Toukiden
I dare you to defend this.
I dare you to say
Phantasy Star Portable, God Eater, Lord Of, Valhalla Knights, Soul Sacrifice and many others were not
inspired by Monster Hunter.
Seriously.
Are you being serious or just joking?
Phantasy Star Portable is inspired by Phantasy star online. If the only defining metric is multiple players fighting on stage to take down a large enemy then you could say that Monster Hunter took its inspirations from Phantasy star online, which predates Monster Hunter by 4 years. To be honest there might even be another franchise that does this as well I simply cannot recall another one at this time.
But if you are not talking about who is first vs who is more popular than I could see where your coming from.
But to get more into detail Monster Hunter is a game where you hunt monsters of various sizes (normally very large). There are no levels persay just stats influenced by armor and weapons made from the parts of the monsters you successfully hunted. There is only one town that serves as a hub, the rest is on the field doing a mission. The game sort of feels more like SoTC where each encounter is treated like a boss battle.
Valhalla Knights is an Action RPG complete with stats and levels, you may fight monsters and other human beings but it is not centered around large boss battles like Monhun.
From VH
Does that scream monster hunter to you?
God Eater, Lords of arcana, Toukiden and Soul Sacrifice are titles that look more inspired by MonHun than any other game but people label games way to easy without looking at the details. I half expect people to start calling EDF a MonHon clone as well.
But as far as inspirations go you could find that in almost anything
great video series about similar idea here
http://vimeo.com/14912890
Edit: Beaten like a red headed step child. Lol, alot of Phantasy Star fans here I see.
It's also like saying the kinect is inspired by the Wii. What's particularly wrong with saying it was "inspired" by? Yes CoD say Halo sales and thought to itself that it should try and make inroads in that market, it clearly was "inspired" by Halo. Phantasy Star P was probably "inspired" in the same way, so I'd argue it's not a shameless ripoff but very much there because of Monster hunter.
Inspired by implies they took idea from some game elements, not that the pubs found it was a viable business venue.