Monster Hunter Rise (2021)

When Capcom started adding additional/new DRM to older games on Steam, everyone predicted it would break Steam Deck compatibility. And now here we are:

Monster Hunter Rise update breaks Steam Deck compatibility, users blame new DRM

Call it petty, but I'm going to avoid buying games if they don't play on Steam Deck due to DRM. I'm fine with tinkering to get games to work, but DRM goes beyond basic compatibility mismatches. Interoperability between my desktop and Steam Deck is a big factor influencing why I buy certain games for PC, so maybe Capcom's going on the old temporary "avoid this company" list until this is sorted out.

I really like this game but my god is the UI ever terrible. Want an example? When faced with a tutorial screen you have two options subsequent to reading, pressing A for Next and B for Close. However if the tutorial screen is only one page long, or you are on the final page pressing Next or Close prompts the same dialogue box "Exit the Tutorial? Yes or No." Regardless of what you want, you have to agree to close the tutorial. Now, at the beginning of the game this is unclear, and many tutorials are only one page long, which leads a new player to wonder if they've pressed the wrong button when faced with the question of whether or not to close the tutorial.

This kind of design is unintuitive and creates friction for the user, and the philosophy of this design permeates every other aspect of the game. It just generally has a very poor interface that fights the player. In time one grows accustom to it, but there are absolutely better ways to design every aspect of the game.

The game is also filled with layers upon layers of useless elements and fiddly little bits to have to learn and deal with, like hiring buddies, trading, and other nonsense that really just gets in the way of honing in on the core enjoyable aspects of the game. I also don't love the wirebugs. I understand their purpose but I've yet to feel they improve my experience over something like Monster Hunter World.

I like this more than Monster Hunter World since everything feels a bit less drawn-out. Still I think there's a bit of a limited appeal for me in these games. Though I am still having fun after the first few sessions, I'm not absorbed into it like I want to be with a big action-RPG. Maybe part of it is just that the game feels disjointed, popping back and forth between the home village and different medium-sized field areas every 15 minutes or so with occasional dialogue.

I think what would make me like it a bit more would be more of a feeling that I'm actually progressing through a world, being able to naturally discover my objectives while exploring instead of picking them from a list one at a time, and maybe a more straightforward gear/loot system that's easier to get a grasp of. Besides that, even with these lower-HP monsters, I still don't super love how long fights take in these games without meaningfully changing enough to justify the length IMO (I'm only 5-6 hours in though). But at least the core gameplay is fun and the game has a really nice look and charm to it.

If I finish the main story, I'll report back with a full review, otherwise I still will have had a pretty good time with it. Definitely still going for now.

I can't decide if I like this game or not, which has been my experience with a bunch of the monster hunter games. Invariable somewhere in the early game is a a pain-in-the-ass monster that you must kill to proceed into the later levels. I just didn't expect it to occur at HR 2. Magnamalo is bullshit.

I do enjoy the technical nature of the game of learning the monster. This game is very streamlined from past games and really keeps the game more focused on the action. But for all the Monster Hunter games there is no ability to grind in the early game and get better stuff. So much of the content is locked behind proceeding the urgent quests. You are already given the best weapons and there is no point in crafting the other ones. To get stuck on the early quests is just demoralizing.

I started playing this again on PC when it launched two weeks ago. Put about 40 hours in... I thought I'd delve deep into this but I feel the same burnt out vibes.

Maybe my hundreds of hours of playtime on World aren't helping. Maybe double dipping wasn't a great idea. There's something about Rise that makes it feel less grand, less immersive and less important to play. The gameplay is there, the aesthetic is there (even though it lacks in detail and polish). I think it's the lack of story, of fresh ideas.

Kulve Taroth was amazing to me, in World. And doing these 16 player events felt fresh, felt MMO-like, without having to grind on a daily basis.

I hope the new Monster Hunter game explores these concepts further. An MMO-lite, a casual MMO, where online play feels less disconnected an anonymous, as it does in Rise.

I also hope the new MH game has a better story and introduces something new, fresh, something deeper than the wirebug. And don't get me wrong. I love MH, and I enjoyed Rise. But it is not the BIG new MH game I was hoping it to be. Maybe the Sunbreak expansion will change my mind, I doubt it.

Also, fuck CAPCOM's shitty end-game concepts. I despised the Guiding Lands in Iceborne and I despise the Talisman grind in MH Rise.

Monster Hunter: World, like most sane humans, was my first Monster Hunter game. To say I loved it would be an understatement. I put 170 hours into it on PS4 before starting over on the PC version, which I put 300 hours into. I know for some of you 300 hours in a single game isn’t a lot, but it’s my most played game on Steam by a decent margin (Destiny 2 is #2 for the curious).

I was very worried that Rise wouldn’t live up to my high expectations. I knew it was a port of a switch game and wouldn’t look as good, and my friend (and long-time insane old school monster hunter fan) kept saying to me “it’s by a different team I’m pretty sure. It’s different than World. Temper your expectations.”

In every way I like Rise more than World, and a lot of that comes down to them getting rid of or tweaking the bullshit from World that I didn’t like. Namely the clutch claw, weakening, mounting, cutscenes/story bullshit, and travel time.

Mounting in World was always boring and always took way too long, can we agree on that? Okay, good, so in Rise you have a minigame where you can use one monster to fight another monster before executing a finisher, which I think we can all agree is way more fun. You can dodge cancel! While mounting a monster!

Iceborne was a love/hate addition to world for me. On the one hand I loved the new hub world, tons of new content, and the new moves completed certain weapons that felt incomplete before. On the other hand the whole clutching onto monsters to weaken them thing was the worst thing that happened to the game. It interrupted the flow of the combat SO much. It was slow, slow, slow and just not fun to do.

In Rise there isn’t ANYTHING that is slow or not fun to do. There is no part of the gameplay loop here that I even mildly dislike. Mounting is fun, there’s no clutch claw bullshit, getting to the monster is faster than ever thanks to your Palamute buddy. They really streamlined the bullshit out of the process and focused on what’s actually good about Monster Hunter, and that’s the combat. Silkbugs add SO much to the game. The mobility is insane, the verticality they allow the level design to have is orgasmic. The new silkbind moves are incredibly fun and often complete game changers depending on the weapon. My main weapon is Charge Blade and counter peak performance being, essentially, a generous guard point that fully charges your phials has changed. the. fucking. game. Back to back ultra element discharges are better than sex. Rise’s answer to Iceborne’s Savage Axe is far more satisfying and having to give up your charged sword for it is an interesting trade-off.

Speaking of, having different skills you get to choose between is fucking awesome. You can choose two entirely different ways of playing songs on Hunting Horn. How cool is that?

Random other gushing about Rise:

The menus are, across the board, massively improved. No more scrolling through a massive list of square icons looking for a weapon, now you actually get to drill down by weapon type first. Armor is organized in your personal equipment menu by the same list format it's presented to you at the smithy.

Capturing isn’t defacto better than killing like in World, it’s just a different loot table, so you’ll do both depending on what you want.

The load times (at least on PC) are INSTANTANEOUS. I can be at the smithy one second and in the training area the next. So, so good.

Not only can you ride a dog to get places faster, but you can DRIFT YOUR DOG FOR A SPEED BOOST. SO GOOOOD.

Your friends can actually run around the entire village with you this time, not just the gathering hub.

Co-op is way better this time, there’s no weird waiting until someone sees a cut-scene before you can join their quest. In fact there’s a complete delineation between singleplayer and co-op (village versus hub quests). My friend informs me this is how it worked before World, and it seems like the better way to do it.

I may be in the minority on this, but I actually really like the Rampage quests, which are essentially a mix between normal combat and tower defense. It’s not terribly deep, but the canon and chaingun are ridiculously satisfying to use, it provides some nice gameplay variety which World desperately needed, and as far as siege stuff it beats the hell out of Zorah Magdaros.

I got this game at release, but didn’t start playing it till a few weekends ago. Before this I got burnt out of monster hunter world on Xbox, as that game felt really grindy on release. MH Rise is better than MH World in many ways in my opinion.

The game is complex enough to keep me interested, but still easy enough to learn with practice. I was really getting into the game, spending the last few weekends playing. Admittedly I was bummed when I beat the last hunt. You can continue to play after that (redoing hunts), but even at 45 hours I feel like I’m ready for more. Game loses a star for some of the times there is input lag/online lag that gets you killed. Also it would be better if they had the controls more uniform between weapons. As you learn that twitch memory to survive high rank, it is very difficult to switch weapons after that. At least without feeling the huge skill cap difference, handicapped by flip flop controls from ranged to melee.

I saw they announced dlc for this. I will be purchasing it day one and will be continuing to play the post game.

MHR is a great game, but it has no merits. It plays a little better than MHW thanks to some QoL improvements (dog, grappling, no blocking friend out of quests until they see the cutscene solo) but it does so many things much worse.

Matchmaking and looking for quest is worse than MHW, there is no new weapon, while it's not what anyone is looking for the story really is abysmal. The really cool investigation quests that made each encounter really special are gone, the super epic meals are replaced with dango ??? Seriously ???

But instead, we got more buddies that can cosplay as Sonic and go do our fetch quests for us.

I'm not even going to start on the textures and graphics because that wouldn't be fair but overall it's a lesser version of MHW and I would have preferred if it was its own thing a bit more by trying new stuff, the monster battles are pretty cools but that's it in terms of new ideas.

It is still enjoyable because MH is a great franchise, but I'm a little disappointed, even though I knew I was essentially getting a good PC port of a mobile console game.

I don't make any claim to be an authority on the Monster Hunter series, by any means. I've played most of them, if even only a little. I played quite a bit of World before taking a long hiatus and did my best to avoid MH:R, but my family dragged me into it, only feinting kicks, and screams. I knew if I started playing this that my life would be derailed for a couple of weeks minimum, and here we are.

Simply put, I adore this game. Capcom have taken an already great formula and refined it even further by removing a lot of tedium, introducing fun new gameplay mechanics, and implementing many quality-of-life refinements. I also loved MH:W and didn't mind its departure from the the main series of games. For the record (and according to my sons at least), MH:W was a bit of a departure from the traditional series of games. I personally found the visuals of MH:W to be breathtaking and the gameplay was top-notch.

The Switch obviously couldn't handle MH:W, but I can think of no better answer than Rise. While Rise may not possess the visual prowess of World, it's absolutely stunning, nonetheless. It never ceases to amaze me how developers can continually squeeze so much quality out of a platform that's been equated to an old mobile phone by many, which to be honest isn't an unfair comparison.

I'll not hide the fact that I'm an unabashed Nintendo fan-boy, and this is an excellent return to what most fans of the series consider its roots. In truth, the series started on the PS2 (as far as I know) and I had the fortune of being a beta tester for it before it released in North America. At the time, I honestly dismissed it after I cooked meat on the BBQ Spit and the silly music began to play. That just felt so out of place given the tone of the game. Back then, I just thought it devalued the game and I never played it again until my sons started playing. This of course was a gross misgiving on my part in hindsight. I allowed myself to base my judgement of the series on that on silly mechanic and left my attention to other titles.

Once my sons began playing the Monster Hunter series, they became miniature authorities on the games. Ask my oldest son any question about the game and you'll be stuck for an hour in that conversation. I returned to the series with MH3 on the 3DS and immediately became frustrated with the complicated nature of the control scheme. Despite my frustration, I must give credit where it's due to Capcom for fleshing out so many gameplay mechanics out of a comparatively limited interface. The Monster Hunter series has established its own niche in the gaming world and inspired many would-be clones, but nothing truly compares. I've never been much of a fan of Dauntless personally and I do enjoy God Eater, but (at least to me and my sons), Monster Hunter is unrivaled. Now, I'll stop gushing over the series and try to focus on this individual title.

Upon first playing the game, I must confess that I felt as though some of the ideas implemented felt like gimmick attempts at furthering new gameplay mechanics. For example, the "Rampage" just felt like a way to justify adding Tower Defense to Monster Hunter. That judgement still stands to a degree and I'm sure many out there feel like this is a tacked-on mechanic with a weak storyline integration. I personally feel like the "Rampage" does have a weak storyline and would have preferred that Capcom just added it as an optional mode instead. Despite my personal misgivings, I will say that it's a fun implementation of the Tower Defense genre into the Monster Hunter series; however, I don't play those mission without an explicit need to do so, but at least I enjoy them when I do.

Now, on to the Wirebugs. My initial reaction to this was a weak, convoluted way to pull in some of the ideas from World. After learning how Wirebugs work, however, I've really come to appreciate their utility and would sorely miss it if removed. Wirebugs add a fun new level of depth and customization to the series. They aren't just a copy of the "Hookshot" or a substitute for a grappling hook. Instead, they have become an essential tool in a Monster Hunter's arsenal. With Wirebugs you can scale walls and cliffs, wrangle monsters for a brief time and make them fight each other, swing in midair to traverse long gaps, and perform some amazing new maneuvers with your weapons. It took me a bit to come to grips with how Wirebugs worked, but once I did, wow, they are just so much fun.

My favorite addition though, by far, are Palamutes. Again, I judged these as a gimmick at first but of all of the latest ideas, this is the one that I wouldn't be without if given the choice. Capcom have done a stellar job in introducing these new companions. Palamutes are like Palicos in that they are hunting companions that you recruit and have a randomness to what you get when you hire them. And, they have so very much personality. I could write a review just on how much I love Palamutes, but I'll try to keep this a brief as I can. To vastly oversimplify the idea, Palamutes are a canine equivalent to Palicos, but with their own unique gameplay mechanics. The condensed version of what they provide is acting as a companion hunter in single and multiplayer, they can don armor and wield weapons, have their own specific set of gear with a wide range of utility, great combat AI, and best of all, they are mounts! To give an idea of a Palamutes size, think Dire Wolf, Worg, or a Colt but smaller. Palamutes not only make traversal of maps faster and easier, but they make it fun as well. Not only can you ride them, but they can sprint very quickly with no stamina meter, scale ledges, have a good jumping distance, and best of all you can act while on them both in combat and in gathering. While you're riding one, you can attack with the A button, and they make cleaning up "trash mobs" so much easier. While sprinting, you can also leap off them to perform arial attacks. You can carve your kills while on them, mine, and gather. After the addition of Palamutes to the series, I would have a tough time returning to future titles without them.

I feel as though I've praised the game enough at this point, however. There are some small gripes I have but I'll not bother going into detail about those. Most of my issues are related to how I play the game personally. One example would be the complex game controls. No matter how good you are at gaming, there's a learning curve here, even if not only in skill, but breadth as well since each weapon has its own unique implementation. I often feel as though my fingers get tangled up trying to hit the correct buttons, especially in the heat of battle. This is partially since I'm an aging gamer in my mid 40's. There are no issues that I find with the game that I would state meriting not playing it or take away from the games overall value.

In summary though, Monster Hunter Rise is the culmination of ideas and mechanics from all previous Monster Hunter titles (including Stories) rolled up into one with a lot of polish, refinement, and quality of life implementations. My opinion would be that any fan of the series that has yet to play Rise that might also be reading this will undoubtedly enjoy this game. I could see circumstances in which some fans of the series may have specific areas that they might take issue with, but taken as a whole, the fun to be had and overall value for your gaming dollar here is exceptional.

Monster Hunter Rise takes everything great about World, dashes in an incredible amount of verticality and brings back the ancient Japanese aesthetic from Portable 3rd to make one of the best games on Nintendo Switch and an exciting start of a new Monster Hunter generation.

The player is promoted to a Hunter in the beautiful Kamura Village, where they soon hear word of a terrible calamity caused by a large horde of monsters, The "Rampage". Solving the mystery behind the Rampage, the player deals with every monster under the sun, including the ferocious new Magnamalo.

Paper-thin plot aside, the player has most of their tools at their disposal from World, with some essential additions. Using a tool called the Wirebug, the player can shoot up into the air and can run up walls. This gives an insane amount of verticality and mobility during fights, as players can ride monsters (to attack other monsters) by wirebugging onto them, utilize special moves with wirebugs, wirebug out of being hit from an attack, etc. - this also results in a dramatically different world design, as areas will have far more depth now that the player can scale much more and much more quickly.

On top of the Wirebug, the player will also have a dog companion, the Palamute. The dogs are adorable and the player can ride them to reach places quickly, making them very helpful. Palicos also return for support. As for the "Rampage", the players must fight a tower-defense mode where they utilize weapons (ballistae, Dragonators, bombs, etc) against a horde of enemies from crashing the village gates, often resulting in a showdown against a large monster - the largest being the Apex monsters, the new replacements for Deviants which inherit a surprising amount of their abilities/attacks.

As for monster design, Rise inherits old gen monsters as well as grabbing monsters from World (Bazelgeuse, Pukei-Pukei, Jyuratodus, etc). The new monsters range from the fruit tossing Bishaten to the ferocious sword-wielding bear Goss Harag to the hellishly quick and unpredictable Magnamalo. The game is still fairly light on content without an "Ultimate" mode but content is rarely HR locked and the player will never have to grind for more than what they need for armor, weapons, and decorations. Decorations are no longer random, going back to the preferred old style of random charms - though in fact, this randomness can be slightly controlled for the hunter's benefit.

Graphically and aurally the game is one of the finest on the Switch. The performance is amazingly smooth for jaw-dropping graphics - it's no World but it's a huge step up above Gen Ultimate. The music features a ton of remixes as well as new tunes - the focus on vocals for every track helps make them stand out as well as heighten the drama where need be.

Monster Hunter Rise is the game we never knew we wanted - instead of porting World to the Switch, Capcom lovingly crafted an amazingly unique and exciting addition to the Monster Hunter series that adds more quality of life improvements and tough fights to get us ready for a possible "Rise Ultimate" in the future.

4/5

Top tier gameplay loop. Weapons are tight as always. Tried the lance and sword and shield this time. Lance was a little stale but sword and shield was great. Making builds is fun as always. Palamutes and wirebugs are fantastic additions. Not a huge fan of the final boss monsters personally but the other new ones were great. Runs fantastically on the switch too, but would love to see this in HD on a home console or PC.

I worked through all patch content up to Toestra. One thing that grinds my gears is having to grind HR in order to reach the next quest, I just wanna beat the next thing!

For longtime MH fans: This entry increases the pace of hunts. There is less running away. The maps are smaller than World but still one piece and not disconnected like the classic games. The wirebug allows you to keep in the fight. Formerly slow weapons are viable to use fast now. many technical weapons have been streamlined. Some of the nonsense like hot drinks/cold drinks has been cut. animations are shorter. crafting requirements are less absurd. in exchange, it's easier (for now). Future updates will add more challenge but for now it's easy and it feels short. As a long time fan, i'm enjoying it a lot.

If this is your first MH: This is a great entry to start with. it's more accessible than ever. There's a lot to learn and if you're not a veteran, this will be a challenging experience. If you like just doing a lot of soulslike style boss fights and you enjoy absurd games that don't take themselves seriously, you'll have a good time.

First things first: I absolutely love this game. As it happened to me with MH3U, MH4U, MHG, MHW and Iceborne before, I just can't stop playing. This time, they even managed to make the gathering quests and exploration fun thanks to the wall running and Palamutes. It's a truly amazing game and my favorite thing right now.

With that said... I'm gonna talk about its negative aspects:

The plot is trash, as is usual in the Monster Hunter games. At least this time is not the colonialist fantasy we got with World.

The multiplayer missions can be very chaotic because you have four hunters and for dogs running around and attacking. The action becomes illegible at times. It also has terrible tutorials that won't teach the most important mechanics to the newcomers.

But the worst thing is the endgame. It barely has one. At least we can be sure this one will be fixed with DLC and the inevitable 'Ultimate' expansion.

Yes, sounds bad, but this game is truly great despise that. You can read my full review in spanish here.