Luke Summerhayes is a big Monster Hunter fan. He records Monster Mash, a weekly podcast about the monsters of the series and will soon be sharing his hunting wisdom with Chris Pengilly in a new youtube series. Contact him on twitter with any additional questions you have or helpful things you've found.
Monster Hunter Double Cross, or MHXX if you want to do my fingers and wrists a favour, launches tomorrow for the Nintendo Switch. It is a high definition, expanded upgrade of Monster Hunter Generations for the 3DS. Unfortunately it's only coming out in Japan for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, the Switch is region free and there's a whole host of great help out there in the Monster Hunter community.
More for my own benefit than anyone else's, I am going to use this page to answer questions and collate sources of help. Keep checking back as I plan to update this page as and when I find snippets of new information.
So, you want to import MHXX?
No, I don't.
Well, we can fix that. If you've never tried a Monster Hunter game before, give this a listen. Some time ago, before we started Monster Mash, and long before we learned how to keep our audio at a decent quality, we did a podcast special on why players of Dark Souls might be interested in playing Monster Hunter.
Okay, fine I will
Good stuff.
How do I download the game?
The first thing you'll need is to set yourself up to access the Japanese eShop. Adam Evanko, better known on Youtube as Gaijin Hunter, has a great video taking you step by step through the process. Once you'reset up with your account, the cheapest bet (particularly post-Brexit), will be to buy some eShop credit rather than trying to directly use a western bank to buy things in Yen. I recommend Play Asia.
Once you have 6,000 yen on a Japanese eShop account, you're ready to download.
How do I play the game?
If you're literally asking how to play Monster Hunter, there are two answers. The first is to look up Gaijin Hunter again. His youtube channel has tutorials on every aspect of the game's mechanics and weapons. My other answer would be: maybe don't play your first Monster Hunter game in a language you don't speak?
If you are familiar with Monster Hunter, though, a youtuber by the name of RedmondStache has done an amazing introduction to piecing things together in Japanese.
I've printed out this list of Kanji to stick on my wall.
That should get you started, hopefully. I'll be updating this post as I find more useful bits and bobs.
Good luck!
UPDATE: Man, RedmondStache is kind of making this whole article redundant by putting out a whole playlist of useful videos all in one place!