Tempting me more than ever, but still... fucking handhelds man. All I ask when playing a game is that the controls be below my shoulders and the screen above them. I don't suppose there's a cheap/easy way to dump the 3DS screen to my monitor?
Easy buy used n3ds , get MH game. Spend 200-300 hours on it or more and if you don't like it that much sell it all of them thus essentially costing you 0 as 3ds seems to hold nice resale value for now.
I planned to do above but perfect native hardware to play NES,SNES,GBA,DS and 3DS games is imo much more worth it that selling it.
I finished ton of awesome games since buying it (like all metroidvania castelvania games and changed my favorite from Syphony of the Night to Aria of Sorrow). Since it handles all Snes,DS,Gba games then you have whole library of awesome RPGs and sRPGs like Tactics Ogre or SMT Strange Journey which is by far imo best SMT game.
I haven't played a monster hunter game since the PSP variants, would there be any reason to go through Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate before Generations?
Nope. MH4U is basically a bit smaller than Freedom Unite on PSP you played but has 3 new weapons and all mosnters were revamped for new verticality combat (thus they changed a lot of their moves and how they behave).
MHG imo is what MH4U should be it changes a lot more to core of combat that MH4 and frankly speaking hunting styles are the biggest change since start of MH back on PS2.
IF i had to categorize it in therms of changes it would be something like this:
MH/MH2/MHFreedomUnite/MHTri/MH3d/MH3Ultimate ---> MH4/MH4U -----------------------------> MHG
Verticality of combat and changed movesets to accomodate that on monsters was nice change in MH4 but changing completely how you play with some weapons was much needed change since like 2 gens ago thus MHG imo takes the cake.
And it is not only MH that changes the most but also MH game that is the biggest of them all in therms of content beating even ridicolous MH freedom unite and then some.