I’ve spent over 1,000 hours playing Monster Hunter games over the last ten years, so I feel like I have some qualified opinions on the new one. In short:
- I like it
- It feels short (but that will change)
- It looks like Monster Hunter World but plays like the older games
- There’s a lot of new mobility tools, but maybe they make the game too easy?
I’m now going to give you a quick overview of the evolution of the series, so that we’re all on the same page once I start breaking down what’s up in more detail.
The original Monster Hunter launched on the PS2 in 2004, with the core concept of being an online multiplayer action game. The PS2’s online capabilities were not great and the game wasn’t a tremendous success, but the series really found its feet through sequels on the PSP and 3DS – handhelds that supported wireless local network play, making it very easy for friends (or strangers!) to meet up and play a few rounds together. But while these handhelds made network play much easier, I think their limited processing power might explain why the older games evolved so slowly from sequel to sequel – the comparison screenshots above show how the bones of Monster Hunter for the PS2 can still be seen 13 years later in Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate for the Switch.
(As a side note, I also think the in-person multiplayer culture of the handheld games may have contributed to the positive attitude of the Monster Hunter community. This is not traditionally a game played with faceless strangers over the internet, and in my experience it has a more positive culture of camaraderie than many other online games. This is a very tenuous theory, though! I doubt there’s much direct social continuity from the Japanese players of 15 years ago and western players today, but I can see elements where the old culture may have fed back into the design of communication tools in the modern game, which would indirectly influence new players.)
Monster Hunter World reinvented the game from the ground up in 2018 by… going back to the original concept of an online action game to be played on home consoles. Starting from scratch with a new game engine and art assets running on modern hardware meant that World looks revolutionary, compared to the incremental upgrades introduced over the previous games. The old level structure – in which maps were broken up into a network diagram of discrete, room-size areas – was replaced with large, lush, contiguous environments. The skill system was simplified, the armour system was simplified, and the controls and UI became a lot slicker and more user-friendly. Crucially, it also had a much slower narrative progression that eased you through the game and actually taught you how to play as you went along – something that the older games were notoriously bad at doing.
All of which is my way of explaining how a history of design decisions at Capcom and the development of new hardware over time have shaped the consumer context in which Monster Hunter Rise was launched – one where there’s a large contingent of Japanese players who have been playing the series for a long time on handheld devices, and a large contingent of western players who got into the series with Monster Hunter World on powerful home consoles. It seems reasonable to think that these two cohorts will be coming into Rise with quite different experiences and expectations.
(If you’re interested in learning more about the history of the series, Gaijin Hunter made a neat video on the subject some time before Rise was announced.)
The feeling I get from Monster Hunter Rise is that it sits somewhere between Monster Hunter World and the older games. The game very quickly dumps you into the village and leaves you to chew through 20 hours of single-player hunts until you beat the final boss, which might come as a shock to Monster Hunter World players who are used to a more verbose and varied style of storytelling. For example, unlocking a new hunt location in World was a slow, gradual process that would play out across multiple quests and cutscenes, but in Rise they’re unceremoniously dumped into your lap when you unlock a new chapter of quests. I can see that it’s a change that might alienate people, but as a long-time player it’s just not something that bothered me. Personally, I’m used to the grind – I was happy enough that they clearly mark your Key Quests (ie. the core hunts you must complete to progress), when some of the older games left you to randomly stumble through with no guidance.
The overall structure of the game feels like the older games, but the visual design and user experience feels much more like Monster Hunter World – here’s the Digital Foundry analysis if you’re interested in the details. Common tasks like gathering resources and crafting usable items have the same streamlined flow, and the drop-in/drop-out multiplayer system is much more user-friendly than what they had in the handheld games. It clearly has a lower visual fidelity than World, and the environments feel a bit… smaller, more constrained, more static than the previous game, but it still feels like a huge improvement over something like Monster Hunter 4.
Well, Monster Hunter 4 comes to mind because of its comparable emphasis on climbing and verticality, but perhaps Monster Hunter Tri is a better point of reference? I was struck – struck! – by how many of the hunting environments in Monster Hunter Rise were revisiting old areas from the third generation games. As someone who first got into the series through Monster Hunter Tri and clawed my way into G-Rank in (its expanded remake) Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, I really enjoyed seeing how these old environments had been reimagined – exploring the new nooks and crannies gave me a feeling like (spoilers hidden behind link) that bit in Metal Gear Solid 4; things felt at once familiar, but alien.
This leads me to my favourite thing about the game, actually! You have a much greater sense of mobility in this game than most previous Monster Hunter titles – one of its main innovations being a sort of silkworm yo-yo that you can use to launch yourself into the air like Spider-Man, although there are also other tools like quick travel options and ridable mounts that make it generally easier to get around – and the level designers have produced much more interesting environments in which to make use of this. There are a lot of fun little secret areas to discover and riddles to solve; I think that each hunting locale features a secret room containing a unique little animal for you to photograph for your collection, if you can find it. The designers have made no effort to draw your attention to this, but exploring the nooks and crannies, piecing the clues together, and solving the puzzles to find them has been my favourite part of the game so far.
That said, the extra mobility also creates a few minor issues in the environment design. There have always been inaccessible tunnel entrances in certain spots that monsters could use to quickly warp around the map – something a monster can jump over or wriggle under, but a player cannot. The above screenshot shows a scene from Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate where I’ve helpfully drawn a circle around one such hole – blocked off by some debris at the bottom, you will note. These kind of devices made sense when your character was a stiff lump of putty whose feet rarely left the floor, but in Monster Hunter Rise there are many occasions when you might fling yourself towards the inviting yawn of a mysterious cave only to slam face-first against an invisible wall.
I also feel like the extra mobility could be making the game a little too easy? I think that’s a very suspect attitude to have about any game – often the opening gambit in a poorly-typed whinge against new players entering a community – but my argument would be something like this:
Historically, the monsters in this series have been designed for a system where the player is slow and sluggish. You needed to read their moves, predict their behaviour, and commit yourself to actions a few seconds in advance – deciding where to position yourself, when to swing your weapon, or whether it’s safe to use an item. The monsters, for their part, telegraph their intentions in advance and usually commit their attention in chunks of around five seconds at a time, which is roughly the same sort of time it takes for them to complete an attack animation.
The new mobility options – particularly the wirebug, but also things like using items while riding your Palamute – make your character much more agile and responsive, in a way that most monsters simply weren’t designed to deal with. For example, when Diablos bursts out the ground beneath and sends you flying across the map, you can now use your wirebug to do a tech recovery and land on your feet, weapon sheathed, ready to chug a potion while Diablos is still winding down his attack animation. It’s much easier to recover from mistakes and interrupt monsters during attack combos, which reduces the risk of being caught out.
That’s not to say that the new mobility options are bad, but just that I think the late-game monsters could do with some new attacks or behaviour patterns that are designed with these new abilities in mind. I can only think of a few examples in the game – like Almudron’s mud barricades, or the final final boss – that seem to be designed with wirebugs in mind. I’ve done about 200 hunts over the last three weeks, and I could count on one hand the number of times I felt challenged; and that’s often just because the monster has a particular move that can kill you in one hit, if you’re caught off-guard. One-hit-kill punishments rarely feel like good design.
We must consider the possibility, however unlikely, that I could be wrong. If you average it out, I’ve played Monster Hunter for about two hours per week, every week, for the last ten years. It’s reasonable to think that I may simply be getting good at it by now. But in Monster Hunter Rise I feel godlike all of a sudden, and that just seems a bit… wrong. Still, maybe this is something they’ll address when the G-Rank expansion arrives?
It was obvious from launch that there would be some expansion DLC coming, but the fact they’ve announced their first free content update for the month after launch makes me think that they’re going to be rolling out small, regular updates every month for the next year or more – the Animal Crossing model, as I now think of it.
I don’t think this is about the game being “unfinished” and more about drip-feeding the game out over a long period to drive down second-hand sales – the idea that people will keep holding onto their copies for a few more weeks, if they know there’s a free content bump coming soon. If that’s the case, then I hate it! It’s good that they’re releasing it for free, but holding back a substantial part of the game to serve as a digital download means that players in the future won’t be able to go back and experience it, which chips away the game’s long-term cultural relevancy. The only silver lining here is that it’s developed by Capcom, who would never not release an ‘ultimate’ edition of the games once the content pipeline runs dry.
The game does feel short. In every Monster Hunter game I eventually, inevitably, set myself the challenge of collecting every fully upgraded Switch-Axe in the game; Monster Hunter Rise is the first game in which I’ve actually done it, and it took less than a month. I’ve optimised my armour to the point where I’ve run out of things to improve. I can see that they’ve deliberately held back a large part of the game to pitch as “free bonus content” but – as per my thoughts on Animal Crossing – I do think games should be judged based on what’s actually in the box rather than what you might be able to download eventually (or were able to download, once upon a time).
Another little improvement that maybe exposes a long-running flaw in the game’s structure is the drop-in/drop-out mutiplayer system. It’s more or less the same system they introduced in Monster Hunter World, which is to say it’s completely different to the older games; you can still form a party with your friends and share a little social lobby together between quests, but you can now invite total strangers to drop in and help you.
I played through most of the High Rank multiplayer quests using this system to join other people’s hunts – a sort of Warriors of Sunlight experience where I felt like a mysterious wanderer, riding in on my dog to help some kid batter a monster before taking its teeth as payment and leaving. It was a world apart from my experience of solo-ing High Rank in the 3DS games (in which each new fight seems to drag on forever because it’s balanced for a party of four). It flew by – I could comfortably knock out five Key Quests and an Urgent Quest on a single battery charge.
I certainly wouldn’t suggest that they remove the matchmaking system – it’s a huge improvement over being forced to play through on your own because your mates have actual lives to get on with and are still languishing in Low Rank weeks after launch – but I feel like they could make some changes to the progression system around it. I like helping people to hunt monsters, but I’m not sure that needs to be synonymous with the main narrative track. It would be nice to have some kind of reputation system for helping people in different ways – something that tracks your input into hunts (damage, aggro, healing assistance, etc) and makes a little record on your Guild Card.
Sometimes it feels a bit bad when I bring my top-tier equipment into a low-tier hunt and brutalise a monster to an extent that is difficult to joke about. What kind of experience must it be like for the innocent young player who flashes the bat-signal in search of help, only to unleash a hurricane of raw, murderous power and finish the quest effortlessly? I have had times where I’ve dropped in during a fight, chained a knockdown into a stun and back into another knockdown, smashed every breakable part with a few blast phial discharges, then decided my work is done and left the other players to finish up while I go fishing.
I’m not sure what the solution to that would be. And I suppose that’s my point – the basic model of how Monster Hunter works is built around tiers of stats that you slowly earn, and you expect to be able to use your new gear once you’ve got it. Back when multiplayer games were harder to organise, it was much more likely that you’d be playing with a regular group – you would tend towards the same kind of power level because you would often be going on the same hunts together. But while the drop-in matchmaking system is definitely an improvement, it routinely brings together players with vastly different power levels, and – similar to my thoughts on the new mobility tools – I don’t think the game is designed to handle that very well.
I think you should have a picture of the game by now. While Monster Hunter World was a radical change for the series, Monster Hunter Rise aims to reconnect back to the series’ roots; it does so deftly, although in doing so it raises questions about previously accepted elements of the game design.
I’m going to close this out by highlighting some of my favourite new monsters:
Bombadgy – A small, pudgy mustelid with a nervous disposition and a sticky musk of nitroglycerin. This is probably the first monster you encounter in the game, and obviously it’s funny to make a cute little animal prone to violent explosions, but the thing that elevates it to capital-letter Good Design in my book is that it’s basically a tiny Magnamalo. That’s good foreshadowing!
Tetranadon – A sort of giant platypus with a turtle shell and a sumo wrestling motif, who can swell his belly up to empower some ground-quaking stomp attacks. It’s conceptually similar to Zamtrios (a rubbery-skinned shark from Monster Hunter 4 that can inflate like a bowling ball and roll around to try and crush you) but I appreciate the positive representation of fat bodies and I like the monsters that look like freakish chimeras.
Aknosom – A giant pink crane that spits fire; like a more dignified cousin of Qurepeco. Monster Hunter Rise draws a lot of inspiration from Japanese mythology; the new monsters are inspired by yokai and the like, and the core storyline about the rampage is clearly inspired by those yokai parade things (which I’m guessing you’ll most likely recognise from that scene in Pom Poko). Aknosom sticks out for me as being one of the cleverest designs, being based on a monster that’s a hopping umbrella and drawing a link to these graceful birds that stand on one leg.
Sadly there’s no sign of Congalala yet, but I’ve got my fingers crossed for the future updates.
