Hunters will rise to the challenge, then break the sun. For every Monster Hunter title, there is always something that makes it unique from previous titles. Monster Hunter Rise is no exception to this, bringing along new monster mechanics and even new friends to join you in your hunts.
Monster Hunter Rise is the 8th mainline game in the monster hunter franchise, releasing in 2021. My initial thoughts and opinions of the game were this is just another monster hunter with a few extra features such as the new dog hunter companion the palamute as a useful rideable mount and formidable companion while your palico is useful for several different reasons the palamute is pure offense and extra mobility and the silk bind/switch skills which were just new moves and variations for the weapons in the game that add more mobility in hunting, which were nice additions for monster hunter. Up until this point, monster hunter wasn’t known for advanced movement in its games. The real icing on the cake was the new wyvern riding mechanics added, which allowed you, once you built up enough silkbind damage, to take control of a monster and either fight other monsters while you’re riding or slam the monster you’re hunting into nearby obstacles for huge amounts of damage.
Like all games, Monster Hunter Rise had its flaws, like the small roster of monsters and easy difficulty often not being as difficult as the previous monsterhunter titles had set as the baseline for the difficulty. Then there was sunbreak the DLC for rise which fixed everything about the base game, such as more variety of monsters to be hunted, more customization of your character, and super increased difficulty to finally give you that challenge you craved in the base game. Not only did the gameplay get better in Sunbreak, but so did the story, which had you move from a very Japanese-inspired village to that of a medieval European-style port city to investigate the appearance of new parasitic monsters called the qurio. During these investigations you hunt monsters based on several different monsters like the werewolf frankenstein’s monster but the best obese were the the new elder dragons being malzeno which was based on dracula and gasmigorm which was based off of tales of demons and devils and what really make these monsters memorable besides their designs and hunts were the way through minimal storytelling and designs monster hunter was able to show the close ties Dracula had with the devil in myth and Dracula’s eventual betrayal.
Well, you may be thinking, why has Monster Hunter made it so memorable, and just to list some of what justifies the monsterhunter franchise lasting as long as it has. It’s got the unique 14 weapon types the hundreds of armor and weapon sets that are very customizable to fit any hunters playstyle or what about the awesome feline hunter companion the palico but above all else its the monsters monsterhunter has always had a variety of monsters with unique designs such and with the unique designs also come the unique fights and my personal favorites from the rise base game and the sunbreak dlc in terms of both designs and fights are tigrex, primordial malzeno, crimson glow valstrax and flaming espinas just to name a few. It’s actually quite hard for me to say those are my absolute favorites because so many of the monsters in Monster Hunter are amazing.
With all of that being said, I give Monster Hunter Rise/Sunbreak as a whole 9/10, while no Monster Hunter game is perfect, my experience with this game did come pretty close to being the perfect monsterhunter game.
