This is a weird one for me. I've enjoyed my time with Sunbreak, certainly more than with base Rise, and at first I was hooked, but sadly it's become clear that this isn't the pivot into smart, fast, ability-based combat I was hoping for, but instead just a repair crew led by a new director coming to fix base Rise's baffling mistakes. It's definitely the best 5th gen game, but a 5th gen game nonetheless, with all the baggage that entails, plus some new problems for good measure.
Most of this review will be negative, but the game as a whole is actually decent, hence my rating. I played it, I mildly enjoyed it, I would tentatively recommend it to others depending on their interest and the price point. I like Gunlance, good weapon. But the discussion around this series endlessly frustrates me, because it seems that flaws are either glossed over or only superficially addressed. You can find plenty of people online talking up Sunbreak's virtues, especially over Rise: the progression, difficulty, no Rampages, endgame systems, gear balance, crabs (damn I love the crabs), and so on. Flowery writing and nice sentiments have their place, but you can read that elsewhere. What I find lacking is deep, meaty analysis.
So I'll save us some time and just reach straight for the butcher's knife.
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I will overlook a lot of bullshit if a game's fundamentals are high-quality, see DMC3, MHFU, etc. But sadly it's just not fully there for Sunbreak, despite all the improvements, and my gut says that there are some deep flaws here that are hard to ignore. If I had to pin it down in a few words, the combat feels too "passive" and "reactive"; it feels like my actions don't have much influence on the state of the monster beyond just dealing damage.
In most other action games (DMC, Ninja Gaiden, etc.), each individual enemy can be put into a variety of states, such as hitstunned, launched, grabbed, jumped on, etc. which all have different causes and effects. But monsters only have a few states: normal, flinch, exhausted, and immobilized. Immobilizing a monster generally isn't very interactive, and just serves as a reward for the player using some simple mechanic (KO, damage topple, wyvern ride, hunting helpers, ...). Exhaust is a similar story, albeit nice for varying the pace more organically. Flinching can interrupt monster attacks, but because monsters move around so much, keeping track of flinch thresholds is very difficult (moreso than older games) and only done at the highest levels of play. So most of your time will be spent with the monster moving and attacking while being unaffected by your actions.
In the past, Freedom Unite tackled this problem with monster AI. Monsters moved and attacked in predictable ways based on where you were standing, but their attacks were quite dangerous unless you were well-positioned in advance, so balancing offense and defense with an eye towards the future was key. These days this is mostly gone, as what the monster does is largely determined by raw RNG that you have little control over, excepting the specific fixed strings of moves that are coded into the AI. Furthermore, the monsters have so many moves and so much movement they can do from neutral, that it's not feasible to play around them in advance. These two factors combined essentially eliminate preemptive positioning beyond the canned "monster will do X -> Y -> Z, so prepare for Y and Z if you see X".
So your best bet in neutral is to stand somewhere midrange and do one of two things: wait for the monster to attack, then dodge and punish, or throw out big attacks and take trades. While this can be fun in its own right, especially when you experiment with aggressive ways to leverage openings within or after attacks, eventually it inches dangerously close to a call-and-response structure that gets old fast. Even the micropositioning that's long been a series staple, while still enjoyable to a degree, is dampened by the ridiculous tracking on many moves, which is there to hit players using the various extremely powerful defensive tools attached to wirebugs, and partially because higher framerates than 30 are glitched and increase tracking.
Because your attacks can't really affect the monster beyond dealing damage, and the micropositioning of hitboxes and movement is less emphasized, more pressure is put on balancing to differentiate moves. MH has never really been that good at balance, but in the past it's been serviceable, with the major exception of Generations Ultimate, where at least you can ignore most of it if you really want. While Sunbreak is probably better off balance-wise than GU (really not saying much), now the stakes are higher, with the core mechanics of Wirebugs and Switch Skills at play.
Wirebugs in general don't really feel like much of a resource to manage at all. This is partially because most of the cooldowns are low, so by the time you would need a bug, you almost always have it (unless you're wirefalling on every single hit). It's also partially because the tradeoffs between silkbinds aren't really there. Often there is either one silkbind that is obviously the best to spam (Hammer's Impact Crater, Switch Axe's counter, Charge Blade's Counter Peak Performance, etc.), or the desirable silkbinds (many of which have ridiculous defensive properties) are low cooldown as previously mentioned.
Wirefall, a mechanic with great potential for defensive decision-making, is severely hurt by this, as the intended cooldown tradeoff is mostly irrelevant compared to its power. This forced the developers to add:
- "Gotcha" followups that catch wirefall, which are trivially memorized and don't contribute to depth long-term.
- Combos that need wirefall to break out of, which feels less like a strategic decision to conserve wirebugs and more like being punished for getting caught at an unlucky time.
- Simply banning wirefall for certain attacks, which "works" but is rather clumsy and has no pattern that I could discern.
For better implementations of resources like Wirebugs see Nioh 2 Anima meter, Unsouled meter/Ghost Orbs, probably many fighting games, and MHGU hunter arts.
Switch Skills are a little less egregious, and there are some gems like Greatsword's Surge Slash Combo and Gunlance's Blast Dash, but a lot of them are just bad compared to their alternatives, and not even situationally useful or significantly different to play, which really limits the impact of Switch Skill Swap beyond the skills that impact the swap action itself. It's sort of like if Nioh only had 1-2 stances per weapon but still had flux, it's neat I guess but falls short of its potential.
Why nobody brings this next point up continually baffles me: 5th gen MH feels substantially worse to control than older games. Movement feels slippery, and the animations smooth into each other in an unsatisfying way. One of the joys of classic MH was how weighty yet precise everything felt. Slamming your meticuously-aimed Greatsword into a monster's head, waiting just the right amount of split-seconds, then watching your hunter snap into motion to iframe the next attack was a fantastic feeling that never got old. But that's gone now, presumably for "realism"/"fluidity"/trailer footage. And it's not like this is some unsolvable problem; DMC, Ninja Gaiden, and Nioh are as least as fast-paced as Sunbreak but feel much better to control. This might sound like a nitpick, but this is the type of thing that gets stuck in your subconscious, silently influencing the texture of your experience.
Given that this series has adopted a Call of Duty style dev cycle, it's not terribly surprising that the systems around the fundamentals, even the newer additions, have accrued MMO-like bloat and internal tension. Just to name a few:
- Why are you allowed to ride the dog and sharpen during combat?
- Why would you ever use more than one ammo type for gun if you can just restock your best type?
- Why do the strongest healing items in the game have the fastest use animation?
- Why is the inventory limited at all if you can just restock?
- Why are there still tons of completely useless armor skills?
- Why does wyvern ride do so much damage yet has nothing to do with the regular combat systems?
- Why do weapons still have obviously garbage moves like GS upswing that are almost 20 years old?
- Why does auto-farm still need busywork maintenance?
- etc.
You basically have to self-restrict to work around these problems, which would be alright if there were only a few obvious things to ban, like Freedom Unite's traps and flashes or DMC/Bayo's consumable items. But here it's a mess because they're littered everywhere, mixed in with other mechanics, and difficult to identify for inexperienced players. It's like if there were a hundred DMC/Bayo items in the same category as the weapons. And plenty of them either exert broad influence on the game or can't be easily banned at all.
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Let's be crystal clear on this point: the problem is NOT that Sunbreak isn't old MH. Old MH is useful as a point of comparison, because it faces many of the same critical design questions. But as the context around those questions changes, those existing answers need to be reevaluated.
I'm not asking for Freedom Unite 2, Freedom Unite already exists and I can play it right now. What I am asking for is a solid game.
Every so often I hear people say that Rise is "a bad MH game, but a good action game." Frankly I suspect the people saying this don't play other action games (except maybe Souls which is another can of worms). But they are "right" in one sense: MH doesn't have some special privilege that protects it from comparisons to games outside of its series.
Nioh 2 has tons of bosses, a stamina system, powerful abilities tied to a shared meter, a handful of weapon types,
and on the fly moveset switching. It executes nearly all of these better than Sunbreak. But that's because Team Ninja is an experienced studio whose reputation and livelihood depends on making solid, polished games, while Monster Hunter is a juggernaut series that's accrued plenty of inertia through loyalty, branding, and multiplayer, so the quality (or lack thereof) in its mechanics is mostly lost on the playerbase. I commend Monster Hunter's dev teams and management for maintaining a reasonable level of craftsmanship even in these conditions, but is missed potential really surprising when all the incentives are pushing against it?
At the end of the day, if you are looking for good 1v1 boss fights, Monster Hunter is still the best series by a big margin. The fundamentals of timing and positioning are still intact enough to have a good time running through the main story with your weapon(s) of choice, and many of the classic MH trappings are as fun as they've ever been. But, sadly, I'm not seeing this entry, or future ones if the series's recent history is anything to go by, as a game to deeply invest into and love.
Ah well, nothing lasts forever.
Most of this review will be negative, but the game as a whole is actually decent, hence my rating. I played it, I mildly enjoyed it, I would tentatively recommend it to others depending on their interest and the price point. I like Gunlance, good weapon. But the discussion around this series endlessly frustrates me, because it seems that flaws are either glossed over or only superficially addressed. You can find plenty of people online talking up Sunbreak's virtues, especially over Rise: the progression, difficulty, no Rampages, endgame systems, gear balance, crabs (damn I love the crabs), and so on. Flowery writing and nice sentiments have their place, but you can read that elsewhere. What I find lacking is deep, meaty analysis.
So I'll save us some time and just reach straight for the butcher's knife.
---
I will overlook a lot of bullshit if a game's fundamentals are high-quality, see DMC3, MHFU, etc. But sadly it's just not fully there for Sunbreak, despite all the improvements, and my gut says that there are some deep flaws here that are hard to ignore. If I had to pin it down in a few words, the combat feels too "passive" and "reactive"; it feels like my actions don't have much influence on the state of the monster beyond just dealing damage.
In most other action games (DMC, Ninja Gaiden, etc.), each individual enemy can be put into a variety of states, such as hitstunned, launched, grabbed, jumped on, etc. which all have different causes and effects. But monsters only have a few states: normal, flinch, exhausted, and immobilized. Immobilizing a monster generally isn't very interactive, and just serves as a reward for the player using some simple mechanic (KO, damage topple, wyvern ride, hunting helpers, ...). Exhaust is a similar story, albeit nice for varying the pace more organically. Flinching can interrupt monster attacks, but because monsters move around so much, keeping track of flinch thresholds is very difficult (moreso than older games) and only done at the highest levels of play. So most of your time will be spent with the monster moving and attacking while being unaffected by your actions.
In the past, Freedom Unite tackled this problem with monster AI. Monsters moved and attacked in predictable ways based on where you were standing, but their attacks were quite dangerous unless you were well-positioned in advance, so balancing offense and defense with an eye towards the future was key. These days this is mostly gone, as what the monster does is largely determined by raw RNG that you have little control over, excepting the specific fixed strings of moves that are coded into the AI. Furthermore, the monsters have so many moves and so much movement they can do from neutral, that it's not feasible to play around them in advance. These two factors combined essentially eliminate preemptive positioning beyond the canned "monster will do X -> Y -> Z, so prepare for Y and Z if you see X".
So your best bet in neutral is to stand somewhere midrange and do one of two things: wait for the monster to attack, then dodge and punish, or throw out big attacks and take trades. While this can be fun in its own right, especially when you experiment with aggressive ways to leverage openings within or after attacks, eventually it inches dangerously close to a call-and-response structure that gets old fast. Even the micropositioning that's long been a series staple, while still enjoyable to a degree, is dampened by the ridiculous tracking on many moves, which is there to hit players using the various extremely powerful defensive tools attached to wirebugs, and partially because higher framerates than 30 are glitched and increase tracking.
Because your attacks can't really affect the monster beyond dealing damage, and the micropositioning of hitboxes and movement is less emphasized, more pressure is put on balancing to differentiate moves. MH has never really been that good at balance, but in the past it's been serviceable, with the major exception of Generations Ultimate, where at least you can ignore most of it if you really want. While Sunbreak is probably better off balance-wise than GU (really not saying much), now the stakes are higher, with the core mechanics of Wirebugs and Switch Skills at play.
Wirebugs in general don't really feel like much of a resource to manage at all. This is partially because most of the cooldowns are low, so by the time you would need a bug, you almost always have it (unless you're wirefalling on every single hit). It's also partially because the tradeoffs between silkbinds aren't really there. Often there is either one silkbind that is obviously the best to spam (Hammer's Impact Crater, Switch Axe's counter, Charge Blade's Counter Peak Performance, etc.), or the desirable silkbinds (many of which have ridiculous defensive properties) are low cooldown as previously mentioned.
Wirefall, a mechanic with great potential for defensive decision-making, is severely hurt by this, as the intended cooldown tradeoff is mostly irrelevant compared to its power. This forced the developers to add:
- "Gotcha" followups that catch wirefall, which are trivially memorized and don't contribute to depth long-term.
- Combos that need wirefall to break out of, which feels less like a strategic decision to conserve wirebugs and more like being punished for getting caught at an unlucky time.
- Simply banning wirefall for certain attacks, which "works" but is rather clumsy and has no pattern that I could discern.
For better implementations of resources like Wirebugs see Nioh 2 Anima meter, Unsouled meter/Ghost Orbs, probably many fighting games, and MHGU hunter arts.
Switch Skills are a little less egregious, and there are some gems like Greatsword's Surge Slash Combo and Gunlance's Blast Dash, but a lot of them are just bad compared to their alternatives, and not even situationally useful or significantly different to play, which really limits the impact of Switch Skill Swap beyond the skills that impact the swap action itself. It's sort of like if Nioh only had 1-2 stances per weapon but still had flux, it's neat I guess but falls short of its potential.
Why nobody brings this next point up continually baffles me: 5th gen MH feels substantially worse to control than older games. Movement feels slippery, and the animations smooth into each other in an unsatisfying way. One of the joys of classic MH was how weighty yet precise everything felt. Slamming your meticuously-aimed Greatsword into a monster's head, waiting just the right amount of split-seconds, then watching your hunter snap into motion to iframe the next attack was a fantastic feeling that never got old. But that's gone now, presumably for "realism"/"fluidity"/trailer footage. And it's not like this is some unsolvable problem; DMC, Ninja Gaiden, and Nioh are as least as fast-paced as Sunbreak but feel much better to control. This might sound like a nitpick, but this is the type of thing that gets stuck in your subconscious, silently influencing the texture of your experience.
Given that this series has adopted a Call of Duty style dev cycle, it's not terribly surprising that the systems around the fundamentals, even the newer additions, have accrued MMO-like bloat and internal tension. Just to name a few:
- Why are you allowed to ride the dog and sharpen during combat?
- Why would you ever use more than one ammo type for gun if you can just restock your best type?
- Why do the strongest healing items in the game have the fastest use animation?
- Why is the inventory limited at all if you can just restock?
- Why are there still tons of completely useless armor skills?
- Why does wyvern ride do so much damage yet has nothing to do with the regular combat systems?
- Why do weapons still have obviously garbage moves like GS upswing that are almost 20 years old?
- Why does auto-farm still need busywork maintenance?
- etc.
You basically have to self-restrict to work around these problems, which would be alright if there were only a few obvious things to ban, like Freedom Unite's traps and flashes or DMC/Bayo's consumable items. But here it's a mess because they're littered everywhere, mixed in with other mechanics, and difficult to identify for inexperienced players. It's like if there were a hundred DMC/Bayo items in the same category as the weapons. And plenty of them either exert broad influence on the game or can't be easily banned at all.
---
Let's be crystal clear on this point: the problem is NOT that Sunbreak isn't old MH. Old MH is useful as a point of comparison, because it faces many of the same critical design questions. But as the context around those questions changes, those existing answers need to be reevaluated.
I'm not asking for Freedom Unite 2, Freedom Unite already exists and I can play it right now. What I am asking for is a solid game.
Every so often I hear people say that Rise is "a bad MH game, but a good action game." Frankly I suspect the people saying this don't play other action games (except maybe Souls which is another can of worms). But they are "right" in one sense: MH doesn't have some special privilege that protects it from comparisons to games outside of its series.
Nioh 2 has tons of bosses, a stamina system, powerful abilities tied to a shared meter, a handful of weapon types,
and on the fly moveset switching. It executes nearly all of these better than Sunbreak. But that's because Team Ninja is an experienced studio whose reputation and livelihood depends on making solid, polished games, while Monster Hunter is a juggernaut series that's accrued plenty of inertia through loyalty, branding, and multiplayer, so the quality (or lack thereof) in its mechanics is mostly lost on the playerbase. I commend Monster Hunter's dev teams and management for maintaining a reasonable level of craftsmanship even in these conditions, but is missed potential really surprising when all the incentives are pushing against it?
At the end of the day, if you are looking for good 1v1 boss fights, Monster Hunter is still the best series by a big margin. The fundamentals of timing and positioning are still intact enough to have a good time running through the main story with your weapon(s) of choice, and many of the classic MH trappings are as fun as they've ever been. But, sadly, I'm not seeing this entry, or future ones if the series's recent history is anything to go by, as a game to deeply invest into and love.
Ah well, nothing lasts forever.
5 Comments
I really just want to say this is an excellent write up, and not only mechanically, but you raise in a compelling way very interesting questions about craftsmanship against incentive.
I feel the same way you do about Rise as I do with Nioh 2, a lack of hard meaty analysis. Because it’s a common sentiment that Team Ninja focuses on “solid polished games” where to me especially with their most recent output they could not be more bloated, unbalanced, and messy cores that refuse to change their approach on enemy design from flowcharts and simply choose the unambitious easy way out, especially in regards to 2’s boss design which manage to be even simpler at a fundamental level. To say nothing of how SoP is broken at its base imo.
Other than that comparison though this was a good read.
Other than that comparison though this was a good read.
I can see that, my intent wasn't necessarily to paint Team Ninja as a flawless studio (though I do like much of their work) but just as a point of comparison. I didn't really go in depth on Nioh 2 here for sake of brevity but there are some problems, especially with the loot system which is a huge mess. The bosses are definitely better on the MH side, since that's the only thing MH needs to focus on. But IMO pretty much all the player-side mechanics of Nioh 2 are really solid, at least for the hundred or so hours I played. Haven't played SoP so can't comment there.
@LunaEndlessWitch After finishing SOP and Wo Long I think the Team Ninja criticism is very fair. Though Nioh 2 still remains one of my favorites and I enjoyed SOP, their games definitely have core structure and balance issues that are somewhat reminiscent of those in MH. To others, take the Team Ninja praise in the review with a grain of salt, though I still stand by the specific mechanical comparisons between Nioh 2 and Sunbreak.
Pangburn
1 year ago