There are some franchises in the video gaming world that are simply always difficult. Despite some franchises having worked over the years to become more accessible and less difficult, others, like the Monster Hunter franchise, still present significant challenges with every new entry that is released.

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The Monster Hunter franchise is all about finding various ways to hunt down and kill enormous, dangerous creatures. While a lot of games focus on this sort of style, none do it like Monster Hunter, providing endless entertainment as a franchise for decades now. However, the games are particularly challenging, especially these entries in the series.

8 Monster Hunter Rise

The most recently released entry in the Monster Hunter franchise remains one of the easier games in the series, prompting fans to wonder what comes next. However, it presents some different challenges throughout and is still by no means a simplistic game compared to other franchises. The main thing that has helped to make more recent entries easier is the many options that players can use to fight the giant beasts they’re attempting to mow down.

Monster Hunter Rise makes hunts a lot more possible if players prepare. There is a good deal of small accessibility and quality of life improvements over various previous entries in the series that players can deal with monsters in much easier ways, though there are still some incredibly challenging fights. Silkbind attacks are a new addition that makes immobilizing monsters so much easier, and therefore hunts are quicker and the game a little easier overall.

7 Monster Hunter Generations

One of the games not considered part of the main franchise, Generations is a Monster Hunter game that was released only for handheld Nintendo devices in 2016. There were a few features introduced in this entry that helped to make it a little more difficult, as it took a lot of getting used to concepts like the new Hunting Arts, changing the nature of some of the gameplay that players were engaging in during hunts.

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The handheld versions of other Monster Hunter games have been a mixed bag, due to there being some difficulty in bringing the controls of such games to these devices. As such, in games like Generations, some of the difficulty at times is unintentional. Besides that, Generations is a fun and fondly remembered entry in the series.

6 Monster Hunter World: Iceborne

The upgraded version of Monster Hunter World featuring the massive and impressive Iceborne DLC is considered one of the very best Monster Hunter experiences in history by many, making fans debate between World and Rise for the best game. The great thing about Monster Hunter World is that it managed to improve the quality of life for players throughout their gameplay without reducing much of the difficulty.

What disappeared in the challenge compared to previous entries was mostly grinding. Gathering materials and tracking creatures was made easier, and all of these “boring” parts of the game therefore took a lot more time. Having become Capcom’s best-selling game of all time, the creators of Monster Hunter World have nothing to regret in terms of the challenge that the game gives players, even with the great co-op options.

5 Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate

Harder than the original version of the game, Monster Hunter Tri, the Ultimate upgrade in this generation of Monster Hunter games was a problem in a few different ways. Despite adding new features such as underwater combat, the games weren’t as well put together in some different ways and these weaknesses led to the generation being less successful than it could have been.

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The challenge of a number of hunts, especially the underwater ones, was extremely high, and the underwater combat never returned to the series. New features like a larger map where players could hunt outside of quests were also available, but the challenges associated with creating this hadn’t all been solved at this stage.

4 Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate

Another challenging ultimate edition, Monster Hunter 4 was only released in the West in the Ultimate, handheld form. Challenges came in the form of there being a lot more height and verticality to the hunts and maps, and a lot more environmental-based difficulty in general which challenged players during hunts.

By the time players get to G-Rank, the difficulty is probably as extreme as the franchise gets. The spread of challenge was fair and reasonable compared to other games, but players often found themselves lowering the ranks whenever they could to avoid this heightened challenge, as it was a cut above almost any other game in the franchise at its worst.

3 Monster Hunter

Any new franchise will have problems balancing difficulty perfectly, and Monster Hunter was no different. Supposed to be a challenge from the start, and released for the PS2 at a time when accessibility wasn’t yet the focus for games, the challenge of each hunt could get rather extreme. It was almost Soulslike in nature.

Players were expected to learn the movements of each creature and challenge themselves by consistently dying to slowly solve how to take them on. While the controls weren’t yet perfected and the balancing hadn’t been entirely solved yet, Monster Hunter remained one of the most challenging games of its time.

2 Monster Hunter Freedom Unite

The final version of Monster Hunter 2, and one of the few versions of the game released in the West, remains one of the pinnacles of challenge in the series. Despite some controls being better than in the first game, the different ways that players were able to fight creatures remained quite limited in this entry.

Additionally, players still needed to know so much about each creature to be able to defeat them. But this became a much more difficult proposition because the second generation of Monster Hunter games contained so many more creatures, making this a horrifically hard game to get the hang of off the bat.

1 Monster Hunter Frontier

The slow leveling and grinding system within the MMORPG version of the Monster Hunter franchise made for one of the most difficult experiences that could be achieved in the series. Because of the many different options for new gear that could be obtained, the difficulty of different creatures, especially ones added later, became increasingly ridiculous.

Frontier was infamous for being “against the player” because of the challenge it possessed. The creators wanted constantly to give their fan base an even greater challenge, making some of the fights insane in difficulty terms because of how much work players had to do to be ready for any of the biggest creatures in the game.

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