Monster Hunter Freedom

I picked up Monster Hunter Freedom for the PSP recently. I like the premise: hunt huge fantasy animals. I don't like the implementation.

• Reading pages and pages of in-game info
• Jumping through little hoops to get to the real game
• Wandering from tiny are to tiny area, loading for too long between them

What I hate most is that despite having "freedom" in the name, the game itself is anything but free wandering (at least where I am now). I'd have preferred the "throw the player in the big bad world, let him figure it out" approach of the GTA series. But perhaps that's just too ambitious for the PSP...