Game development is often the art of compromise and of accepting trade-offs to squeeze important features into a game while removing others in order to comply with the limitations of the hardware. This is especially true with the 3DS; that is one of the least powerful platforms on the market. Apparently the development team of Monster Hunter 4 did not accept this kind of philosophy, as Game Director Kaname Fujioka revealed as part of a long interview on Dengeki Online.

Tsujimoto [Ryozo, Producer] said "Absolutely let's not do any trade-off." On all action segments, you absolutely can't remove anything if you add something. Our direction was that if 10 was thought to be the maximum, then we continued to add to it in order to transform that maximum into 13. 

That's quite a tall order, especially considering the machine they were working on, but the action gameplay we saw so far does look very good (even if many Japanese gamers criticized some aspects of the graphics). Did they keep that promise? We'll know quite soon, as the game will be released in Japan exactly a week for now.