I never “really” played Monster Hunter. I’m pretty quick to make a judgement on games, so a new franchise has to impress me fast. In the case of Monster Hunter, I played the first one and gave up real quick, I didn’t “get” it after doing some early small monster hunts. I gave it another chance on PSP, but I gave up on that one even faster and I never touched the series again.

So the demo for Rise came out, and since it actually made you play the real core of the gameplay in a way, actually getting you to hunt big monsters, I figured I’d give it a chance again (I’m sure some other MH demos did that too, but that was when I was in “gave up on MH” mode so I paid no attention). It took me a bit, but after trying out different weapons and figuring out how I was supposed to play, I became able to kill the demo monster, Mizutsune, pretty reliably (didn’t play the second demo that had Magnamalo). And I was enjoying it. So I figured… let’s jump into MH for real this time, unlike my original “attempts” with the series.

So yes this is a review not at all from a fan of the series, but a newcomer. So I don’t really know what’s new in this one except a few elements, I don’t know if it’s better or worse than any of the other games, I’m judging this as if it were a whole new thing. If you want a review from a veteran, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Let’s see how a newb deals with his first MonHun!

Developer and Publisher: Capcom
Release date: March 26th 2021
Platforms: Switch (PC later)
Genre: Action

A lot of the presentation here is fairly minimal. There’s hardly a story, for example. The village area has its own quick story about beating Magnamalo because of the upcoming Rampage or something, it’s not much of anything. You beat him and that’s that. The Hub area also has its own story around the origin of the Rampage which has basically no depth. This story is very simple and doesn’t even end (it will hopefully end when the version 3.0 update comes out). There’s not really story-related cutscenes, it’s mostly conversations. You can basically ignore it. The hub/village area itself is just a few screens with a few NPCs, with the only really noteworthy parts being the dango-making cutscenes (which will get stuck in your head for a bit). The areas you explore on hunts are more detailed and have a lot of exploration to them (and they’re big open maps which I hear is a new thing? I might be wrong, I remember Monster Hunter Tri (which I watched a friend play once) having load screens between areas of the maps). Most of the non-hunt moments of the game are spent navigating menus to craft armor/weapons, choosing your next mission, managing your animal buddies and making dango… it’s very simple. The focus of the presentation is definitely the design of the few story characters, the design of the monsters and the areas you can explore… which do look awesome. I don’t really know which monsters are new (I know some that aren’t like Rathalos), but I like a lot of the designs. My favorites are probably Goss Harag, Rathalos and Barioth, but all of them are pretty cool so far… I’ll talk about this more later.

So like I said, in-between hunts you’re basically making equipment, then choosing your next mission in a menu, then making dango, then it’s out to hunt, which brings you to the main camp of the selected hunt’s area. There’s 5 different maps (as well as a few setups for the rampage map and an extra map that’s only used for a specific boss battle), which have their own sets of small monsters and materials you can gather.

In most hunts (though some early ones are exceptions) there’s 3 large monsters wandering around the map. Generally hunts only have one target monster to take down, but you can play around with the others either to gather material, or to use the new Wyvern Riding feature to help fight your target monster. As you fight monsters they may run around and encounter other monsters, and sometimes you actually get cool unique battle animations when 2 monsters fight. Like a flying monster might grab a monster off the ground and drop them or something. It’s pretty cool.

How the combat works has some depth to it, but the core is pretty simple. There’s 14 weapon types. For full disclosure, though I did try all of them in the demo, I didn’t in the full game. I focused on 3: Long Swords, Hunting Horn and Hammer (and I messed around with Sword and Shield a bit). Each weapon has a unique moveset. There’s basic attacks with X and A, plus some if you press both X and A. There’s special features with the ZR button such as charging with the hammer or more special attacks with other weapons. Pressing different buttons in different sequences lead to different attack combos, and sometimes you can skip certain parts of combos by linking from different combos’ attacks… And then there’s the Wirebug, which is a movement tool (useful for dodging away from certain powerful attacks), but every weapon also has one or 2 special attacks using wirebugs in different ways. These deal blue damage, which leads to monsters being stunned for Wyvern Riding. Basically every weapon type has its own learning curve, with a pretty heavy amount of attacks.

Each weapon also has it’s own special gimmick, usually represented by some kind of meter under your life and stamina bars. For example the long sword has the spirit gauge which goes up when you attack, but also changes its outline color when you land certain combos, allowing the use of different powerful attacks based on your spirit level.  It also has sheathing and unsheathing attacks that are quite interesting. Someone who’s good with the long sword will use the different attacks not just to hit monsters but also avoid their attacks, and they go fucking hard. Meanwhile the hammer is way simpler, though it relies on positioning and charging attacks for heavy hits. The Hunter Horn provides buffs and healing for you and teammates in different ways (and has some really good wirebug attacks). The Sword and Shield has good mobility and also can block attacks… and so on. There’s also a few ranged weapons, I just haven’t tried them yet but from what I’ve seen they’re pretty interesting and strong. Basically, there’s so many weapon types you’re sure to find one that fits you pretty well. Turns out the big dumb hammer worked best for me from what I’ve tried, but I liked many of the weapons. I’m sure if you look at the meta some may be more effective than others, but overall I will say every weapon seems pretty effective, I don’t think any will make it impossible to win.

So fighting large monsters is the bulk of the game and it’s quite fun, as you may expect. There’s a good amount of large monsters (and more are coming in updates), and each of them acts very different. Some may produce different elements or liquids and such (so some may shoot fire or lightning, while some may have poison glands, or sleeping gas), while others may have unique physiology sure as having skin/scales as hard as stone all over their body making hitting them very complicated. They’re all really well designed. Just seeing how they look will give you a pretty good idea of how they may move and attack. The monkey bat thing Bishaten throws fruit at you and hands off walls, Volvidon rolls around, Jyuratodus swims in mud because he’s a fish and so on. These designs are amazing.

Much like how each weapon has its own learning curve because of their movesets, every monster has something of a learning curve… which will differ based on what weapon you use. Your first time fighting a monster might be a bit more experimental because you will need to probably hold back a bit and observe what they do, and see how they react to your actions. Maybe you’ll find out that’s not the correct thing to even do in the first place, like Volvidon surprising me with a giant long tongue attack. There’s all sorts of things to pay attention to, like, say, Barroth being literally made of rocks so some weapons bounce off him pretty easily. I’ve noticed certain enemies where some animations were good occasions for you to hit them with particularly strong attacks to knock them back/down. Knocking them down is good because you can get a few free hits in. Also, despite the lack of HP bars, you can kinda tell how well things are going, as fighting the large monsters fucks them up pretty bad. You may break of parts of their bodies like horns and claws and such. You can even cut some of their tails off. Breaking parts is a fun way to get materials, more on that later of course.

A new element here is Wyvern Riding. Basically, either by using a Puppet Spider which you have to find/know where they are in the wild), doing enough wirebug damage or having the large monsters fight each other. Once the monster is stunned you can use wirebugs to jump on top of them and then you control them. This allows a few options. You can do attacks, so you can use a monster to attack another. Doing enough attacks unlocks a strong attack, not something I really ended up doing. The other big option is the “launch”, which makes the monster dash forward recklessly into walls for some extra damage. You can do several of these if you regain footing fast enough. If you launch into another monster that’s that, but it should stun them to allow you to wyvern ride them too. Of course there’s limitations, a monster that you had a wyvern ride with already won’t as easily be stunned again. So even if you just need one Puppet Spider the first time you meet a monster to stun them for riding, if you rode them already it won’t generally work with just one again. My preferred strategy with wyvern riding is to get to another monster if needed, do at least 3 strong attacks to break off some materials, end with a launch, then wyvern ride the next monster for more strong attacks and end with the super attack (Or just another launch, whatever). This gets you 3 extra materials at least per monster which is quite nice.

Before a hunt (or back at camp, which you can fast-travel to if you’re not in battle) you can set up equipment for the hunt. Potions, traps, flash bombs, meat for bait and exploding barrels, mostly. There’s a few things you have by default that you can’t unequip, such as kunai which are kinda pointless IMO (maybe I’m wrong), the BBQ spit which… I never used… and the whetstone. Your weapons do lose some of their sharpness (even blunt weapons like hammers somehow… don’t question it), so you need to find time in battle to sharpen, or wait until the monster runs away for some sharpening time. The potions are obviously the most important thing, as you need those to not die. Those monsters are pretty big so they hit hard, though of course taking potions takes time so be careful. The explosive barrels are a bit interesting. I mostly only find them useful to use when the monster is asleep (either because you caused sleep or their fatigue is high so they escape for some sleep). You can place 2 big (large or mega) barrels at a time, and a small barrel. The big ones require some sort of impact to explode, while the small ones blow up after a few seconds. I’m sure there’s interesting ways to use these outside of sleeping monsters (maybe placing them on traps), I just haven’t really figured it out.

A hunt can be ended in 2 ways: first is you kill the target monster, allowing you to carve its body up a few times to get materials. The other is bashing on the monster enough to make them tired enough to capture them. To do that it’s pretty simple, just use a pitfall or shock trap when your palico says you can capture, then throw 2 tranq bombs (or use tranq ammo from your ranged weapon) in their face. This doesn’t let you carve the monster, you just get materials after the end screen. The 2 methods are perfectly valid, you do have different percentage changes to get different materials depending on the hunt method. You can check the monster guide in the pause menu to see those drop rates. I will say capture may be a bit annoying solely because it limits your trap use in hunts as you need at least one for the cap (and also it’s possible to capture using your palico’s trap but that’s so random I’ve only had that happen once…. funny enough I had already wasted the tranq bombs on a weirdly-failed capture attempt before, so the monster just touched the trap and the capture was done).

Outside of large monsters, hunts also allow you to explore the area. You may find ore to mine, plants to collect, spiribirds to get stat boosts for the hunt, bugs and other endemic life to use as weapons against monsters (blastoads are fun). There’s some hidden relics to find as well (10 per area), no idea what this does but that’s a thing you can do. You’ll also find smaller monsters, which die pretty easily but you may need some of the materials you can card from them. Exploring is fun, with the combination of riding on your dogs back and using the wirebug to climb up places.

Difficulty is a weird thing here… This game isn’t very hard, I guess? Rather than hard, I’d just call it challenging (which are 2 different things), and a healthy challenge at that. The monsters are quite well-designed generally when it comes to how they act in combat (sometimes they attack a bit too non-stop and don’t have good occasions to hit them (or maybe I’m just bad), but that’s pretty rare), and when they hit they tend to hit really hard… But I have basically not failed any hunts. You do get 3 “deaths” for each hunt (third one is a fail, the first 2 bring you back to the main camp and reduce your cash reward a bit), but having done almost every hunt in the game, I don’t think I was carted more than 10 times… and I only failed 1 hunt (and 1 rampage mission). Even the monsters I had difficulty with, I’d still have little issue actually capturing/killing them, and I’d still do it WELL within the time limit (unless I went out of my way to kill some other monsters). But, that said, this game does have a skill ceiling that’s pretty high. Learning all the tells for different attacks from a ton of enemies, knowing when to dodge, when your attacks will land, learning optimal combos with your weapon of choice (or learning several weapons)… let’s just say when I watch someone else play this game, even if I basically never fail hunts, I feel way weaker than them a lot of the time. This game may not kick your ass too much, but it has the great challenge concept of you being able to learn the mechanics really well to just get better at it. I have this weird impression though that multiplayer might be tougher, only because those 3 deaths you get in single-player are shared when you’re with other people… but then again hunts are faster, so maybe it’s well-balanced.

So back in the village in-between huts, there’s a few things to do. Namely you can upgrade your equipment. Your Palico (the cat thing) and Palamute (the dog thing) can get different weapons (I like giving them weapons that do status effects) and armor, plus the palamute has I guess subweapons of sorts that you can change around. You can get weapons and armor based on the monsters you fought, as well as a few fun ones using other materials like ore. You get access to more weapons as you rank up (and fight the monsters you need to get the proper material drops). Eventually some of the materials for powerful weapons have a pretty low drop rate (down to 1%) so it might take a bit to get that Rathalos Ruby you need, but maybe it’ll just be hanging around somewhere in a level too.

Armor selection is interesting as you get higher up in rank. You CAN select based on the defense value, but that’s a bit weak. Instead you should look at the skills the armor provides. Those skills can increase attack, defense, reduce knockback from certain enemy actions (or remove it entirely), affinity (I think this is basically crit rate?), elemental/status resistance and many other things. And there’s reason to go with full sets, as you get bonus resistance. Though maybe you’re a madlad that is able to min-max skills for optimal performance by mixing armor sets… I have no idea if that’s a legit strategy, but it might be. Weapons are similar as you may want to focus on higher attack, but some also deal different elemental damage or status effects. Plus high-rank armor and weapons also have slots where you can place decorations, which add more skills. I ended up being a bit of a newb that just went with high numbers that I liked, so high attack and attack boost from armor did what I wanted.

There’s a few other things to do in town. Dango gives you various temporary boosts for your next hunt. The buddy area (or the housekeeper NPC) lets you hire buddies, train buddies and send buddies out for different kind of missions. Good ways to get extra mats but a bit slow.

Finally the last thing I can think to talk about is the Rampage missions… these are weird. Basically it’s tower defense. You have a path monsters will walk on (though flying monsters will just go straight), which has gates. If all the gates are broken you lost. The walls forming the path (and a few spots on the path) have spots where you can place turrets. You can have automatic turrets as well as manual turrets that you have to operate yourself. As monsters walk the path you can shoot them with manual turrets or fight them normally. Some monsters may target turrets before gates, some may target you specifically which is tremendously annoying… These missions are quite tough, and not nearly as fun as hunts. I’ve done very few of these. I do wonder if these are better in multiplayer, as monsters that target players won’t be focused solely on you, and there’s more damage output from being able to use more turrets at once.

Overall

I really had fun with this. It’s REALLY weird how the game ends on a “well turns out that wasn’t the final boss” moment… and then there’s nothing. There’s GONNA be something, with the version 3.0 patch, and the upcoming version 2.0 patch will add more monsters and higher ranks… but at least up until 3.0 they will keep me coming back for more.

Really good game, it allows for a lot of gameplay styles, has a lot of interesting enemies and it’s just surprisingly satisfying to knock these giant monsters down. Grinding for gear is not too annoying as it tends to go pretty fast even with the low drop rate materials, and there’s a decent amount of character customization once you’re in high rank (I feel it’s really not important before that).

I know some people will play each of these games for hundreds of hours anyways, and the monster-hunting is definitely fun to do so I can see why, but for me once I get the weapon and armor I want and do all the hunts… what more really is there to do? I could keep playing and having fun because the hunts are fun, and I could learn all the weapons I still haven’t (I want to try out at least one of the ranged weapons, as well as the Switch axe), but I can kinda just do that when more content gets added through updates.

Overall I very much recommend this one. It has turned me into a believer of Monster Hunter, finally. I may sound negative on some aspects, but I don’t actually think they’re that big a deal, it’s just because of how I play games (IE I can’t just play the same game forever). I don’t know if it’s the best MH experience, but talking to MH fans it does seem like, gameplay-wise, it might be one of the better ones. Content-wise it’s a bit lacking, but it does have more stuff in it than World did at launch (from the little research I did), and it will get more through updates.

Maybe when I get in the MH mood again I’ll check out World (to get the “nice PC graphics and framerate” version of MH), or the other one that’s on Switch which sounds like it has the most content of any game in the series. No idea which one is better.