Monster Hunter: Legends of the Guild feels like one of those monkey paw wishes. The live action Monster Hunter movie sucked because it had a real terrible story tacked onto a great world that just wasn't explored nearly enough and so I wanted to see them do a movie that felt more true to the MH world better. What we got was this pretty awful "movie". I can't really call it a movie, because it's less than an hour long. It feels like either a movie that got cut real short because they realized they didn't have enough budget for it, or something that was maybe meant to be a tv series and was planned to be that, before getting chopped down to OVA length. It's paced weird, I think it was made in Japanese first because how everyone interacts with each other feels too fast, dialogue coming quick, something that happens a lot with dubbing foreign films, but they went about matching the English dub lip wise, so it looks right, but that doesn't change the movement or pacing at all, so it's very strange feeling.
Visually it's very rough. It feels like a remastered cutscene to a game from the PS2 era, most faces and such are awkward, but that is unfair to some of the real good CG that you could find back then. Everything else visually is okay, it's probably using models and stuff from Monster Hunter World, particularly with the monsters, but it's not great. The sound design, something I don't often bring up with things, is abysmal. Like they paid a random dude 20 bucks to come in and do sound effects in an afternoon, because there is zero impact to anything, there's no weight to anything and some effects are too loud, while others too quiet. Like there's a fight with a spider monster and the hits sound like they are using a pillow to smack against things, it's really awful. Also the action is just not good.
Story is lame, even for a very basic premise about saving a village from a rampaging elder dragon. Like it could've been built up across a 4 to 6 episode mini series, or probably done alright in a full length movie, because there's no time to breath here, get to know all the characters, you don't care about anyone involved, so any emotional weight they try to tack on, doesn't work in any way.
So yes, I got my traditional monster hunter movie and it sucked and I hope they don't do anymore with this animation company ever again lol This honestly reminded me abit of that Dragon Quest animated movie that came out abit ago. I dropped it, because it was awful, but it also had some similar issues this had, but I care about Monster Hunter more, so I managed to at least get through it.