User blog comment:Plexioth- xD/Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate/@comment-1758220-20120313035438/@comment-76.69.2.56-20120314091512

If you didn't want a console war, then you should have made comments about consoles that actually made sense.

Monster Hunter's situation in the West is indeed bleak. But that doesn't have anything to do with the release schedule in Japan or what system the games are on in Japan like you were saying. That doesn't affect Western fans and there's really no evidence showing that Monster Hunter players in the West prefer the game on consoles over portables. No, this problem is entirely due to one thing: Monster Hunter's Western availability. Importers are pretty small group in a game's fanbase. If Monster Hunter Tri G came out in America, the fanbase would flare up, whether it came out for 3DS or PS3 or iOS.

You said that an HD console (well, you used the phrase "last-gen", but in proper terms the Wii is the same generation as the 360 while the 3DS is the next generation) would improve Monster Hunter's content and gameplay. Can you prove this? Monster Hunter has never pushed the hardware in terms of game content. It's also not a hardware pushing system in terms of game mechanics: it isn't like Dead Rising where the system needs to handle a massive number of enemies. It isn't a game with a huge open world with events happening off-screen. The only thing that the HD's power would actually go to is higher quality graphics, but that also increases the size of the graphics budget as well as increase the amount of data the game would have to load. Load times would increase and more of the development time would go into working on the graphics, less on gameplay elements. I don't mind the dream if an HD Monster Hunter, but it isn't hurting the series by not going HD.

As for Monster Hunter becoming a yearly series and stagnating... That makes absolutely no sense. Obviously you're not talking about the Western fanbase anymore at that point because we haven't got a Monster Hunter since 2010. But the Japanese franchise has always been more than yearly: they've released at least one game every year since the first one in 2005. As for growing stagnant, Monster Hunter 4 seems to be hoping to buck that trend.