Monster Hunter is an online action-hunting game by CAPCOM for the PlayStation 2 released on March 11th, 2004 in Japan, and September 21st, 2004 in North America. The game is a fantasy hunting simulator filled with many deadly monsters. Like actual hunting, successfully killing or capturing the monsters requires significant strategy, skill and involved resource management. While initially considered a commercial failure, Monster Hunter would go on to become one of CAPCOM's highest selling franchises.

Despite featuring an offline mode, Monster Hunter was primarily an online game. The official servers were shut down on December 31, 2007 in North America and Europe, and July 1, 2011 in Japan. This means that it is now impossible to play online on official CAPCOM servers. Despite this, the game still features a small active community on private servers.