gameing

Monster Hunter is a franchise that has been around for a long, long time, but I only heard of it in 2021. I played the Rise demo thrice before deciding I was obsessed with it.

The Monster Hunter franchise is developed and published by Capcom and began in 2004 with the original Monster Hunter for the PlayStation 2. The games are described as fantasy action role-playing games, and have held the same basic gameplay ideas from the start. Outside of the storylines of each game, which are unrelated to other games besides the occasional namedrop, the goal of Monster Hunter is to forge stronger weapons and armor in order to hunt monsters. Monsters tend to be causing trouble, ranging from being in the way of a trade route to attempting to destroy humanity.

The Monster Hunter universe also has many species besides humans and monsters. A common companion of humans is Felynes, a species of sentient/sapient cat people who are a little larger than the cats we know and stand on two legs. They constantly speak in cat puns because they think it's funny, and they are shown in the games to have many jobs that help out humans. Felynes could join in on a hunt, gather items or support hunters with healing and buffs, cook meals, forge armor and weapons, and many more. There are also Wyverians, who look like normal humans until you notice their pointed ears, four-fingered hands, and digitigrade legs. They can also range greatly in size, from very small to, rarely, enormous. A third species introduced in Rise are the Canynes, who resemble dogs or wolves. They are not shown to be sapient like Felynes, but they still assist in hunts by attacking monsters and transporting hunters.

The monsters are great, too. I'm a huge fan of guys like:

• Bazelgeuse
• Bishaten
• Teostra
• Volvidon
• Pukei-Pukei
• Zinogre
• Mizutsune
• Kulu-Ya-Ku
• Magnamalo
• Nargacuga

Monster Hunter is certainly a series I would recommend :) It's Capcom's second most successful franchise after Resident Evil, and it's so much fun. If you ever get the chance, the most recent game is generally the best to play, but you could save money by buying the second most recent. Play MonHun :]

Rise was my very first Monster Hunter game, and it is very dear to me :)

Monster Hunter Rise is the second gen 5 installment in the Monster Hunter series, released for Nintendo Switch in March of 2021 and later on Steam in January of 2022. They also released a massive expansion, called Sunbreak, in June of 2022.

In Rise, you create your character, the newest monster hunter of Kamura. Your job is to hunt monsters, large and small, and you earn zenny (money), monster parts, and anything else you pick up during your hunt. You use your rewards to forge and upgrade your gear, including armor, weapons, and items that make your equipment even stronger. However, you soon discover the Rampage, an event that the people of Kamura Village have been preparing for. During the Rampage, hoards of monsters storm the village gates, doing everything in their power to destroy it. You must hone your skills, forge your most effective weapons and armor, and save Kamura from the Rampage once and for all.

I really wanted to play Rise after seeing Miss Holly Hollowtones stream it from the beginning, but I wasn't sure it was for me. So, I downloaded the free demo on my Switch and gave it a go... and hated it. I couldn't get over how sluggish my character felt, and there were so many different buttons that I couldn't even figure out how to use healing items. Fast forward a few months, and after watching the same streamer play it some more, I gave it another go. This time, I had learned a bit about weapons. I knew that my character felt slow because I had chosen hammer, one of the slowest moving and attacking weapons. This time, I went for switch axe... and again gave up. There was just too much to wrap my head around. Finally, I decided to play the demo on my computer, and tried Holly's weapon of choice: the hunting horn. There was an INSTANT difference. I understood the controls, I had a handle on how to trigger melody effects, the movement speed was perfect, and the weapon looked like a musical instrument and made fun sounds. A very, very generous friend of mine named Mac bought the game for me, and I couldn't be more grateful. I fell in love with the hunting horn, and it's the only weapon type I care about in the entire game. Now, I've sunk almost 400 hours into Rise, and have forged every base game horn.

By the time I got to around HR 50, I'd gotten pretty good at the game, even carrying my good friend Maebh through many of our hunts (love you, Maebhy, your charge blade is sooo cool. I love your pdfs). As for the game itself, I have a blast playing it, and honestly really want to start another save file. Whether I'm doing hunts alone or with friends, or if I'm just fighting for my life to grind for rare monster parts, I always have a great time.

Although my builds have evolved along with my progression in the game, my offense tends to stay the same: I pretty much only use hunting horn, I love inflicting blast and poison, and I'm actually goated. Hunting horn is awesome.

I love to play Rise with all my cool friends! I finished the base game story along with Maebhy and Zag :)! It was super fun, and we started playing Sunbreak together, too. Maebhy was my original hunting buddy, from pretty early on, and we did almost every urgent quest together. We got Zag to jump in too, which made monsters hunting even MORE fun! We have so much fun when we're all together, and more recently have been helping Nick progress through the early game when he is free :) If you like the idea of killing awesome beasts with your friends, you should give Monster Hunter Rise a try!!

The time has come. It's time to talk about Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak!!

At long last, on May 2nd, 2025, my friends and I began playing the Sunbreak story. Don't ask me how we managed to wait *checks notes* almost three entire years to start it. All I know is that me, Maebh, and Zag beat the base game, then eventually we had all acquired Sunbreak and decided it was time to move on (instead of just continuing to forge base game weapons LOL). So, it had begun, and as of writing this [jan 2026], we, um. well . uh.. we aren't done yet! This is what happens when you play through a game with friends and you all have school and work and responsibilities and shit lol so to any minors reading this: stay young while you can. play games with friends while you all have nothing to do but homework and shit. please. lol.

Anyway, the game itself! I LOVE what they did with the Elgado Outpost. It's so neat and clean logistics-wise, while also being stylistically interesting and fun to hang out in. The new maps (the jungle and the citadel) are ALSO super mega awesome. The jungle is probably my favorite map in the game. The new monsters and mechanics also fucking rule. I will not spoil these, but they are really cool. You can look it up if you feel so inclined :)

Currently, my build is just The Barbania Set aka my cool pirate outfit. And yes I'm still using hunting horn you don't even have to ask.

Now for something completely different: It's Monster Hunter Stories!

Monster Hunter Stories is an RPG spin-off series originally started with the titular release for the Nintendo 3DS in 2016. If you're thinking, "Wow, this picture looks nothing like the other pictures on this page," you would be exactly correct! Unlike all other Monster Hunter games up until this point, Stories uses a silly, cartoon style, with bright colors and humorous animations and antics. Although the overarching story can get quite serious, the game is meant to be fun and lively, with an all-new gameplay system never-before seen in Monster Hunter.

In this story (heheh), you play as a young Rider: a person who lives alongside monsters as friends and borrows their skills to explore and help others. Your people are very wary of traveling far from their village, as the far more widespread Hunters (like the games!) have not met or understood Riders for generations. Of course, being that this is a video game, you leave the village fairly soon after gaining Rider-status. Together with your Monsties (monster-besties) and a mysterious felyne named Navirou, you set off to explore the world, but something grim is afoot; A sinister Black Blight has been plaguing the land and taking control of monsters' minds, sending them on violent rampages...

So, what do you do as a Rider? Well, this may surprise you, but the main thing is you ride monsters! There's way more too it than that, though :) For starters, Monsties have to be raised from hatchlings in order to trust Riders, so you have to sneak into monster dens and steal them yourself! It can be scary, because the monsters could be there when you walk in, or swoop in on you while you're snooping around. When you end up in combat with a monster, it's nothing like regular Monster Hunter combat at all! Instead, you enter a turn-based battle system, where the primary mechanic is rock-paper-scissors. Melee attacks have a designation of Power, Speed, or Technical, with Speed beating Power, Power beating Technical, and Technical beating Speed. It's all very logical, and every monster species has an attack pattern that they follow, so it's important to keep track of what they're doing so you and your Monstie can plan accordingly. If you do a good job of anticipating your opponent's attacks and syncing your actions with your Monstie's, you'll increase your Kinship gage, which lets you use more powerful skills and, eventually, hop on your Monstie for even more devastating attacks!

I originally started playing this title on my 3DS around 2024, but I got a great deal on the Steam remaster of this game during Winter Sale 2025! I haven't progressed super far yet, but I've really been enjoying it :] My favorite Monsties so far have been Arzuros, Gendrome, Barroth, Royal Ludroth, and Yian Kut-Ku, although I can't wait to gain access to my Diablos. I also love the equipment forging system, as it's very simple and straightforward. Can't wait to keep playing!!

As you may have guessed, I also got a great deal on the sequel Stories game during that Steam sale, haha! The demo for this game was actually my first introduction to the Stories series, so I really look forward to diving into this one once I'm done with the first game. From my understanding, you don't actually have to play them in order, but I wanted to have the opportunity to see the original for myself and experience any awesome changes the sequel made half a decade later :)

In the wise words of Holly, generally the best Monster Hunter game to play at any given time is the newest one. The later games always have some sort of quality of life improvement that makes it better to pick up than the previous games, and the hunts are designed to be more fun and interesting than before. Unless you're trying to play all the games or experience a feature or game mode that was exclusive to an older game, there's no real reason to go back and play them. After all, there are hundreds of hours to be played in a single Monster Hunter game.

However, I am a little bit of a sicko.

Monster Hunter: World, the 5th mainline game in the series, was released in January of 2018 for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It was later ported to Windows that August, making it the first Monster Hunter game available on PC. As indicated by the title, it was also the first open world Monster Hunter. In previous games, there were loading zones between each area. In world, all areas in a given map are seamless, allowing players to experience the world in larger chunks.

In the story, the character you create and their Felyne friend have embarked on a ship to the New World as part of the Fifth Fleet of the research commission. On the way there, the ship is nearly destroyed by Zorah Magdaros, a giant Elder Dragon which resembles a volcano, tipping the player and their research partner out of the ship and onto its back. Luckily, the rest of the ship was unharmed, and you manage to escape and meet them at the base in Astera. Like many Elder Dragons, Zorah Magdaros is traveling to the New World, but the researchers have no idea why. The player's goal as a hunter is to study the island and its wildlife and figure out what is bringing these ancient and powerful monsters to the New World.

World introduced many changes and features that were not previously available in the main series games. For example, every hunter has a small lantern on their person full of bright green scoutflies. These are what guides the hunters towards monsters, alerts them of gatherables and threats, and generally makes hunting a little bit easier. Hunters also have a retractable clutch claw strapped to one arm, which allows them to grapple onto monsters to do special actions as well as shoot projectiles. Additionally, there were many quality of life improvements made to improve the ease of learning for new players, making it the most beginner-friendly game at the time.

I purchased World on Steam during a sale. I think base game plus Iceborne was like $30 total. The reason I was interested in the first place, after already owning and playing many hours of Rise, was because my sister had a copy of it on her PS4 and had never played it. I, the MonHun enjoyer of the family, decided to play it myself while I was visiting one weekend. After roughly four hours of the game I had determined that I loved this game. It has a different feel from Rise. There's a lot of emphasis on the research aspect, with the player collecting samples and examining tracks and prints, and the weapon controls with the hunting horn are different from the revamped ones in Rise. Plus, the clutch claw mechanics are different from the wirebug ones, which makes the hunt go a little bit differently. On top of all that, the maps in World are just so pretty and detailed in a way that the ones in Rise really aren't (though, the Citadel and Jungle in Sunbreak are a bit more like the areas in World).

Now that I own it myself, it's easy to see that they did NOT optimize this game before throwing it on Steam. Wow. My laptop could barely run it, but my Steam Deck has a much easier time, thankfully. However, I still much prefer Rise by far, and have barely made any progress in World at all. I'm glad I bought it and have had some fun playing it, but I would definitely recommend getting the newest game that you can run (side-eyeing Wilds so hard rn). They're just better in so many ways. Still, if you feel so inclined, get it at the old-games-discount-plus-sale price, like me!