Never played a Monster Hunter game before and waiting for my physical copy to come today. Is there a weapon that tends to be good for people new to these games? Or is basically everything pretty balanced and play what you like?
As mentionned, MH weapon choice is very much a matter of taste, you might pick up a weapon and hate it, and switch to a few different weapons until you find the one that clicks for you. Then possibly later you'll go back to the weapons you hated and will find they're actually fun now that you don't suck at the game anymore.
Weapons tend to be somewhat balanced, for speedruns there's usually some outlier shit but often they require speedrun perfection bullshit to actually make that good so hardly a concern.
Usually the recommended starting weapons would be Dual Blades(fast as fuck so you can get used to animation locks and stuff, fun, very simple), Long Sword(still pretty fast, has iframes to just ignore shit, stylish) and Hammer(slow and heavy unlike the others, but easy to hit attacks with the super wide swings, can KO stuff and is pretty simple to use overall).
Sword and Shield used to be a newcomer weapon but with the Iceborne changes(which are in this too), I don't know if that's the case not sure what the motion values are in Rise. It's still probably ok to do the story with even without going deep into it though, the main melee chain is infinite and has virtually no commitment and there's almost no sheathe time which makes SnS easy to just poke at stuff with 0 risk.
Mind you if you want to try other stuff, everything's fine too, it just takes a bit longer getting used to like Charge Blade or Insect Glaive than some other stuff.