User blog comment:Pink Fatalis/Poll: MH4 is out in Japan! What are your thoughts?/@comment-1011548-20130826171841/@comment-3062343-20130826223511

I agree with most of this, particularly the part about the returning monsters. To be fair though, there's a fair few of the old monsters that we haven't seen any substantial gameplay for (e.g. Kushala, Kirin, Teo, Congalala etc.), so they may have received a significant revamp. The climbing on monsters seems pretty gimmicky to me too, but at least it doesn't seem to be a necessary part of gameplay, so I can just avoid doing it. I guess it's kind of like Dragon's Dogma in that regard; I expected DD to have more mandatory monster-climbing, given how much they showed it off prior to release, but I ended up pretty much never doing it. To be honest, I'm really getting the impression that DD was partially made as a testing ground for mechanics Capcom wanted to be in MH4.