Have you ever played Monster Hunter? Or is this just a series for you that you hear about occasionally and never found your way into? If the ports of the new Monster Hunter Rise for the Playstation and Xbox systems should be your first Monster Hunter, then I wish you a lot of fun! At the same time, I must offer a cautious warning, and it comes from a fairly young but already tiring hunter. What do I mean by that in relation to the am January 20th upcoming Monster Hunter Rise port, of course I don’t want to withhold it from you!
The World of Monster Hunter
I got my first Monster Hunter by accidental twist of fate. A friend had himself generations ordered for the 3DS on the release date and got another copy as a gift. He kindly sold one to me for a bargain price. So I entered the world of Japanese monster hunting, which was still very cumbersome at the time. The game was interesting, cool, but also cryptic and quite complicated. Accordingly, Generations landed on the shelves quickly and Monster Hunter remained a mystery to me. At least until the game came along that, for many, catapulted the Capcom brand to new heights.
with Monster Hunter World I had a lot of fun, again encouraged by a friend! Being taught by an experienced player helped immensely. World was beautiful, fascinating and as complex as few other games I have known to date.
In Rise, the flagship monster is the dangerous Magnamalo.
Source: Capcom
This time I stuck with it. After more than 400 hours of sometimes failed but mostly successful hunts in World and Iceborne, I was eager to build a new master hunter.
The ascent into the air
And then came Rise for the Nintendo Switch. Like many others, I was initially skeptical and unsure whether it could top the grandiose world or even come close. With the biggest addition, the rope beetle, the gameplay has been completely changed.
Suddenly I wasn’t tied to the floor anymore. I would swing through the air like Spider-Man to get to high points in the highly vertical areas or attack monsters from the air.
Even though Rise looks significantly “uglier” than World, the gameplay was a revelation for me. Coming back to World, I immediately noticed the hunters’ clunky movements. Everything was so clumsy and slow compared to Rise.
Rise is also much more beginner-friendly. Of course, there are again lots of tutorial texts that try to explain complex menus, but this still works best with Rise.
Rise is also simpler than World. Only in the endgame do the monsters become really strong and dangerous. But since I was no longer a newcomer to Rise, this can partly be attributed to this fact.
I loved Rise and rarely had as much fun playing the game as I did for the first few weeks. But the dry spell started much faster after the DLCs than with World and Iceborne. Monthly free updates (all of which are included in the port version, by the way) helped, but these were only small appetizers until the eagerly awaited Master Rank made its way into the game.
