Can't believe I put in nearly 20 hours into Monster Hunter freedom in the past week. The combat is quite good but man does this game have some really retarded missions. The egg collections and mining missions are really stupid and I dislike how nearly every monster I've fought so far has been the same with a different color of paint that changes their fireball. The game heavily encourages farming which is bullshit. You'll have to beat a boss/monster several times just to get their loot and their fucking body might disappear before you can even carve the loot.
Anyone else who is familiar with this series, should I continue playing freedom, then move on to freedom unite, then portable 3rd and then monster hunter 3? or should some of these be skipped?
There's a strategy for most of them. The first thing is to only do the key quests to unlock the next tier of monsters. Check a wiki for whichever version you're playing. Secondly, the game is grinding/farming with a core of boss fights. After a couple of hundreds of hours you can automate some of the resource grinding, but you'll still have to do the odd resources-only run.
The monsters do change vastly over time, but the first tier consists of Baggis, Jaggis and such to get you used to the controls before they throw you against
The Wall, a Querupeco.