‘Monster Hunter Rise’ Is a Horrible First Monster Hunter

Monster Hunter has never been a particularly welcoming franchise. With little tutorialization besides a series of text boxes, many games in the series required you to do your own research into what the cadence and core gameplay loop of the game is like. Unlike the Souls series, whose animation locked combat and giant enemies bear enough similarity to Monster Hunter to make this comparison, the Monster Hunter series doesn’t teach through failure. In fact it barely spends any time teaching at all, and Rise exacerbates that by streamlining the early game to get players to their first hunt as quickly as possible. While the bevy of quality of life improvements and new speedy mechanics means a much more frictionless experience for veteran players, to a newbie it’s akin to being tossed into the deep end of a pool when you don’t know that “swimming” is a thing people can do. We discuss the Rise and it’s onramp, what we really want out of being a mech mechanic, and more on this episode of Waypoint Radio.

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