting rashly and must learn when it is safe to attack.
Generation 2
Fighting a boss in several different flat arenas. The boss is bigger than you and has priority over your actions. You are slow and largely vulnerable, will get punished severely for acting rashly and must learn when it is safe to attack. You can sacrifice damage for evasion skills now, which subverts this a bit (especially on lance)
Generation 3
Fighting a boss in several different flat arenas ´´and underwater arenas. The boss is bigger than you and has priority over your actions. You are slow and largely vulnerable, will get punished severely for acting rashly and must learn when it is safe to attack even though attacking is weird and unsatisfying underwater''. Lance gets a counter and dbs get fast, which subverts this a bit. Hitboxes no longer suck.
Dialogue gets more colorful and some cinematics get more cutesy, maybe.
Generation 4
Introduction of sloped areas, climbing areas, jumping moves and pseudo-aerial combat. Monsters and player movesets are not at all balanced around the introduction of sloped environments, many monsters even lacking the correct animations to deal with slopes. Monster have no method of dealing with vaulting players, and will only be able to hit them due to hitboxes which aren't adjusted for player verticality. Kind of a critical error when it's the game's major selling point. Ledges constantly interrupt the player's movement and can punish the player by forcing them into an extremely vulnerable jumping state, which is a problem when small ledges aren't visible to the player when the camera is pointed at the monster. Introduction of evasion+3 allows complete invincibility for long periods of time, or significant enough evasion to not be punished for making mistakes in most instances. Iglaive always powerful and on the cover to make sure all the new players flock to it and can spam mount. CB trash initially, but gets access to cancel into counter-able guard at any point with massive motion values, huge amounts of true damage as well as exhaust and KO damage all in one hit. That you can pull out of a counter. Also the cutscenes are like a bad disney movie.
Item sets was nice though
Gens
Fighting a boss in several different sloped and flat arenas. The boss is bigger than you but you have priority over most of it's actions. You are quick, rarely vulnerable, will get rewarded significantly for acting rashly and must always attack or be spamming absolute readiness. Hyper monsters and deviants are introduced to combat these empowered players, where the design philosophy is 'Big flashy unpredictable AoE attacks half of the time, standing still doing nothing the other half'.
XX
DUDE HOLD Y LMAO
MHW
This game which takes all the worst things from 4U and gens, adds paid dlc and full blown walking while shooting controls and cool cinematic monster interaction is exactly the same as classic monster hunter yep, you guys are all just lame meanie haters that can't deal with changes.