One of the most common doubt, not only on Monster Hunter, but also in a lot of fantasy games in general, is the difference between Wyverns and Dragons.
This causes a lot of confusion, especially because there is no 100% unique usage of it in the pop culture, and each media (be it books, movies, games) choose to depict their own version of both.
So while you may hear that "Dragon has both legs and arms plus wings while wyverns have just legs and wings" that is not 100% true.
Games like The Elder Scrolls depict their dragons just like these description of Wyvern, and the same goes for the dragons depicted in the A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin.
However, in the case of the Monster Hunter series, there is also a differentiation not only in the matter Wyvern/Dragon, but also how the eastern people see them in the first place.
The other common debate is about the Western and Eastern Dragon.
Monster Hunter is a game made by japanese people, so it is worth to note that the way they see this things is different from the western people.
In the games, both Wyverns and Elder Dragons are called dragons, but with different writtings.
You will see that its is natural to a japanese player to call the Raths the "green and red fire dragons".
That even caused me some confusion when i was researching for the first time in japanese.
A japanese acquaintance mine kindly explained to me the differences in the view, so i thought it would be good to share it here too.
This below is her explanation about it and even the same pictures she used to better illustrate this differences.
They use this 2 kanji to refer to the monsters in the series: 竜 and 龍 (Both read as Ryū)
竜 ( Ryuu ) refers to a beastly dragon, typically 2 legs and arms capped with wings and breathes fire.
It is usually translated as "Flying Dragons" in the translators we see out there.
龍 ( Ryuu ) refers to Dragons that typically don't breath fire, usually having a snakelike body, and move through the air with magic. Godly, and ancient, usually with no wings. This is usually translated as "Ancient Dragons" in the translators out there.
This is 龍
This is 竜
You can say that 竜 is a Monster, and 龍 is a God.
All monsters in Monster Hunter that uses the 竜 (here used as "wyverns") are dragons in reality.
Tobi Kadachi (Japanese: Tobikagachi) is called the Lightning Flight Dragon (飛雷竜), which is a monster title:
Chameleos (Japanese: Oonazuchi) on the other hand, is called the Dragon of Fog/Haze (霞龍), which is a godly title:
So all of them are dragons, but one kind is like a "earthly/ mundane" and the other is a "godly/ divinity".
That is the main difference between them (and also why there is the "Elder" or like in the original japanese, the "Ancient" Dragons).
The Flying Dragons category ended up being localized here as "Wyverns" and stayed like that until this day.
Also, a monster that looks like a "dragon with wings integrated with its front legs", is commonly called "Wyvern" (regardless of the current classification).
So you will see that in the older games,in japanese games/books like the Hunter Encyclopedia and even in MH4U, the Yian Kut-Ku, Cephadrome and Remobras are also treated as "Wyvern" s, and that not necessarily mean that "Wyvern = Flying Wyvern species".
The second image above is a screenshot of the gameplay of the episodic quests in MH4U by HamsterBomb.
Over the years the japanese developers used the word Wyvern too, written like (ワイバーン) in older media like commercials and marketing materials of the series. But it is worth to note that this is almost not used nowadays, opting more for the use of the (竜).
A huge thanks to Sky Spider Girl for explaining that to me!
Again i hope that this helps clear the misunderstandings about the usage of the term and can be a interesting piece of trivia for you guys to know about!
