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...