A lot of fun, and that it's the only early release game I've ever bought should demonstrate how into it I am as an idea. My reservations (that I'd love to see addressed if this ever gets a full release, but I doubt it) is that this will widen its artistic influence (it's just generic brand Junji Ito: The Game, which makes it feel perhaps a bit small, or even familiar, which is the worst thing it could be), even just limiting itself to other Japanese horror manga (it's entirely possible I am missing references here) would help make it feel a bit less effable, which the game badly needs.

The second point is basically the gameplay version of that aesthetic complaint. The game is super short right now, and will repeat itself a lot. But I think that's a problem, and not avoidable considering its genre. Once you get all the "options" for certain events, there's little left to surprise. And the structure, too, always doing the sets of mysteries to unlock the locks to climb the lighthouse, it's all so...predestined? Where a horror game especially one with these ambitions absolutely needs to feel strange and deep, this one is familiar and shallow.

I love the presentation, the art, the whole menu and UI is some of my favorite in a game (sacrificing some intuition for style, which is always good for me). I'm glad I bought it, even if it's never finished.

I feel like the time is now to update my Sunbreak thoughts, about halfway (I’m guessing) through the title updates, and, well, I was in the mood to write about it. The game has changed a lot since I wrote my first review, and my suspicion that this’d end up my favorite Monster Hunter turned out…even more true than I expected. So I wanted to write about why.

Anomaly investigations feel like an endgame designed specifically for me. Or, almost. My favorite Monster Hunter endgame is essentially what we got in Rise: essentially nothing making you play, beyond you wanting to play, because it’s fun. It gives you some hyper challenging monsters, and no reward for fighting them, because it is so confident in simply being fun to play that it expects you to fight them anyway. I didn’t care about Apexes not having gear: I liked that the game just made these challenging fights and invited me to do them, if I wanted to. I did fight them, and I did have fun. I had so much fun in the endgame of Rise. But I acknowledge that these days, most people playing a game like Monster Hunter crave more concrete tasks to accomplish, more systems to engage with, and rewards for doing so. I don’t begrudge that, even though it usually ends up making me less interested in a game in the long run.

But anomaly investigations. I love them. I spent about 200 hours in base Rise simply using the “Random” button on Join Requests. This was my absolute favorite feature of Rise. This is why, despite knowing Rise’s matchmaking is objectively worse than World’s, I still kind of prefer Rise’s. It’s pretty shit for trying to find specific monsters to fight (pre-anomaly investigations, at least) but the Random button. I love that button. In World, scouring the board for Join Requests and manually choosing one every time, when I just want to “play Monster Hunter” and don’t care about the particulars, I’d usually grow tired and bounce off after about four hunts. In Rise, I’d keep going back and jumping into Random fights all night. Random hunts actually made the camp feel somewhat less egregiously casual, since if I suddenly realized, “I brought a poison SnS to a monster immune to it,” I could go swap out a build real quick. Or I’d equip a weapon I was still learning to play, get something like Valstrax that I felt not ready for on that weapon, no worries, I’ll just switch to my trusty GS. Or so on. I never got bored because I was always fighting different monsters, trying different weapons, and always felt like I was helping people out, and the time to jump into the next hunt was just about zero.

Anomaly investigations feel like the team at Capcom saw how much time I spent doing random hunts and made an endgame system specifically for me. I’m using my well-tuned GS build? I’ll limit my search to the upper levels. I wanna try out a new build, a new weapon, new switch skills? I can just cap the level to 40 or something low and hunt something without having to worry about carting (probably). Because I will essentially use any of the materials investigations give to me, I’ll just have it give me any random target. Pre-investigations, I thought anomaly quests didn’t quite stick the landing on “making the entire roster relevant in endgame,” but investigations nailed it, since you have augmentation as an endless anomalous material funnel.

And I get why people don’t like armor augmentation. But I really enjoy it. I felt base Sunbreak had a really diverse array of viable options for builds, and I think that augmentation makes that even more true. Sure, I can’t take a crap gear piece and make it great, but for example, I really love the skill on the Malzeno armor that heals you when you hit a broken part. Stacked with bloodblight and recovery up, a single hit on GS can heal me to essentially full, which helps me stay really aggressive in anomaly hunts. So I take some of the Malzeno armor into augmentation and basically roll on it until I get some better offensive skills (which the armor largely lacks). Is it a meta set? Absolutely not. Can I still pump out far better damage than in a world without armor augmentation? Yes yes yes.

I think armor augmentation is bad for min maxing, for the more hardcore community, but I think Sunbreak is really about encouraging build and playstyle diversity in a way that the MH series has, in my experience, never done (GU is close, but most weapons have extremely extremely “the best” art/style combos, where I just feel Sunbreak allows for a bit more diversity. Partly because it’s easier! Which I don’t think is inherently horrible). It feels bad rolling a bad augmentation roll, but since I’m not really going for a God Roll, I just get a good offensive skill on a comfy piece, or a good comfy skill on an offensive piece, and then call it a day. If you’re happy with the “good enough” augment, it really takes extremely minimal grinding.

Then I’ve really enjoyed the title update monsters so far. I like that the weapons don’t feel dramatically, insanely better than what we already have, just providing even more options (the armor sets, on the other hand, have some pretty great unique skills, but even they are there to encourage you to try out new types of play, eg. attacking the monster from behind). I again don’t really care about how many fire monsters we’re getting, I guess probably since I main raw-focused weapons and don’t really pay attention to elemental resistances in my armor (giant fireballs are generally very easy to dodge) and just don’t care that much what color the big projectile being thrown at me is. Again, I kinda get why some people care, but I don’t. Which is a running theme with Sunbreak—all of the common criticisms are just things that don’t bother me, or that I actively like. I hope we get at least a couple completely new monsters (new to this game, I mean; I don’t really expect fully original monsters in title updates) but I like all the fights we have so far. While base Rise has some monsters I really hate (Volvidon, Basarios…that’s it, really), Sunbreak has only added monsters I really like (Seething Bazelgeuse I find a little boring). Which is not true of any other Monster Hunter game I’ve played (Portable 3rd is close, but alas: Nibelsnarf).

I think Monster Hunter will return to the World mode for its next entry, or something at least closer to it (a bit slower, more emphasis on ecosystem interactions, more grounded combat), and I’m fine with that. I’m sure I will really, really enjoy the next game. But I think it’s possible Sunbreak stays essentially my perfect modern Monster Hunter. And I’ll always have it, and I’ll be playing it for a long time.

I enjoy this more than base World, for sure, the roster becomes a bit more varied, the weapon and armor designs less dull, Seliana feels like a hub designed by people who actually play the game. But. But unfortunately, the way I felt about World remains: I don’t really feel the urge to play this game, ever, with it doing nothing I don’t think other entries do better. The Sparks Notes of my World thoughts is I can go to Rise (and, now, Sunbreak; especially since Sunbreak fucking owned) if I want fast arcade modern reactive combat, and any Monster Hunter before this for slower, more methodical stuff, so I never really want to play Iceborne; I still have to beat Fatalis, and I imagine I will periodically hop in every now and again until I do. At the same time, Iceborne doubles down on the MMO lite mechanics and its combat updates (most of the new moves, and of course the clutch claw stuff^) I have to actively force myself to engage with, where the equivalent stuff in Sunbreak (switch skill swapping) made me a massively more adventurous, diverse hunter. I never really want to hang out or luxuriate in Iceborne like I do in other Monster Hunters, I mostly just want to hunt the thing to get the thing to make the thing. It doesn’t help that I couldn’t care less about things like ecosystems and stuff…when people point to other games missing some of World’s more complex monster-monster or monster-environment interactions, I mostly think, well, I guess that dev time went into making the fights in the other games more fun. Oh well.

^ I do think the clutch claw stuff is a little over-hated. It’s annoying, but you don’t really need to use it on all but the highest end monsters. I rarely used it and didn’t see a huge increase in hunt times over high rank (once I had a decent, but still bad (see below), build going).

And I hate RNG decorations. I am a humble greatsword main who has played this game for over 100 hours and I do not have a single focus decoration (ok: I have one, but it’s paired with affinity sliding, which is not helpful for GS). People who prefer this system to RNG charms are, I think, unfortunately, insane.