What were Hunting Styles and Hunter Arts?

Generations let you rebuild your own hunter: four fighting styles and a super move for every one of the fourteen weapons.

Monster Hunter Generations arrived in Japan as Monster Hunter X (‘Cross’) on November 28, 2015, reaching the West the following July. The X was a thesis, as producer Shintaro Kojima explained: cross divides a space into four, so the game offered four Hunting Styles, four flagship monsters, and four villages, three of them returning hometowns from earlier games.

The Hunting Styles rewired every weapon: Guild, the classic style; Striker, simplified and aggressive; Aerial, built around vaulting off monsters; and Adept, rewarding perfect dodges with counter-attacks. Hunter Arts added charged super moves, and Prowler mode let you play as a Felyne outright. The expanded XX (2017) and its Switch edition, Generations Ultimate (August 28, 2018), pushed the bestiary to the largest the classic formula ever held, and Ultimate’s 5.4 million copies made it the biggest game of the pre-World era.