Also...does Monster Hunter actually have plot?
Sort of? Much like Soulsborne games, there's a
lot of lore lurking in the background for people to piece together, and which suggests that the setting's almost a dead ringer for the kind of post-postapocalyptic worlds that Studio Ghibli is so fond of. You know, tech-heavy arms race led to massive war that devastated the planet and changed it forever, the remnants of humanity have rebuilt and created a new civilization much closer to nature? The modern plots tend to be much more local in scale, tied to the rise of a new generation of Hunters, with the player character usually taking point in discovering some new-ish monsters (usually regarded as myth) that the locals are not prepared to deal with. So plots tend strongly towards "save the town from the new threat" stories.
For example, in Monster Hunter 4, the main plot kicks off with an odd plague that starts affecting the local monsters. Nobody knows anything about this Frenzy Virus, just that records about some great disaster a century or so prior do seem to describe similar events. Regardless, it's having a very pronounced effect on the ecosystem as it's basically super-rabies if super-rabies was more easily transmitted. While it's not fatal in humans, monsters infected with it become hyper aggressive and most tend to die a few days later. Those few that survive get a sizable boost in their abilities. So this is a
big problem for the local ecosystem. Turns out that this is due to a hithero unknown monster they dub Gore Magala, which the protagonist ends up encountering and fighting off on several occasions and essentially acts as the central antagonist of the game.
In Monster Hunter World, the plot itself is more in the vein of discovery, with the protagonist being part of the fifth research fleet sent to the "New World" landmass for the sake of advancing knowledge about its ecosystem and why Elder Dragons flock to it every decade or so in what has been dubbed the "elder crossing". When they puzzle it out, they realize that something screwy's going on and they have to intervene in the current Crossing lest a natural disaster be artificially produced that would more or less destroy the "New World".
Monster Hunter doesn't tend towards Final Fantasy style plots where humans with god-complexes take center stage as the antagonists. They tend more towards "we must prevent an invasive species from creating local environmental collapse" or "if we don't drive off this elder dragon, the nearby town will be destoryed".
