Beat Xeno'jiiva today, cool fight. Overall, I liked most of the Elder Dragon fights so far, though I have yet to fight Kirin. The only fights that I didn't like were Kushala and Vaal, they really went too far with the gimmicks. Though at least I managed to get three miasma jewels for Vaal, which just made it uninteresting and easy, but I much prefer that over a tedious gimmick fight. Kushala, on the other hand, was the most obnoxious fight in the game, hands down. At least the Zorah and Vaal (with miasma jewels) fights, while rote and dull, are not downright odious, but Kushala is just frustrating with its constant knockbacks and area denial spam, which made the fight feel more like a fight against the map than the monster itself. I will probably farm some Brace Jewels before fighting it again, as I have heard stacking Flinch Free is more effective than Windproof against it, though I am not sure about this. Perhaps then the fight will play more like how my Vaal fight did: boring but not quite annoying. That is the thing with gimmick fights, once you take away the gimmick they tend to have little substance.
Teostra was just a good fight, I didn't find the Supernova that bad, I thought he telegraphed it quite well and gave you plenty of time to get out of the way, its range isn't unreasonable either. Xeno was great too, I liked how its size and immunity to mounting made me change my approach to attacking. This fight also shows how to do area denial right in a game like this: instead of filling the field with cheesy tornadoes, its floor heating doesn't outright truncate the player's field of movement but introduces a cost to using the surface which the player can then calculate in the heat of the fight against the benefit of traversing it. Punishing his explosive stomp was also a lot of fun since you never knew where the "mines" would appear after it. Both of these fights made good use of the aura mechanics that set apart the Elder Dragons without making them gimmicky, and they are among the best in the game.
I have to say my favorite fight is still Nergigante, though. No gimmicks, no bullshit, just a straight up brawl with a powerful monster. I didn't find his moves to be cheap at all, not even the dive bomb, and one thing that I liked about it was that it hit the sweet spot for me when it comes to iframes in Monster Hunter. I had found the iframes to be way too forgiving in this game. Odogaron is a case in point, I could just dance around this guy despite his twitching, and there were many times where I thought its hits should have connected, but didn't. Mind you, I am not calling for a return to Freedom Unite bullshit iframes, but MH4U had actually hit the sweet spot for me and this game felt overall like it was more forgiving than that. Again, Nergigante is an exception, and I think this fight got it just right in this regard, though Teostra and Xeno were also fine since I never felt like I got off easy when I shouldn't have in those fights.
Overall great game. Feels trivial to say it since this is basically the same thing they have been doing since at least FU (haven't played the ones before that), but it is quite a thing to see the full glory of Monster Hunter on PC, which is especially impressive to a guy like me who has only played it on portable before. The lack of loading between map areas, the smoother controls, better framerate, and yes, nicer graphics, really bring out the franchise's masterful design, even if the latter does seem to have gotten a bit streamlined in the process. Not enough to argue that it has phase shifted into popamole though, or even something unworthy of the franchise. Heck, even the introduction of scoutflies and the streamlining of resource collection, whetstones, tracking, etc. would maybe have bothered me had this been my second MH game, but as it stands, they are welcome QoL features that allow me to get all the quicker into the meat of the game. All this baby needs is to have G-Rank added in and it will probably be able to measure up with the best games in the series. As it stands, it is one of the best RPG-ish action games on PC right now along with the better Dark Souls games.
