Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak
I want to recommend MONSTER HUNTER RISE to you, especially now that the SUNBREAK expansion is out and more sweet content updates are coming.
But it’s hard.
Recommending the sixth mainline console release of the Monster Hunter series feels a little bit like recommending the sixth season of THE EXPANSE: it’s good, but if you haven’t been following it all along, you probably feel like you’ve missed the boat already.
Except that in Monster Hunter’s case, “the boat” isn’t several installments of plot or lore (the series has no overarching story) - it’s several installments of familiarity with the game’s mechanics.
See, for a long time, the Monster Hunter games have been almost impenetrable - despite their incredibly simple titular premise. There’s so many systems, and the games traditionally explained them either poorly or not at all. I think that’s a big part of why they hadn’t been that big outside of Japan for the first 5-10 years of the series.
Then came MONSTER HUNTER WORLD.
2018’s MONSTER HUNTER WORLD was a revolution for the series in terms of simplification and quality-of-life improvements. It’s really hard to overstate just how much it changed things.
Before WORLD, equipment gave you skills in fractions that sometimes did literal nothing (if you didn’t have enough to add up to a whole skill level), and also sometimes the game gave you negative fractions too, so assembling all your skills was like solving a four-dimensional Rubik’s cube.
Before WORLD, you needed a specific skill just to see the monster on your map, and if you didn’t have that skill you needed to either learn a specific recipe for a meal that would temporarily grant you a version of that skill - and then you needed to craft paintballs and tag the monster with them so you could continue to track it.
Before WORLD, you had to consult a fucking fan-made wiki just to know which parts of the monster you were supposed to hit.
WORLD fixed all that shit, and more.
Every time I think about how far the series has come, this comic plays out in my head.
With all these changes, a new generation of players could break through the Monster Hunter wall - and they did so in a big way: MONSTER HUNTER WORLD became Capcom’s best-selling single title to date.
MONSTER HUNTER RISE continues carrying that torch, making even more improvements and simplifications on top of what WORLD did: You don’t need to worry about the temperature of the arena you’re hunting in anymore! Gathering resources in the wild is finally just a single button-press! Monsters always appear on the goddamn maps, free of charge!
But despite all this streamlining, MONSTER HUNTER RISE isn’t a bottom-up redefining-and-clarification of the series’ fundamentals the way BREATH OF THE WILD was for the Zelda games.
RISE is absolutely the best first Monster Hunter game to play, but you’ll still have to learn how to play a Monster Hunter game. And that’s not easy.
It’s worth it, though.
There just aren’t that many games that blend the addictive make-numbers-go-up motivators of RPGs with the compelling get-better-at-execution motivators of fighting games the way a Monster Hunter title does, and MONSTER HUNTER RISE is the best one yet.
The complex mechanics and fiddly details manage to really come together in viscerally satisfying moments, like when you get to smash a giant transforming sword-axe into a roaring monster’s face mid-charge, breaking off its horn and sending it tumbling onto its ass.
And then do that 500 more times. With friends.
You just gotta break through the wall to get there.
Breaking through the wall
Let’s start with what exactly this game is.
MONSTER HUNTER RISE is an action RPG. You have stats and skills that you improve iteratively, but the core gameplay is real-time combat with monsters where you need to dodge and time your attacks.
The major thing that sets Monster Hunter games apart from most other action RPGs is the sheer depth of the combat systems, and to even begin to explain that I’m going to have to use an example.
My main weapon in RISE is called a switch-axe, or “swaxe” if you’re nasty (and I am).
This is a giant axe that’s as tall as I am, with attacks spanning from slow-and-heavy skullsplitting slams to quick slices that can chain into each other.
As you might’ve guessed, the axe can transform - into a sword.
You can only stay in sword mode for a limited amount of time (which is recharged by attacking a monster while in axe mode). When you’re in sword mode, your attacks are different, and they build up a new meter. When that meter is full, then your swaxe does an additional effect each time it hits the monster. That effect depends on the specific swaxe you’re using - it might inflict a status ailment like poison, or it might just deal more damage.
Of course, the swaxe also has combos for both sword mode and axe mode, and specific moves that allow you to transform between modes mid-combo, and RISE even introduces a new skill that affects those transformations. And I haven’t touched on the special movement or finisher moves with this weapon, or any of the basic mechanics of melee weapons in general (like sharpness, critical hits, and elemental damage).
Dedicated hack-and-slash games like GOD OF WAR and DARKSIDERS top out at this level of control complexity. The swaxe is an entire game’s worth of mechanical depth.
There are 14 mechanically distinct weapon types in MONSTER HUNTER RISE.
If you don’t have any guesses what an “insect glaive” is, I don’t blame you. (It’s a bladed pogo stick with a drone.)
This leads me to my first piece of advice for managing that intimidating level of complexity: You don’t actually need to know all of it to play the game well and have fun.
Seriously. You don’t.
It reminds me of fighting games like GUILTY GEAR STRIVE, or competitive multiplayer games with huge rosters like OVERWATCH and LEAGUE OF LEGENDS. You don’t have to know everything; you can do just fine only focusing on your mains. Personally, I stick to just one weapon per Monster Hunter title, and it’s worked out.
(And since MONSTER HUNTER RISE’s multiplayer is strictly cooperative, you don’t really have to worry about how much better or worse you are than everyone else.)
In fact, you can approach the whole game this way.
Is there a whole system for monster appetite - including how you can tell if they are hungry (and skills/weapons that can make them hungry faster) - that you can learn in order to effectively use bait meat that you laced with other stuff to inflict status ailments? Yes, of course there is, this is Monster Hunter - there’s a system for every little thing.
Do you actually need to know it, ever, to get proficient enough to have fun? No, of course not, this is Monster Hunter - there’s a system for every little thing.
I don’t think I’ve intentionally used bait meat once in the several hundred hours I’ve sunk into RISE so far. And that’s fine: when a game is deep enough to accommodate a huge variety of playstyles and gimmicks, not every player is going to use every toy in the box.
Did I mention there are controls - and outfits - that are specific to your pet owl? No? Don’t worry about it.
This does highlight something that Monster Hunter has always been pretty bad at, though, which is that the on-ramp for learning all this stuff sucks.
To be fair, most RPGs suck at the beginning, and especially complex ones that have to manage the lose-lose balance between “overwhelming the player with walls of text up front” and “constantly interrupting the early experience with endless micro-tutorials as you play”. This is a Gordian knot that tons of games have been trying to untangle for decades, and MONSTER HUNTER RISE certainly isn’t the one to finally cut through it. But even beyond that, it still feels like RISE is worse than it should be at conveyance.
The main way RISE teaches its various bits and bobs to the player is via textboxes that maybe have a little picture - which is about as effective as trying to teach someone how to play hockey through a PowerPoint presentation. Worse, these tutorials often appear when you can’t immediately apply their instructions (or don’t want to, because you were just in the middle of figuring something else out). And worse still, a lot of the early tutorial experience covers things that players are likely to know or figure out intuitively through gameplay.
So when you start a new game of RISE, prepare to pay the price of admission over and over again in the opening as you click the “Are you sure you want to exit the tutorial?” button 3,078 times.
You’ll really start to feel it around the time you get to the tutorial about tutorials (that includes a picture of another tutorial, so you know what a tutorial looks like).
Fortunately, there’s an ancient remedy for these sorts of ills: play with friends (ideally, ones that already know how to play). Joining a friend’s lobby, and online matchmaking with strangers are both pretty painless in RISE.
Is it an indictment of the game that it virtually requires a friend who’s taken the class before to tell you which readings to skip, and distill the others into a form you can actually understand? Yeah, for sure. Deduct however many points you want to from its grade for that.
But if you’re brand new to the series and don’t tend to play games this dense, finding a buddy will help you break through the wall.
And on the other side of that wall?
Here be dragons
The stars of the Monster Hunter series have always been the monsters themselves, and getting to fight them is the real payoff of the games.
Each large monster you hunt is essentially a fully-fleshed-out boss fight.
Monsters have a variety of different states (e.g. exhausted, enraged, etc.) and switch between them dynamically throughout a fight. Breaking different body parts on a monster can also alter the course of a fight - like cutting off its tail, or breaking the claws it uses to get a steady grip on slippery ice. All this changes both their AI and their attacks, making the monsters more “alive” and responsive than a simple progression of “first this moveset, then this one”.
Hunting a single large monster can typically take anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes (or more, for some of the “final boss” encounters). It may feel weird to spend 10+ minutes “just fighting one enemy” - usually that means something’s wrong, either with you or with the game - but it’s more accurate to think of these things as “levels” rather than “single enemy encounters”. These aren’t just fights, after all; they’re hunts.
The fights themselves are generally much better in RISE than they were in previous titles, too. Some individual monsters have been tweaked (e.g. airborne dragons like Rathalos and Kushala Daora are much less obnoxious), but the biggest addition is a system that lets you wrangle one monster to fight another - which turns those moments when a second monster shows up from “oh fuck” moments to “oh fuck yes” moments.
All this combat-y goodness is supported by wonderful creature design.
Monster Hunter games have always been great at this (I’ve written about it before). The creatures have a believable biology to their anatomy and movements that makes them fascinating and memorable, combined with rule-of-cool video game nonsense (like shooting lightning bolts and doing flying somersault body slams) that makes them exciting to fight.
These are games where the floor for “interesting monster designs” is dragons and raptors. They rock.
In MONSTER HUNTER RISE, the new monster designs also have a theme: they’re adaptations of yōkai (supernatural entities) from Japanese folklore. (Technically, some are inspired by Fūjin and Raijin, who are deities rather than yōkai.)
This adds a fun layer to each design, as you get to recognize (or look up) what they’re based on and appreciate the ways in which that concept was brought to life as an animal - like the way a one-eyed hopping umbrella gets represented as a crane with a huge frill, or the way the kappa (no, not that one) comes to life as a giant sumo-wrestling platypus.
The expansion, SUNBREAK, extends the theme but switches cultures: its brand new critters are adaptations of classic Hollywood horror monsters like Dracula and the wolfman. Just like with the yōkai, this makes for some inventive designs.
I’m especially tickled by the design of Garangolm: the traditional green square-headed image of Frankentstein’s monster gets adapted as a moss-covered gorilla with blocky scales. It can also coat each of its fists in different buffs, making it like a “frankenstein” of multiple elemental types while fighting you, which is just such a cute idea.
Of course, not all the new designs are that subtle.
Hint: This one isn’t the wolfman.
SUNBREAK also makes another contribution to RISE’s monster design virtues, particularly in the endgame.
Bloody business
In Monster Hunter games, the endgame often involves fighting super-hard versions of monsters you’ve already faced. In MONSTER HUNTER WORLD, these were called “tempered” (and later “arch-tempered”) monsters; in the base game for RISE they were “apex” monsters. These typically have a slightly different color treatment and a new move or two, but otherwise most of what’s different is just that they hit a lot harder and are harder to kill.
In SUNBREAK, the new tier is “afflicted” monsters. And while they also have more health & deal more damage than their regular counterparts, their “affliction” introduces some unique mechanics that significantly change the texture of the fights against them beyond just “they’re harder”.
First: When afflicted monsters get enraged, their bodies get covered in glowing red orbs. When you deal enough damage to them, they explode and deal massage damage to the monster. If you pop enough of them, they’ll stun the monster - letting you and your teammates dogpile the hapless thing for a while. Because each of their body parts gets one of these bubbles, you’re incentivized to hit every part of the monster, rather than just the traditional weakspots.
Second: Afflicted monsters can all hit you with a new status ailment called “bloodblight”. While you have bloodblight, your health slowly goes down over time, and your healing items are less effective…but, every time you hit the monster, you regain health. This changes how you think about balancing healing/retreating versus aggression in a way that’s pretty new to the series.
I like this approach to making harder versions of monsters.
Rather than just taking your toys away (i.e. giving them more health, making them immune to traps, etc.), they let you keep your toys and instead challenge you to adopt a new play pattern - one that changes some of your normal priorities in combat, and overall encourages you to be more aggressive.
Encouraging aggression is a particularly good call for Monster Hunter. When a monster deals tons of damage, the default response from the player will be to play more conservatively - and when you combine that with a much bigger health pool, you can end up with fights that take way too long. The designers for RISE were smart to make sure their “upgraded” monsters gave players a bunch of tools and incentives to stop that from happening.
A new day
There’s bunches of other improvements to the base game in SUNBREAK, too. There’s other variants of RISE’s monsters that are much fresher than simple palette/stat-swaps, there’s some quality-of-life adjustments to the new mechanics from RISE, it adds helpers that make single-player hunts much smoother, and of course there’s all the new gear that comes with new monsters.
There’s plenty more to say, but I don’t want to end up conveying the essence of the Monster Hunter games so accurately that this review itself becomes too big and dense for most people to enjoy.
SUNBREAK is great.
You don’t need it to enjoy MONSTER HUNTER RISE, but it is well worth the money, especially with a full schedule of free content updates to come - adding even more new goodies. The first of these adds Lucent Nargacuga, which hasn’t been in a Monster Hunter game for 9 years. I am very much looking forward to it obliterating me just as hard as it did back in MONSTER HUNTER 3 ULTIMATE.
(Heads-up: While you do need to clear the base game before you can get to hunting the new beasties, SUNBREAK does give you a bunch of free gear to help you work through the base game as fast as possible, and that there’s always a spike in player activity when new content like this drops.)
This is a great time to get into MONSTER HUNTER RISE.
Yes, it’s still a Monster Hunter game, with all that that entails.
You’ll still have to assign skills to your pet cat, and learn the peculiar timings of swinging your giant jawbone-sword, and deal with the fact that “skills” and “switch skills” are two completely different and totally unrelated things.
Monster Hunter is definitely an acquired taste.
But it’s delicious.
