as someone with an interest in horror gaming, i follow plenty of horror youtubers and have watched full playthroughs of every Chilla's Art release. they're jank things, speedy turnover reused-asset experiences centered on societal, social, and even supernatural incidents grounded in Japanese culture, but things i always generally enjoyed for some aspect or another. i found Chilla's prior release Night Security actually pretty unique and enjoyable even if just as a viewer, and decided i might actually play the studio's next game myself for once.

Parasocial taught me why i prefer to watch these releases rather than play them myself. there's some immediately interesting concepts at play with the streaming interface, as well as the very real terror of being followed i've personally experienced leaving me a bit shaken. however, the crippling technical performance despite receiving feedback in a patron-exclusive beta made the game nearly unplayable in its current state, as well as the cheeky self-references having the opposite effect.

it's upsetting buying games (particularly indies, which i'm almost always willing to forgive) on launch is no longer encouraged as they are often not ready, and while i understand Chilla's is a two-man project, with their catalogue of works, experience, and fervent fan support i expected a smoother landing. the team's repeated history of utilising young women enduring abuse or manipulation as objects of shock horror bad ends is questionable besides, a trend Parasocial maintains.

In a vacuum, this game is pretty good: that's what you get for inheriting one of the best combat systems of all time. But as a Monster Hunter game, it's hard not to see this as a big misstep in 2023, especially after Sunbreak. In retrospect, Rise reads like a 5th gen regression from GU, which is insane considering how scattershot and unpolished that game is. Some of it is undoubtedly because of Covid development issues (they literally had to add the last fourth of the game in post-release), but a lot is fundamentally misguided.

Last year I discussed many of my problems in the context of Sunbreak, and those all still apply to base Rise, but with even greater severity in some cases. Some additional points:

The nicest thing I have to say is probably the structure, which streamlines by picking some low-hanging fruit (minimal gathering quests, skip some overlapping village/hub progression). Of course this is also undermined by annoying aspects like Rampage (a worthless dev timesink similar to Zorah Magdaros in World) and obtuse unlock requirements for Switch Skills which hinders experimentation, but on the whole it's probably the best in the series.

What's crazy is that copy-pasting the GU Hunter Arts system would have been significantly better than the existing silkbind system, in the sense that the separate meters at least prevents one imbalanced move from sucking the air away from all the others, as well as encouraging aggression through meter buildup by attacking.

Moreover, GU's quantity over quality approach in styles and arts arguably worked better in producing actually fun playstyles, just by trying so many things that some ended up turning out well. Nothing in Rise is as blatantly busted as Absolute Readiness in GU, but on the other hand none of the parry moves in Rise are nearly as well-balanced as Critical Juncture from GU.

The increase in parry moves in Rise (and 5th gen more broadly) also goes against a huge strength of the series's combat: dynamic defensive play. As I examine in this post, one of the remarkable things about MonHun is how the roll iframes are balanced against the size and speed of the hitboxes such that the timing and direction needed is situation-dependent. Parries and lengthy iframe moves such as LS's foresight slash subvert this by covering a variety of situations with the same input, which in turn lessens the need for good positioning in advance. (Small note of praise: it seems like the base iframes on the roll have been reduced in Rise, which actually makes sense as correcting for the trend of smaller and faster hitboxes.)

Adding wirebug movement is cool in theory, but in practice, it's really difficult to imagine how they could have gotten this right. A huge tenet of Monhun combat is how your offense and defense are heavily intertwined through positioning, and it's easy to see how powerful fast movement is if you play Insect Glaive or Hunting Horn. Changing movement presents a huge risk of either breaking the dynamic or not really doing anything. Rise wirebug movement ended up being the latter, where it's mostly limited to catching up to a monster, occasionally dodging a few attacks like Mizutsune beam, or moving around the map (which is actually super fun!).

The difficulty of the game has been discussed many times, but even putting aside systemic concerns such as restock and damage values, what's baffling to me is how so many returning monsters (ex. Rajang, Nargacuga, Tigrex) are effectively slowed down versions of their GU counterparts, in a game which has the least player commitment and highest average weapon mobility. It's even more blatantly obvious in retrospect, after most of these monsters got extensive AI reworks in Sunbreak.

Brief dishonorable mention to the Hunting Horn: for a weapon which has always had great gameplay but lackluster damage output, Capcom decided that the appropriate course of action was to totally redo the moveset from a long range poking weapon with weird attack angles and buffs to a spammy close range washing machine that my friend described as "something out of God Eater."

This is something that I mentioned already in the Sunbreak review, but funnily enough has become one of my top sticking points with 5th gen MonHun: the gamefeel. I'm no animation expert, so I can't give a detailed dissection, but the less snappy animations somehow give the game this strange syrupy quality. I genuinely don't understand how something like Surge Slash GS in Sunbreak, which is the best weapon idea MonHun has had in years, feels so awkward to use despite really not being that different from an old MonHun weapon mechanically.

For what it's worth, I find it difficult to imagine them iterating on this set of mechanics in the future. But I'm sure MH6 will have many, many problems of its own making...

(i put some hot tips on playing chulip at the end of this review and i beg you to look at them, if nothing else here, if you are planning to play this!!!!)

moon, chulip's predecessor that laid the foundation for its general gameplay and writing style, is a game about "love" in a broad sense. you must observe people, hear their thoughts on things/others, give items, and practice good timing and patience while each tick of the timer brings you closer to "death". you give "love" and in turn receive it as a kind of experience, which as it accumulates allows the player-character to persist in the world for lengthier periods of time. the idea behind this "levelling up" with love, to extend this life timer, is that love is what drives us to exist at the most fundamental level.

moon ties its passivity of the player into a critique on rpgs' getting experience through violence and its obfuscation of that violence, and forms much of its identity around this. despite some uneven execution, i do think its statement of intent that comes out of this critique, taken more broadly a thesis on what we take from games in general, makes moon an incredibly passionate game in own right. but its kind of passivity presents its own problems to me; you become an intangible ghost in moon's world, impervious to all its elements EXCEPT for time. it presents its own challenges for the player through with the concept of passing time, but because its only really the timer and being patient enough you'll have to worry about (and you practically forget about the timer once your love level is high enough), i do feel like there's some lack of complexity to moon's definition of "love" past this. this lack unfortunately lends itself to simplistic woobified arguments for moon that arent totally its fault, that its a cutesy escapist sim patterned after animal crossing, revolutionary just because its non-violent, smoothing out the complexities and contradictions that do exist within the game.

yoshiro kimura, one of moon's three main designers and the one responsible for the bulk of its script, would go on to found punchline and create its first game, chulip, after suffering a health crisis and travelling the world (not sure in which order, but i think both inform this game's figurative/literal troubles of the heart and its internationalism, respectively). chulip is one of three spiritual sequels to moon along with giftpia (by moon designer kenichi nishi's skip inc) and endonesia (by moon designer taro kudo's vanpool), all three of which lift moon's "love" gathering mechanic but ditch the rpg critique to utilize it for stories about growing up and adolescence...at least from what i can tell, because only chulip has an english translation. i believe giftpia is about considering what path one takes to realize they are an adult, and i believe endonesia frames adulthood as an understanding of one's own emotions and rejecting escapism, but i'd love to be able to understand their text fully someday and see for myself. the point is, all of them take moon's bedrock and mechanically and narratively add their own spin and layers of complexity beyond that original game's meta, genre-defying statement.

chulip frames adolescence as "learning how one can attain happiness"...which can be interchangibly interpreted as attaining love, since the game revolves around getting kisses and all, but happiness is the operative word that comes up time and time again. its a harsh world, one of artists unhappy that their dreaming days are long gone or contending with leaving them behind, working adults unhappily fighting over scraps of money no one can get, lovers unhappily separated by death that came too soon, workers unhappy to be stuck in dead end jobs in perpetuity, people with secret passions and vices unhappy that they cant be known, students of life so unhappy that they shut themselves off from the world, so on. the main goal is attaining a lasting happiness in winning over a girl you saw in your dreams, and to do that you need to strengthen, i.e. "level up", your heart by getting practice kisses from everyone else in the game.

to make the player understand the world as one that tests happiness, to take them out of complacency that stems from being nothing more than an observer, moon's timer is replaced with hp, heart points. same basic idea as health but damage is not just physical (though it often is), but emotional too: when you get yelled at, overhear a snicker at something you did wrong, pick up a gross RNG poopie out the trash, you take damage. a game over in chulip is not becoming starved of energy like in moon, but becoming heartbroken. chulip teaches that finding happiness is a difficult journey that requires a vulnerability to pain that moon largely shields you from. you must learn how to deal with being hurt, sometimes to the point of wanting to give up, much like its underground residents seem to have. but even they have moments where they want to come out and be happy. thus the game is not just about comfortably observing examples of love in the world, but exposing yourself to an often unkind world to find happiness, to both enjoy the smaller moments and to become closer to a revelation of oneself.

so the elephant in the room: chulip's reputation. that it wastes the players time constantly, that its puzzles are cryptic to the highest degree and its never clear what to do, and that its viciously eager to hurt the player in many different ways until they die and lose progress. even people who found something to love in moon--itself a time wasting, highly cryptic game--would say chulip has worse design. moon can be accepted for its supposed wholesomeness, but then chulip by comparison is downright abusive for daring to be a cute game about gaining love from others that then has you taking figurative and literal blows from them constantly, and discouraging exploration when the most harmless seeming, insignificant interaction might hide an unwelcome, barbed wire surprise. i have heard all this, considered it carefully, and decided i am far too in love with chulip's whole being to care or even think of most of it as actually bad. i cant think of this game as truly mean-spirited when it sincerely makes me laugh, humbles me, and has this aura that kept me from ever being mad at it for too long. its entire essence envelops me, making everything it throws at me feel utterly right with what it kind of experience it is.

im playing the trangressive design card here somewhat, one usually used for more self-serious, "cooler" experiences in which theres no real question about their intentionality--pathologic, nier/drakengard, certain kill the past games spring to mind. its wasting time is inherited from moon, both sharing an unconventional design element in having the player feel time go by passively, so that even boredom adds color to a world as it turns with or without you (though chulip having no timer makes waiting around by itself less of a problem, the one "non-stressful" edge over moon). i find its even more cryptic puzzles are actually more fitting than moon's, or any other adventure game i can think of, because its obtuseness is so over the top and specific to itself when taken altogether that it feels hilariously in tune with the strange and opaque nature of the characters and the world. same can be said for its threats to your health from every corner; im drawn into the world when it strikes back, not simply out of some dour sense of brutal reality, but because its jokes hit that much harder when you mechanically feel the punchline (heyyo). im not saying all of this is intentional, though i think more of it is than its been given credit--dont even get me started on the factory as a simulation of grueling tedious work--but it doesn't matter to me when so much of what might not be intended just works so magically for me. all of it adds up to become THE single best work of comedy ive ever found in games, slapstick with uncanny timing, bewildering beyond belief in its impish way.

not to mention that this is a love-de-lic like we are talking about; an airtight clockwork construction of character-based narrative design with an incredible level of detail to discover on your own, genuinely deserving of greater appreciation. will always love the planning out of what to do that happens in my head with every daily commute to different areas, working my way through the showa-era diorama of long life town with its lovely rustic atmosphere. its mundane ritualisticness got nailed into me as i played and became insanely endearing; getting up, passing michelle beside the empty lot dream girl is living in, going under the train tracks where that fortune teller is, walking by the fountain up the stairs to the station, buying a ticket from the two-faced man and then waiting for the train...soothes my autistic brain like nothing else. the goddamn SOUNDTRACK and SOUND DESIGN is taniguchi arguably at his very best, full of variations on that one theme of the entire world of the game thats seemingly composed to be perfect biding-your-time music. AND its a game so tantalizingly bursting with secrets that i have played it and replayed it often these past 5 years, and in all these years, i have only been able to go a few months at most before i find or hear about something i never found before. not kidding, i literally found something new the week before i wrote this. ok full on rambling at this point ill wrap up

im too stubborn to make concessions, or to fall back on ironic appreciation. i love chulip immeasurably, it epitomizes so many of the feelings within games that i want to explore most, as a singular and highly considered vision within the medium that ALSO reveals this medium's tendency towards fraught, confused architecture. an intricate piece of simply spoken poetry with a wonderful rhythm of life to it, yet brutally and hilariously esoteric as can be. looking back on an embarrassing temporary defeat and laughing, listen to the sounds of your hometown at night, speaking honestly and being true to yourself to others, all of these have happiness in them. the rules of love are the rules of the universe, the rules of the universe are the rules of long life town.

SOME TIPS:

- im not going to say you wont need a walkthrough and i dont blame people for using one BUT dont assume this game wont give any hints on how to do anything. i would say to try a walkthrough only when you feel like youve exhausted your options, especially if it isnt related to an underground resident or the "main quest". when you need a guide i recommend using the fandom wiki for help, as gamefaqs is ocassionally misleading.

- tying into the above, i cannot stress enough that the third rule of love suzuki mentions is extremely, EXTREMELY important. you follow that rule by showing items and name cards to people in long life town, you can buy blank business cards from the shop next to the train station. if you engaged with moon's name cards/item showing system, you probably understand, but id argue its even more crucial in this game. take in and learn as much as you can.

- the english localization makes the game playable but it is incomplete and downright bugged in places (i still love how its deadpan delivery makes everything feel extra bizarre, even if things were translated too bluntly). the worst offender is that it left out a major hint for a main quest, which ill tell you about here: you'll find a computer that displays a message onscreen, that message is "dempou soccer".

- save often. in new areas, prioritize kissing residents who clean toilets. this game can kill you easily especially early on, tread carefully until you have more hp and health items to recup from blows.

11/12/2023 EDIT: Apparently back in September they added one new free map, which is great! And then replied to their own post complaining about how it's a missed sales opportunity! ??? dropping half a star.


Sold over 100k in barely a month on aesthetics alone, now struggles to break 300 concurrent players in a 24hr peak. You wouldn't think this is an issue, but I promise you it is, because most of these people are playing private lobby and the few who venture out into randoms will soon be blasted by the remaining 10% of the playerbase that has already grinded out the card/character unlocks and leveled up their decks. Median playtime: 8hrs. Median playtime among my Steam friends that own it: 2-2.5hrs, excluding the half who still haven't launched the game. What's with that, huh?

Did you know the game only has like 2 songs when you're not standing by the jukebox? Most of my friends have already muted the in-game music because they play this one song on loop whenever you're not in-game; thankfully when you're in-match the music stops. Uh, it just stops. There is no music at all in-match. What's really bizarre to me given that they tweet out other artists' songs overlapped with the game but afaik they literally only play if you go to the jukebox. Please correct me if I'm wrong about this. EDIT: OST has 6 songs, no idea what the other 4 would even be unless they're tucked in the jukebox.

Held back by a lot of really basic things, ordered by most important imo:
- Card unlocks are all generally more powerful than the base kit.
- Repeat card drops are fed to existing cards to level them up.
- Only 1v1 or 2v2 modes, no FFA and nothing higher even though maps can support it easily.
- Tiny map pool. The demo in February had 2 maps, the game launched with 4; none on the roadmap unless some offhand tweet mentioned it that I can't find.
- Can't rotate teams in private lobby without recreating lobby every time.
- Default/extremely basic Unity movement, no sense of weight or momentum which makes tracking anyone feel awful. (Feels extremely similar to Gunfire Reborn in this regard)
- Other characters need to be grinded out to even play as, really frustrating vibing with a design and being met with "erm, grind pls?" like uhhh okay then.
- Most of the guns feel bad imo, I feel like I'm actively downgrading myself when I swap to anything other than the default pistol besides the sniper (which might be a good thing given the card situation tbh)

Of all of the things to "go back to form" on with your FPS, including a gameplay-affecting battlepass/XP grind is not one of them. This was always one of the worst parts of playing CoD post-3 or any of the clones, like oh yeah sure just give the already experienced player mindless proximity mines and an auto shotty while the n00b gets a sawed-off. Lmfao get real.

The B-line to selling an expansion pass instead of reconsidering the unlocks at all or adding any new maps or modes is extremely disheartening, but it makes that "crazy good" 2/3 launch sale make a little more sense now I guess! Maybe I'm reading into that one too much but then there's this tweet which is uhhh??

I don't know, in a word I'd say "vapid" but that feels overly mean, but it's all I can really think of. Would love to see this get more gamemodes (FFA, KOTH, CTF) and a much higher player cap and absolutely desperately needs more maps. As it stands now? I don't know how you're supposed to get much out of this unless you love spinning a roulette endlessly while vaguely pointing in someone's direction.

QUÉ


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This game has heart, I just wish playing it was much better. Great soundtrack, playful visuals and a whimsical theatre style, it is those wondrous factors that make a Sonic Team game for me. Balan Wonderworld feels like an art project that wasn’t finished, though I am able to see the spots of beauty glimmering out.

Don’t think I could ever recommend it to anyone, but if this is Yuji Naka’s last major game, well damn. There’s always Prope’s Rodea the Sky Solider to replay. Every second was an adventure…