Monster Hunter: World

Capcom's 2018 entry is the one that took the series global. The core loop had not changed in a decade - track a large animal across a map, learn its tells, break its parts, use those parts to build the weapon that lets you hunt the next one - but World rebuilt the presentation around it: seamless zones instead of loading gates, a scoutfly trail that replaced paper maps, and fourteen weapon types each deep enough to be a main game. The Great Sword's charged slash and the Insect Glaive's aerial loop are not variations on a theme; they are different games sharing a monster. It is deliberately slow to commit - an attack animation you start is an attack you finish - which is where its difficulty actually lives. Iceborne, the paid expansion, added a new region, the Clutch Claw and a substantially harder tier of hunts. It sold over twenty million copies, more than any Capcom game before it, and turned a cult Japanese series into a mainstream one.