Only decided to write this review now that I've finished the main story and have progressed to High Rank, where the game really opens up.

The GOOD:
- The combat flow and pacing is absolutely phenomenal. I was very disappointed with the way Rise handled some of it's weapon balancing, so a return to a more World-like pacing and doing reworks of weapons from there was absolutely the right thing to do. Shield weapons feel excellent to play again, especially in combination with the decoration rebalancing, which may be a controversial change in itself, but does feel fresh either way rather than a downright nerf.
Oh, and the Offset Attacks and Power Clashes just add to the wild new experience. (Pun not intended)
- I adore the idea of the ever-evolving world with the seasons, it's actually a throwback to the second installment in the series from days long gone. Not only do the changing seasons modify the weather patterns and visual appearances of the world, but they change what monsters you can encounter.
- Monster variety is- even with the very limited roster, excellent, from the return of the fan favorite Leviathans to completely NEW types of monsters for us to fight. Heck, the new designs in general are a breath of fresh air (even if I think we could still make a game based solely on favorite returning monsters).
- Navigating the vast open world with seamless transitions feels VERY good - It's ambitious, to say the least, almost a little too much. To think just two generations ago, we had loading screens between areas.
- The visuals, while not much of an improvement over World are at least decent enough. Most particularly, the character models look extremely good- and the world itself does NOT feel empty.
- Networking finally seems to work. I don't even care about the crossplay stuff, but the fact that we can make a group and drop-in drop-out is really nice for the people I know who play.

The BAD:
- OPTIMIZATION... or lack thereof - Okay, let's address the elephant in the room. This is the one reason why I'm marking this review as 'Not Recommended'. Needless to say, and I won't sugarcoat, the performance is absolutely AWFUL. I know Capcom REALLY is trying to push the envelope with their games as of recent, and I love the games they make, but did they seriously not learn a thing from how badly World was optimized at launch? Because prepare yourself to indulge in the beautiful choppy 30FPS this game serves to you right here on a plate. Especially for the fact that this game looks decent, but really doesn't look THAT much better than World that it would warrant having double the amount of VRAM for a WORSE framerate.
Okay, jokes aside, I'm extremely fortunate to have a pretty beefy computer that's able to run this game as well as it can, but there is absolutely NO REASON anyone should need a PC of my specs or better. People with lower end hardware exist, and deserve to be able to play this game as much as people with the higher end hardware.
I also don't get nearly as good of performance as I did in the benchmark, which puzzles me, since the benchmark was an earlier version of the game, before they "optimized" it. To rub salt in the wound, the game, on startup, recommends FRAME GENERATION. Seriously, just let it sit in for a couple seconds. On a game like this, where frame-time inputs are not uncommon, especially with Perfect Guards and Offset Attacks, which have relatively tight timing, WHY would we even think of using something that is well-known to cause frame-time and input lag issues?
Actually, the optimization is so inconsistently garbage that my friend's brand-new RTX 5090 (which definitely costed him more than my entire computer) barely maintains 60fps without frame generation, but one of my OTHER friends, who's stuck on an aging RTX 2080 somehow runs the game better than him. I'm in complete disbelief that a game could release in 2025 and be this poor of a technical state, and it's truly unacceptable that optimization like this can exist after this game's lengthy development cycle.
"But dear reviewer!" I hear you say. "It'll get better with time!"
Simply put, games should quit releasing in such an unfinished state. If your Q/A team KNOWS the game is in a terrible technical state, DON'T RELEASE IT, simply put. Me, and many others, are utterly sick of giving developers the benefit of the doubt with optimization. There's literally zero reason that games with such large budgets can be so plagued with issues. We pay for 100+ dollar deluxe editions and get an avalanche of problems dumped on our heads.
- While I didn't notice any game-breaking bugs, I DID notice some graphical artifacts, which are EXTREMELY jarring when they come up.
- The whole story of the game is insanely hand-holdy. That's not a dealbreaker for me, since I understand they want the game to be accessible- even if it's a very small fraction of what the game offers, did you guys really have to make co-op'ing the whole thing WORSE than World?
- On the topic of the story, the whole "walk around" sections got boring VERY quick. Some of them were so long and boring I just used the opportunity to do homework instead of paying attention to the game.
- Day one micro transactions and we have to pay for a voucher to edit our hunter despite such things being free in Generation 4 and prior.

The UGLY:
- Denuvo anti-tamper, and a two-fold implementation at that, on top of the already exceptionally bad performance this game has. Capcom even shoved their own proprietary DRM into the game which functionally stops you from modding it. because they declared all mods as cheats.
A double DRM, which runs on ALL 16 THREADS of my CPU!!!
Lemme just say, such heavy-handed DRM use is inexcuseable - even if you want to stop piracy and preserve the sales of the first couple of months, it ALWAYS comes at the cost of legitimate consumers.
Heck, I even had activation problems at first, since my internet provider isn't known for being the best. I can only hope Denuvo gets removed later in it's life as it has with prior titles.

Verdict:
So many people including myself were massively hyped for the 6th generation of Monster Hunter. On one hand, the hype was absolutely worth it, especially considering the immense success of Monster Hunter: World and Iceborne, Wilds was saddled with some truly tremendous expectations, and so far, it lives up: every single weapon feels great to use, almost every single monster in this game has been pretty fun so far, especially the new ones, the ever-changing environment of this game keeps things fresh, and most importantly, Wilds took everything World did and did it one step BETTER. Simply put, escapism sells.
But the game is utterly plagued on the technical side, from the slew of performance issues, to the double-whammy DRM implementation... it just turned so many of my friends away from buying it, and made a couple of them refund even after preorders, especially with the massive price tag of this game. Looking past the performance I enjoy it, but for that reason I can't recommend it.

Ever since I started with Monster Hunter, I've adored it and the spin-offs, and it's with a heavy heart that I have to put "not recommended". Even though I'm more or less writing this review to raise awareness and vent my frustration at the serious issues this game has, I can only remain hopeful for a brighter future. If they can quickly fix the performance issues, I guarantee a lot of negative reviews, including this one, will change for the better.

It'd probably be an easy 8 or even 9 out of 10 if the performance got addressed. For now, I'll just say one thing.
Capcom, for the love of all things holy, stop releasing your PC ports in a state like this and FIX YOUR GAME!