http://www.koeitecmoeurope.com/toukiden2/kyoutou.html

So in the words of The Dude 'Thats fucking interesting man' for a number of reasons.

First off even those of us who own and love one know Sony wants the Vita over and done with and every Vita series is being pushed to PS4/PC to move the userbase away from the platform, which in this case is funny since this is straight up a mobage strategy in effect which seems counter to that unless theres a smart phone idea in the works.
Secondly its interesting as an experiment for hunting games. Its basically the same monster hunter style online but now only one player per hunt needs a retail copy and the rest can be freemium players using a f2p client searching for retail copies to link to for a hunt. With an energy/gem system that depletes per hunt and you pay real money to refill.

Which has to make the cynical of us wonder: Just how closely is Capcom watching this right now?

Its no secret Capcoms being doing poorly compared to the past for years, RE7 was a nice surprise for them that hasnt managed to outperform the somewhat bomb of SFV. Monhun has remained their one cash cow as all their other ip's went the way of none mario/zelda first party nintendo games. Dead and buried. Monster hunter is huge and they have been trying different ways to make mobage, gachage and other iOS apps to milk the brand and i cannot help but wonder if they are watching this for success.

and if it takes off i would be very surprised to not see MH5 do something similar.

I know i'm not the only hunting game fan here, what do the rest of you make of this "f2p gacha hunting" style?