Difficult Video Games

So I'm stuck on Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate on the 9 star quest: Advanced: Whale of a Hammer. I've 3 carted at least a baker's dozen times. The interesting thing is I can (mostly) pinpoint something I did wrong to cause the carts. Because of this (I think) I keep trying the quest. I concluded melee range is very risky, so I crafted my first set of gunner armor and bow. I have the positioning and timing down of the fight, so now my only problems are terrain forcing me out of position at a bad time or a failed dung bomb attempt trapping me with both of them at the same time and something going wrong.

So it turns out Monster Hunter is actually much more difficult than Dark Souls after you get deep into the game. Like many things different monsters will be harder for different people, but you will find at least a few to give you a hard time. This is the third quest I can think of that's given me serious problems, but this one more so than the ones before. So the question is why keep playing, and why does it feel fair compared to many other games?

I've read up on this and been thinking about it a while. I think the most comprehensive insight I got was an article about speed running games. It talked about how games needed to be predictable to speed run. The controls had to be tight, and in the same situation everything had to work the same way. Then playing a Mario Maker level that you just stood there and all kinds of things happened around you for 2-3 minutes while you watched a Rube Goldberg machine type of level push you through to the end. The game functions so tightly that they can do that.

That is the way Monster Hunter works. Fighting in this case two frenzied Black Gravios' you want to stay to the left of center because centered his beam will hit you and on the right side his downward beam will hit you on the way back up at the end. 90% of the time after any beam some kind of AOE attack will come from home so you have to be out of melee range, etc... Because mostly everything happens the same you can see your mistakes and what you could have done to avoid it. So you always feel like if you'd been just a little bit better you would have won!

I think this is the key... making sure the player can see how they could have prevented the death or penalty of whatever kind happens in your game. Games that don't get this have you dying and questioning why, did the AI get a lucky roll, was there anything in my control that could have let me win? Dangling the carrot at the end of the stick and realizing if you're just a bit better you'll be able to reach it is the sweet spot.

Closing Notes: Monster Hunter does have advantages here as by 9 star quests you have sunk a lot of time into the game and understand it. The variants of the monsters means you have fought an easier version of the same monster before, preparing you for this tougher version, and before you fight multiple monsters you've fought them solo and killed them, so nothing is new except the complexity of taking on multiple at the same time. But still the game is setup to make all this happen.