Learning to love rise and sunbreak (my experience/review so far)
(This is gonna be a longer post about my experience with rise and monster hunter as a series in general feel free to scroll past if its too long)
I recently got back into monster hunter rise after originally playing when it first came to xbox. My first experience with monster hunter was playing the older gens on a friend's ds as a kid back in the day. I always knew about monster hunter but never really got into monster hunter. Flash forward many years into the future and world is announced. I followed it to release and when I finally got my hands on it I FELL IN LOVE WITH THIS SERIES! 500+ hrs later my only challenge left for myself was fatalis and alatreon. I was hooked!
This lead to me buying generations ultimate for switch since it was cheap and I wanted a taste of the old world. I played through that and that was a good time and I still have stuff to do in that one as well. Now is around the time rise was announced and I ended up going back to world until rise released for xbox. I bought the bundle with g rank/mr and began playing through it. Now at first I HATED RISE. I tried multiple times to get into the game and each time failed. Now there was many reasons I believe for this at first and no they didn't just boil down to "haha your a spoiled new world hunter lool"
I did not like the addition of wire bugs and how I personally feel the inclusion of them made the devs have to make monsters in a sense faster and more aggressive to compensate. (This still rubs me the wrong way a bit to this day as certain monsters imo feel a bit cheap to fight. I've learned to just deal with it but it's not my favorite. I do like however the mobility they added and the addition of verticality to maps and wall running.)
I have a love hate relationship with silkbind skills. Some I think are awesome and great with some real creativity. Some I think (cough cough longsword) replacing moves that were just basic parts of weapon movesets like helm splitter to a silkbind is kinda lame.
Imo base high rank endgame grind is boring. Doing the same hunts over and over or side quests with nothing new in-between to reach a cap of HR X amount to progress to unlocking ONE new monster killed the vibe and what I loved about playing through some of the other games. Maybe I'm remembering wrong but I don't remember base world grind to endgame being like that.
Probably the most minor but adds up the most throughout the game and I love the idea on paper but hated the execution of was the new endemic life. Having to run around the map and collect birds for the first 5-10 mins of a hunt is not it at all. Now some people say that you can just ignore or skip them. But if you do that you have WILLINGLY handicapped yourself. I think on paper it's nice to have endemic life that provide semi permanent or temporary buffs to attack, defense ect is great. Just don't tie it to our health and stamina please?!
Now eventually as the title suggests I fell in love with rise and I think what really did it for me were the monster designs plus armor and weapons (as is the case most of the time for me.) Aswell as the fact sunbreak added things and fixed a lot of the issues I had or made them more bearable. I have just killed garangolm and I have been enjoying the game immensely more than I was before. I love the follower system and hope they bring it back into wild in some shape and expand on it. Also I been LOVING the rathian master rank armor and I loved the Damascus armor for hr.
Anyways that's been my experience with the monster hunter series and rise, how I've come to love the game and I look forward to seeing you all in wilds!