Before playing this game, I tried to get into MHWorld and failed despite nearly finishing the base game, so I wasn’t expecting to get much out of MHRise when I played it at the request of a friend who definitely wasn’t going to follow up on playing with me, but I was motivated primarily by a dearth of things to occupy me in the time between semesters. Turns out, this game is pretty nice.
The first two things that made a good impression on me were the better pacing and the movement. The game rushed through tutorial prompts to get me into playing the “real game” as soon as possible. The information overload isn’t for everybody but I preferred it to the unskippable cutscenes and tutorial missions of World. In general, most shitty inconveniences from previous MH have been filtered out of this game.
When first forced to do a gathering quest, I was surprised by the game’s map design and movement. The wirebug swinging and dog-riding made moving around the map, at worst, a fast and painless ordeal, with room for improving your efficiency at routing and tons of collectible resources hidden in vertical spaces encouraging you to swing and climb your way around the locale. Moving around the map was a tedious and boring necessity in older MH, but in Rise, it's comparable to and perhaps better than a game like BotW who’s entire appeal is exploration. Having nearly every surface be climbable at the cost of stamina reminded me of BotW, but unlike BotW, Rise’s movement is fast and arcadey, and wants you to get to the real star of the show (the combat) as soon as possible. That alone made dumping time into this game much more palpable, since I'm never dreading the dull moments that I had in MHW.
When it comes to combat, I should preface that I primarily played insect glaive, longsword, and greatsword. Everybody knows that MH’s gameplay structure is a standard rpg compulsion loop, but the secret sauce imo is that MH’s compulsion loop exists to give a natural incentive to mastering its deeper systems in a way that most action games don’t do. Usually, a scoring/ranking system grades your gameplay in order to incentivize you to play better even if you can complete the game by playing badly, but MH’s depth comes specifically from optimizing your use of the weapon’s moveset with knowledge of the monster’s quirks in order to kill it faster. Strong gear is gonna require a lot of materials, and there will usually be some material with a very low drop rate that you will need to grind for, making you fight the same monster over and over again. Naturally, you’re gonna want to learn how to kill that monster as efficiently as possible.
This is where MH’s monster and weapon design comes in. Monster attacks are generally easy to avoid if the only challenge were to be surviving, but dodging while also placing yourself in position for a rewarding punish is more difficult than it is in a game like Souls due to less i-frames on your standard dodge, slower movement with your weapon out, and the nature of enemy attacks. In order to get that meaty punish after avoiding an attack, you will need to take advantage of your weapon’s quirks, and all the ones I've tried are full of wonderful nuances to take advantage of, allowing your ability to kill monsters to effectively scale with your skill.
For a simple example, the Teostra (a late game boss) flame breath attack where they sweep the area in front of them from side to side with a highly damaging beam of fire. Running away from it works, but will leave me unable to get much damage after his recovery. With the Insect Glaive, taking advantage of this attack is easy, as that weapon allows me to leap above fire breath and hit their head with aerial attacks. It makes me pay attention to how monsters control vertical spaces and how to take advantage of that.
With the longsword, I want to counter the flames with a well timed and highly rewarding samurai slash that nullifies the flame’s damage, but that will require me to place myself in harm’s way in order to “parry” the attack. Since he begins his attack from the sides, I position myself in the center to make it easy for me to react regardless of which side he is coming from. Good timing and reflexes are heavily rewarded by the Longsword.
With the greatsword, I need time to charge up its highly damaging charge slash, which requires me to be safe from damage while I charge. So I want to get to the blindspot at the side of his head as soon as possible to do that, which made me pay very close attention to the tell for the flame attack. If I successfully recognize the tell, I can wirebug dash into the side from which he starts his attack, where the return stroke will miss and give me ample time to charge my counter attack. Gauging my punish windows and positioning carefully to see what kind of damage I can get away with is the main skill encouraged by Greatsword.
Different weapons emphasize different skills, can take advantage of different aspects of the monster’s moveset, and the same weapon can have multiple correct responses to the same attack, but give higher reward to more intelligent responses. This is where I found the appeal of MH’s combat.
The game’s lack of difficulty for most of its monsters is a noted criticism that I agree with. Hunts give you too much time and too many resources, which can make it pretty easy (and relatively unfun) to blow through every monster once, and consider yourself done with the game. This game really benefits from giving yourself a build goal and grinding for it. In most other combat focused games, this could be a deal breaker, but given what MH combat is about, I don't think traditional boss difficulty is required to enjoy mastering the game.
Speaking of which, I'm not a big RPG build-making guy, but I do like what MH allows for with its builds. For example: I went for a standard meta critical hit build. The premise of the build is to make a weapon with a high crit chance, and pair it with gear that increases your crit chance when hitting weakpoints and makes it so that your weapon doesn’t degrade in sharpness when hitting weakpoints. This makes your damage pathetic when hitting anything that isn’t a weakpoint, but highly rewards precise hits, making this a build tailored for higher skilled play, but punishing to other playstyles. There are other gear skills that allow you to break resistant parts easily and deal more damage to them, allowing for a less efficient but more flexible style. I see a lot of potential in how the builds can facilitate a nice variety of playstyles and allow the player to tailor the game to their preferred approach.
The biggest criticisms I have with the game come from the camera and the console. The default “target camera” type usually isn’t bad, and you can adjust it to be more zoomed out and turn more quickly (which I highly recommend), but some of the game’s later bosses, most notably the poster boy Magnamalo, are insanely mobile and attack in ways that are difficult to track with traditional target camera, feeling more designed for the lock-on camera mode. The issue is that MH’s implementation of lock-on is kinda shit.
The game requires you to be precise with hitting monster parts and the lock-on camera often gets in the way of that. This wouldn’t be a problem if you were allowed to toggle lock on with the tap of a button, but it can’t be turned off and instead switches the lock-on to other major monsters in the map. Bizarre fucking design that could be easily fixed, dunno how they let that one through. Just make tapping L1 toggle lock-on, that input currently does nothing in the Lock-On Camera type.
Also the Switch kinda sucks for playing the game, at least for my situation. On top of fps drops, it makes it very inconvenient to play the game with my circle of friends. It would be so much easier if it was a PC game where I could be in a discord call, but it being a switch game makes the process of communicating with friends while playing awkward as hell. Because of this I only got to play with pubs, and never experienced any real coordination to gauge what Monster Hunter gains from the co-op play that made it so popular in japan. Thankfully a PC release is planned, and I’d like to play the game with 60fps if I’m alive for it. If you’re on the fence with MHRise I recommend you wait for the PC release.
You made it this far? You read something this long? Weird. Here is some extra random thoughts:
I love the music, it's catchy.
The Nargacuga and Valstrax are easily the coolest looking monsters. The Valstrax’s attack animations are so fucking cool.
Zinogre looks kinda ugly and overdesigned to me, but still managed to be cool to me despite that because of his moveset and concept. Really fun monster to fight.
fuck the Tigrex. i hate that his name is “Tiger” and “Rex”. i hate that he has a jurassic park trex head pasted on a wyvern body. i hate that he has no consistent theme and all his abilities are random bullshit. He can throw rocks because he’s smart?? but he also bites walls like an idiot?? He glows red for no reason?? And worst of all most of his moveset is him spamming a charge attack where his entire body is a hitbox. even his music fucking sucks. fuck you you ugly sack of shit.
The first two things that made a good impression on me were the better pacing and the movement. The game rushed through tutorial prompts to get me into playing the “real game” as soon as possible. The information overload isn’t for everybody but I preferred it to the unskippable cutscenes and tutorial missions of World. In general, most shitty inconveniences from previous MH have been filtered out of this game.
When first forced to do a gathering quest, I was surprised by the game’s map design and movement. The wirebug swinging and dog-riding made moving around the map, at worst, a fast and painless ordeal, with room for improving your efficiency at routing and tons of collectible resources hidden in vertical spaces encouraging you to swing and climb your way around the locale. Moving around the map was a tedious and boring necessity in older MH, but in Rise, it's comparable to and perhaps better than a game like BotW who’s entire appeal is exploration. Having nearly every surface be climbable at the cost of stamina reminded me of BotW, but unlike BotW, Rise’s movement is fast and arcadey, and wants you to get to the real star of the show (the combat) as soon as possible. That alone made dumping time into this game much more palpable, since I'm never dreading the dull moments that I had in MHW.
When it comes to combat, I should preface that I primarily played insect glaive, longsword, and greatsword. Everybody knows that MH’s gameplay structure is a standard rpg compulsion loop, but the secret sauce imo is that MH’s compulsion loop exists to give a natural incentive to mastering its deeper systems in a way that most action games don’t do. Usually, a scoring/ranking system grades your gameplay in order to incentivize you to play better even if you can complete the game by playing badly, but MH’s depth comes specifically from optimizing your use of the weapon’s moveset with knowledge of the monster’s quirks in order to kill it faster. Strong gear is gonna require a lot of materials, and there will usually be some material with a very low drop rate that you will need to grind for, making you fight the same monster over and over again. Naturally, you’re gonna want to learn how to kill that monster as efficiently as possible.
This is where MH’s monster and weapon design comes in. Monster attacks are generally easy to avoid if the only challenge were to be surviving, but dodging while also placing yourself in position for a rewarding punish is more difficult than it is in a game like Souls due to less i-frames on your standard dodge, slower movement with your weapon out, and the nature of enemy attacks. In order to get that meaty punish after avoiding an attack, you will need to take advantage of your weapon’s quirks, and all the ones I've tried are full of wonderful nuances to take advantage of, allowing your ability to kill monsters to effectively scale with your skill.
For a simple example, the Teostra (a late game boss) flame breath attack where they sweep the area in front of them from side to side with a highly damaging beam of fire. Running away from it works, but will leave me unable to get much damage after his recovery. With the Insect Glaive, taking advantage of this attack is easy, as that weapon allows me to leap above fire breath and hit their head with aerial attacks. It makes me pay attention to how monsters control vertical spaces and how to take advantage of that.
With the longsword, I want to counter the flames with a well timed and highly rewarding samurai slash that nullifies the flame’s damage, but that will require me to place myself in harm’s way in order to “parry” the attack. Since he begins his attack from the sides, I position myself in the center to make it easy for me to react regardless of which side he is coming from. Good timing and reflexes are heavily rewarded by the Longsword.
With the greatsword, I need time to charge up its highly damaging charge slash, which requires me to be safe from damage while I charge. So I want to get to the blindspot at the side of his head as soon as possible to do that, which made me pay very close attention to the tell for the flame attack. If I successfully recognize the tell, I can wirebug dash into the side from which he starts his attack, where the return stroke will miss and give me ample time to charge my counter attack. Gauging my punish windows and positioning carefully to see what kind of damage I can get away with is the main skill encouraged by Greatsword.
Different weapons emphasize different skills, can take advantage of different aspects of the monster’s moveset, and the same weapon can have multiple correct responses to the same attack, but give higher reward to more intelligent responses. This is where I found the appeal of MH’s combat.
The game’s lack of difficulty for most of its monsters is a noted criticism that I agree with. Hunts give you too much time and too many resources, which can make it pretty easy (and relatively unfun) to blow through every monster once, and consider yourself done with the game. This game really benefits from giving yourself a build goal and grinding for it. In most other combat focused games, this could be a deal breaker, but given what MH combat is about, I don't think traditional boss difficulty is required to enjoy mastering the game.
Speaking of which, I'm not a big RPG build-making guy, but I do like what MH allows for with its builds. For example: I went for a standard meta critical hit build. The premise of the build is to make a weapon with a high crit chance, and pair it with gear that increases your crit chance when hitting weakpoints and makes it so that your weapon doesn’t degrade in sharpness when hitting weakpoints. This makes your damage pathetic when hitting anything that isn’t a weakpoint, but highly rewards precise hits, making this a build tailored for higher skilled play, but punishing to other playstyles. There are other gear skills that allow you to break resistant parts easily and deal more damage to them, allowing for a less efficient but more flexible style. I see a lot of potential in how the builds can facilitate a nice variety of playstyles and allow the player to tailor the game to their preferred approach.
The biggest criticisms I have with the game come from the camera and the console. The default “target camera” type usually isn’t bad, and you can adjust it to be more zoomed out and turn more quickly (which I highly recommend), but some of the game’s later bosses, most notably the poster boy Magnamalo, are insanely mobile and attack in ways that are difficult to track with traditional target camera, feeling more designed for the lock-on camera mode. The issue is that MH’s implementation of lock-on is kinda shit.
The game requires you to be precise with hitting monster parts and the lock-on camera often gets in the way of that. This wouldn’t be a problem if you were allowed to toggle lock on with the tap of a button, but it can’t be turned off and instead switches the lock-on to other major monsters in the map. Bizarre fucking design that could be easily fixed, dunno how they let that one through. Just make tapping L1 toggle lock-on, that input currently does nothing in the Lock-On Camera type.
Also the Switch kinda sucks for playing the game, at least for my situation. On top of fps drops, it makes it very inconvenient to play the game with my circle of friends. It would be so much easier if it was a PC game where I could be in a discord call, but it being a switch game makes the process of communicating with friends while playing awkward as hell. Because of this I only got to play with pubs, and never experienced any real coordination to gauge what Monster Hunter gains from the co-op play that made it so popular in japan. Thankfully a PC release is planned, and I’d like to play the game with 60fps if I’m alive for it. If you’re on the fence with MHRise I recommend you wait for the PC release.
You made it this far? You read something this long? Weird. Here is some extra random thoughts:
I love the music, it's catchy.
The Nargacuga and Valstrax are easily the coolest looking monsters. The Valstrax’s attack animations are so fucking cool.
Zinogre looks kinda ugly and overdesigned to me, but still managed to be cool to me despite that because of his moveset and concept. Really fun monster to fight.
fuck the Tigrex. i hate that his name is “Tiger” and “Rex”. i hate that he has a jurassic park trex head pasted on a wyvern body. i hate that he has no consistent theme and all his abilities are random bullshit. He can throw rocks because he’s smart?? but he also bites walls like an idiot?? He glows red for no reason?? And worst of all most of his moveset is him spamming a charge attack where his entire body is a hitbox. even his music fucking sucks. fuck you you ugly sack of shit.