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 over 175 hours into Rise, and forged nearly every hunting horn I can at this point.

Now that I've been playing the game for a while, I've gotten pretty good at it, 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. Whether I'm doing hunts alone or with Maebh, or if I'm just fighting for my life to get rare monster parts, I always have a great time.

I have learned about builds. As of HR54, my armor includes Kaiser crown, Zinogre mail, Anjanath vambraces and coil, and Rajang's golden hakama. This along with some decorations and my talisman gives me skills such as attack boost, latent power, weakness exploit, critical boost, slugger, evade extender, master mounter, and horn maestro. I also hate when I have negative elemental resistances, so I use decorations to bring everything to 5 or above. My current favorite horn is Bazelreid Rookslayer, the Bazelgeuse horn. It has a base blast buildup of 18, with 220 attack and pretty good sharpness. Its melodies grant earplugs, attack up, and my precious large health recovery. I love this weapon and use it whenever possible, although sometimes I switch it out if the monster I'm facing is immune to blast.

I love to play Rise with all my cool friends! Maebhy is my official hunting buddy, and we do every urgent quest together. Recently, we've been trying to help Octo and Zag get into the game. Zag has reached HR4 and unlocked high rank, but Octo is still HR1 I think. We have so much fun when we're all together tho :) Especially since helping fledgling hunters gives higher rank hunters special rewards. If you like the idea of killing awesome beasts with your friends, you should give Monster Hunter Rise a try!!

This is where I'll write all about my adventures in Sunbreak :) I've officially unlocked the quest that starts it, so it won't be long now, but I probably won't write much until I really get into it.

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, I'm expecting the Citadel in Sunbreak to be a bit more like the areas in World). Now that I own it myself, I've realized that the large maps kind of makes it run like ass on a laptop, but with the power of mods and resolution settings I've managed to get it to run at a clean 30fps. I'm glad I bought it and am having a lot of fun playing it, but just like Holly said, I would definitely recommend getting the newest game over any older ones. They're just better in a lot of ways. Still, if you feel so inclined, get it at the old-games-discount plus sale, like me!