Dead Horse Interchange

Well, I guess it's back to my God Eater waifus then.

Sakuya top waifu, am I doing this correct?

You have no idea how pissed I am that God Eater 2 made her the Waifu-Not-Appearing-In-This-Game.

So after playing in very limited chunks and finally deciding which weapon suits me, so far (Sword, but there's a ranged weapon coming in two patches and I'm hoping it's good because I love being a ranger), I've finally found my stride in the game and am starting to see its value.

I kept getting annoyed with hitboxes and the fact that you need something called, "weapon archonite," to upgrade your weapons. Unfortunately you get this in such small amounts (the max I'm able to get, right now, is 11 per full hunt) that you're going to burn yourself out if you try to craft and upgrade every weapon type (which the game encourages you to do given that daily missions require you to use specific weapons). In the time span it takes to craft all 5 of a monster's weapons and fully upgrade them you will have so much of the, "armor archonite," for upgrading your defense that you actually run out of money before you run out of armor upgrade materials.

Once I began to treat it 100% like I treat Monhun, but replacing bows with swords, I was able to find my groove. Still recommend taking it in very small chunks, however.
After you get to a specific monster, named Embermane, you start to see that they didn't just make every monster drop one material item. However, all 5 (or was it 6?) previous monsters do this. You break their tail? Hide. Head? Hide. Legs? Hide. Embermane suddenly changes all of this, giving you a horn for his head, tailspike for his tail, and claws for each leg.

The necessity to break parts in order to obtain materials is still a questionable design choice but, at the same time, Monhun had the problem, at end game, where you'd just blitz a monster and only break parts, intentionally, if you were farming specific materials that part made drop or you were just dicking around for fun, minus monsters who become crippled if you break specific parts (Chameleos, for example). Apparently there's also a further stipulation that breaking parts will drop different materials if you break them while the monster is in different states. Chat had people complaining about a specific part of a lightning monster that would only drop as, "charged," if you waited until the monster charged it.

I also question the necessity of a 30 minute mission timer and also a danger meter that slowly fills up to 100% over time, fighting the monster or not, that disables reviving and causes the monster to deal far more damage. Just feels like a dick move to have two different timers with one going up (danger meter) if you perform badly meaning your party can actually ruin the hunt in a far worse way than just, "welp, we failed, time to try again."

Still have a lot more to experience before I can truly say if the game is full on, "bad," or just, "different." Lots of optimization issues, but the game is only at version 0.4.4, or something like that.
In the end, as annoyed as I was with the early experience, the game kept making me want to go back and play it so they're clearly doing something right.

How about the other parts of the MonHun gameplay loop? Any collecting, crafting, eating something before the hunt, small monsters and such?

No small monsters, no eating. There is collecting but the only crafting you do is your armor and your weapons. Also some potions, which you can take up to four different types. You get 5 heals and 1 self revive per mission and they refill automatically after a hunt (think Estus Flask).

I chalk it missing all of the other parts that make Monster Hunter what it is to the fact that it's so beta that it's not even considered its first version but you definitely notice the absence.

Their version of gems are these essence cells that you collect. Their version of armor skills follows Monster Hunter World's version almost entirely, except you only have 4 armor pieces instead of 5 and all weapons come with a skill instead of only a few, if any.

In an earlier version of the beta they had the monsters get tired as they got weaker, just like in MonHun, but that doesn't exist, currently. I'm hoping it comes back so that they can add capturing or give actual moments to attack some of the monsters, at the least.
The only super interesting combat mechanic, so far, is something the community calls, "booping," but is referred to as an, "interrupt," in the game. During certain attack animations you can use certain attacks with high enough stagger (think hammer pound versus sword and shield swing) to knock a monster out of the attack and leave them on the ground for an opening. The mechanic starts to become more apparent when you fight the Embermane who will charge at you and constantly jump around-- during the charge nearly any attack on his head will knock him out but you have to specifically hit him in the head and you can knock him out while still eating the hit if you miss the timing slightly.

It still being beta might explain why the earlier monster had only one drop (provided those are also the first monsters they designed). They might patch some more in later I guess.

Earlier versions of the beta had the early monsters dropping more parts. They deliberately lowered it down to one.
They also removed killing the wildlife for parts (wildlife meaning literally just goats who now exist purely to obstruct you and that's it).
They also changed gathering although I don't know how much it has affected anything, since gathering, now, only helps you make potions for buffing yourself.

Sounds lame. Those goats better get patched to charge at you during the monster fight. I need that for my authentic MonHun experience.

Just reading that I get Konchu flashbacks.