A dated and broken title that preys on the ego of gamers to trick them into thinking they are playing a good game.
Most people complain about a lack of a lock on system on this game. But that's not the problem here. There's confusion as to what to is actually causing this game to be so difficult and unfun. The fact that the gameplay is piss-poor. Everything you do besides walking from point A to point B is unintuitive and slow. Combos string together terribly, with a cannibalized version of the PSO combo system, combat feels as unnatural in this game as it would in Sim City. While combat is the bread and butter of this game, you can also skin the creatures you kill, cook meat, forge weapons and armor, and all of that sucks too. It's usually clicking a few buttons on difficult to navigate menus and watching a dumb animation. Where's the fun?
You might think a game with such broken and awful gameplay has to have some silver lining to move the units that it moves... but things only get worse. Graphically, the game looks decidedly like a budget title from 6 years ago. The sound is unremarkable, and environments are repetitive and boring.
Now, Capcom wouldn't be able to get away with selling broken garbage like this unless there was something to confuse gamers about the quality of the game - and that's the online play. The online play is a serviceable way to experience this game with up to 3 friends. It works, but who cares? The game is equally terrible, no matter how many friends you have. The game does offer a lot of content, but when it is so poorly executed and repetitive, it honestly almost makes things worse.
Monster Hunter Tri is a game that has hype based on the elitist notion that its difficulty makes it some kind of holy grail for gamers to conquer. What fans of the Monster Hunter series don't realize is that they apologize (and sometimes even praise) what is, in black and white, bad gameplay and bad design choices on the part of the developers. Yes, the game is hard, but it is not skillfully crafted content or clever gameplay choices that give an intuitive challenge. It's just a game that's hard because it is poorly made. Capcom has been fooling gamers with the same shtick for 6 years, don't let them use the collective gamer's ego against you.