Watch out! Lord of Arcana is a BRUTAL Action-RPG...

[Yggdrasil]

Since we're talking about monster hunter, I've been thinking about getting into it but every time I do research on it, I'm unable to find anything like a story in any games so is it pretty much all fighting without story?

Monster Hunter is pretty much the son of Street Fighter II if you think about it. It's awesome and you don't really need an excuse to kill shit like crazy but the game still give you "Quests" as an excuse. The entire charm of the franchise is in his "old fashioned" design as a game (and you know, old school video game design > new video games).

That's how I see the whole franchise anyway.

[FlamingR1ft]

Yeah, there's no story. You go on missions (without any kind of plot explanation) to:

i) Collect certain things (plants or items)
ii) Kill a boss monster
iii) Kill multiple smaller ones.
iv) Occasionally some other random stuff.

It gets exceptionally difficult. Did you ever play Demon's Souls? This is much harder. I hear the Wii version (Monster Hunter Tri) is a little easier though.

[Tooker]

Monster Hunter hates you and wants you to fail... at least if you're playing alone.  My understanding is that the combat was much more balanced for multiplayer than for solo play, which is good, because it's not balanced even the tiniest bit when playing alone.

I somehow really enjoyed MH some of the time - enough to keep playing through a lot of times when I hated it.  I've put it down twice and come back to it, and I still have my copy, despite giving away or selling a lot of other games.