Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate

For many players in the West, this very title was the moment when they finally understood why the Monster Hunter series is such a phenomenon in Japan. Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate from Capcom arrived on the 3DS and brought with it a depth, addictiveness, and community spirit that can swallow up hundreds of hours.

The core of the game is wonderfully simple to grasp and infinitely complex to master. You hunt giant monsters, harvest materials from their bodies, and forge ever better weapons and armor from those materials so you can hunt even larger and more dangerous beasts. This looping cycle of preparation, hunting, and upgrading is the engine of the entire series, and here it runs at full throttle.

The fourth main installment brought a fundamental novelty in the form of verticality. For the first time you could climb walls, leap from heights, and land aerial attacks on monsters, giving battles an entirely new dimension. New weapon types were also added, such as the Insect Glaive for aerial acrobatics and the Charge Blade with its shifting combat style, expanding the already rich arsenal of fourteen distinct weapons, each of which plays like its own game.

The absolute heart of the experience, however, is cooperative hunting. Up to four players can team up and take down a monster together in tense, coordinated combat where timing, knowledge of the beast's behavior, and mutual support all matter. This game got countless communities on their feet and became an enormous social experience.

Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate became a commercial success outside Japan as well and played a key role in the series establishing itself on the global market. It laid the foundations for the later worldwide phenomenon Monster Hunter: World, and for many Western players it remains the game that pulled them into this addictive hunt.

Why play it: It offers the most addictive loop of hunting, forging, and upgrading with a superb co-op for up to four players. An ideal gateway into the world of Monster Hunter for anyone wanting depth measured in hundreds of hours.