I first played the series with World in 2018. It felt so long ago now. My discord account said it was made in 2016, but 2018 was the year I truly used it, and consequently, the day the Deppu persona was truly born. I recall looking around the PS4 community tab back then, as I was still a console gamer, and noticed a large group with a discord link. I joined it during the beta of MHW.

It was strange, to say the least. I was never one to interact. Back then, I usually just browse chan and reddit, reading without interacting. This was the first time I ever truly interacted. Even to this day, I am still in a server with people from that early group, talking on the daily and even playing MH Wilds now and then.

The server, it turns out, was ran by a twitch streamer. I still feel a bit bad to this day for only watching his stream once or twice, considering how much his community had impacted my life. Then again, the people I still talk to doesn't feel like to be that big of a fan of his anyway. It was one of those discord drama where a large enough server splintered into cliques. I simply fell into one of the cliques, and left the main server.

Regarding monster hunter itself; it is a series I play on the bleakest years of my life. Which is not something you'd expect to hear from a game one enjoys quite a lot. I can hardly recall, but I must've put about 1500 hours into the game. The day rolling into another in a blurry haze as I indulged in sickly NEETdom, playing games from evening to the early dawn.

In an odd way, I both love and resent the series for it. I love it for the few friends it had managed to earn me, and I resent it for all the lost hours of my life, deco farming. To this day, I still have no idea how I could've played the game so much. I remember spending so many hours into the base game—not even the expansion—and just joining the server's lobby and joining random quests. It was fun in a bitter way.

Today, neither Rise nor Wilds gripped me as hard as World. I don't think it is due to the quality of the game, but rather my bettering condition as the years progressed. I started medication around Rise and found a job around Wilds. The more things are looking up irl, the less I game. I wonder if integrating into society is something to celebrate or to mourn. As if something was lost from me in exchange. Alas, time flows.