Hi,
I believe there are good reasons for this implementation, especially a logistical one.
If you don’t already know, in the main MH games, higher grade equipment requires drops from higher grade monsters. Their materials are differentiated from the lower grade materials dropped by lower grade monsters.
For example, low-rank Jyuratodus drops Jyuratodus Scale, while high-rank Jyuratodus drops Jyuratodus Scale+. You can see how the number of unique materials scale up as a hunter progresses through the game.
However, this is not an issue for the main games because
- There is more than enough space for hoarders who never sell a single piece of the materials gathered throughout their hunting lifespan.
- You can choose to farm low-rank monsters by playing the low-rank quests, should you need low-rank materials for forging and upgrading new weapons.
These two points alone, especially point 2, is vastly different from MHNow.
In MHNow, since the monsters you fight scale up as you unlock higher difficulty, it is nearly impossible to revisit low-rank monsters outside of helping low-rank hunters who are doing their 1* to 5* quests (equivalent to low-rank in main games) once you have progressed to 6* and beyond, especially when you are at 10*, or by clearing low-rank HATs, which most people who have a choice in their HATs would rather attempt the highest one possible for the R6 drops.
Here comes the big question: Without the ability to revisit low-rank monsters for their materials, how are you going to get the materials needed for forging new weapons and armour?
Honestly, MHnow’s material system is simple, effective, and sufficient. You certainly don’t want to scroll through like 10-20 lines of materials just for a single monster when managing the item box, and then you have to scroll through that many times more for each monster that’s arranged down the order. Imagine scrolling past some 300-400 lines of materials just to check how much Wyvern Gem Shards or Refining Parts you have. Main games allow 2D movement across the item boxes and have the real screen estate and mouse/keyboard/controller controls for that, but in this game it is 1D, only up or down scrolling, on a tall and narrow screen that’s meant for fingers.
I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t want to have to deal with that vast number of different materials when there is a hard limit to item box capacity.