After the introduction, which is by far the weakest of all in the series, you would be starting at the middle of.. welcome (back) to Moga Village, and everything stays the same except one thing, the last time you left. Talk to everyone with bubbles on their heads, you would find out the someone is missing, the elder's son. On the south west port you will see a cat, and that's the new thing to the village, the cat will bring you to the guild village which is located at another island. And another unfriendly system coming back to haunt us, the point based gathering in the farm and barter trading with the fat lady. It works just like in Tri, meaning no more free farming after quests which can be extremely annoying.

First thing first, you would need to find the elder's son who is located at the camp in Moga forest, and pass him a piece of raw meat (he's starving may be?). You will learn that the village needs some rebuilding and thus return to the village.

Elder's son will stand on a pile of crates and talk to him. You will learn that you need to get 30 points to help the rebuilding. Here you go again to the Moga forest and slay minions, gathering stuffs to make up the 30 points. Once you have enough you'd need to return to the village and talk to the son again to exchange the points (last option).

Next you would be more than happy to help the weapon smith. He needs an iron ore to restart his career (and yours too) and gives you a great pickaxe. Go o Moga forest again and find the mining points (only 2 of them). Again return to the village and pass the iron ore to the weapon smith (the last option).

Finally before you are allowed to step foot outside in the wild you will need to learn how to swim. Go to the big ocean in the north of Moga forest, kill whatever fish you see there, collect, gather stuffs along the way (you'll find your first machalite ore in area 12, and that's not along the way). Back to forest, and the elder will now allow you to take village quests.

1* to 5* quests are pretty straight forward, with a few capture quests making an unwelcoming return. These quests require you to capture instead of slaying, so beware of the difference. Also note that monsters seem to get up faster than previously before, so lay your trips quickly.

I wouldn't recommend spending much time making armors at this stage of the game, I have been wearing Jaggi armor since the very beginning and had been serving me till reaching the next stage of the village quests. Weapons on the other hand are business as usual, upgrade whenever possible. Rathalos weapons seems to have the highest juice in low rank, no matter the monster is weak to fire element or not. The catch is it only appears late in low rank, very late.

You will get requests from chief's son to upgarde your farms, new masks etc and do them since you must fulfill some of them to progress. There are 2 key requests, one is getting the ancient mask (1) from the statue behind the waterfall in your farm, the other is fixing the Caedeus battle camp (2). After unlocking the ancient mask (1) you will have access to more fights in 5*, and do Rathalos and Barioth quests to unlock request (2) which will again unlock 2 further quests in which slaying Uragaan is enough. After you have done all these the Tri's final battle appears.

After watching the "ending" after the Caedeus fight and you would be greeted with a Purple Ludroth by the village quest lady. This is a high rank quest so there will be no supplies provided initially, just in case you have forgotten. After the fight you can have access to high rank in village quests now The free roaming in Moga forest also upgraded to high rank if you choose to enter it during the night, but the points given by each monster stays the same.

Sakura is back..

Ok here's my short review based on the 10 something hours I have put into, before meeting any new monsters nor subspecies.

Graphics: 8
Screen size isn't really a problem with the 3DS, but the 400 x 240 resolution is. Everything in the game is very well animated, in fact the smoothest I have seen in any MH game. However there isn't much details into everything as well, especially the items' icons in the item box. I have no idea how 3d in 3DS works, but in MH it's just different layers of flat polygons displayed on screen instead of something zooming out proportionally. It's really a hit or miss.

Update: The shading effect is really nice! Finally you can feel the sun light effect, either the sun's direction or being covered by the cloud. However there's a bigger problem I have encountered and that's frame rate problem, which happened alot in Thundra especially. It can goes way too fast or too slow which really affect your timing. And it's harder to look for shiny too due to the bright floor in Thundra.

Sound: 8
No Pro Logic II support do affect those who usually hunt in surround sound setup environment, which I am. Otherwise the BGM and effects are unusually clear for a Nintendo handheld.

Update: The music doesn't get anymore exciting, and after spending much time listening to P3's OST recently the 3G version do sound abit bland.

Control: 2
Bad, really bad. The 3DS is just too crampy, the analog stick and L button position are to close to each other. And the upper and lower screen weight balance makes it even worse, making my hands tired after only an hour or so, or immediately if you are in a action filled quest. Hope slidepad can compensate this.

Update: I'm still having some problem despite already spent over 200 hours with the slidepad. While it becomes easier to control with it I still find myself losing control during panic time (which had not happened before, even with clawing on PSP). Unsheathe weapons, especially when swimming also gave me alot of problem.

Gameplay: 8 for Tri hunters, 10 for the rest
Everything stays intact, to the original Tri formula. The farm system is very tedious, and free roaming in Moga forest can be extremely frustrating especially in the gamer's climax stage. Random appearance of gathering spots in the map is back, which can be good or bad. I also find out that this game is more generous in accuracy. Something I thought I had missed actually hit, something I failed to aimed actually destroyed that specific part. Good for noobs like me.

Update: Despite having G rank in addition to low and high rank, the game doesn't feel repetitive since there some monsters, especially the sub species, only available at higher rank so you won't feel like wasting time grinding the same monsters at all levels. This is a really big plus since the non hunting quests are basically gone once you have completed them once. However the sub species do artificially make this game bigger, which is just cheating in reality. Black blos, green Naruga, green Plessy, ice Moron, sand Barrioth, red Pekko, white Lagia, Gold and Silver, farting Uragaan, those are some monsters that really spoil this game for me.