Monster Hunter Rise

[darksnowman]

3 hours ago, Hero-of-Time said:

Took 450 hours and last month I finally managed to nab the platinum and all the trophies for the DLC.

Hard to get my head around putting this amount of time into it. With gold coins, I took a punt on MH: Rise in an eShop sale in June and played it pretty much immediately. I put in ~15 hours until credits and couldn't think of much to say about it worth bumping this thread for.   It threw a lot at me from the word go (lists of added quests and guff before I'd done anything) and I found it extremely overwhelming. The tutorial was too short, awkward and poorly explained—amongst other basic things, I had to search online for how to even start a quest because you obviously have to talk to the girl outside, it's not the indoors desk near the tutorial guy nor do you just accept it off the noticeboard. Of course it has nice production values with the monster intros, wirebug movement is cool, and I enjoyed the couple of "defend the village gate" bits but it seems like a) you must need to want to grind for drops (like really want to) and b) play the game socially to get the most out of it? Since I got it on sale I felt I got my value out of persevering with the buttons and ticking off quests as far as I did.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained... but no, seriously, I gained nothing from my time with this. Was hoping to get into it or I wouldn't have got it. MH remains an acquired taste.

[Hero-of-Time]

I can see why you had issues with the game, especially if this is your first time properly playing through a game in this series. When starting out, it's usually best to play with someone who has experience with playing these games, just to give advice and help you along the way so that you don't get overwhelmed. You can play through the game on your own or with randoms (pretty much what I done when playing the PS5 version) but it certainly helps having an experienced hunter by your side. 

The series is very much about grinding. The loop of killing monsters and upgrading equipment is central to the whole game. This needs to be repeated countless times in order to progress and so if the idea of fighting the same beasts over and over again doesn't sound appealing then you done well to drop the game early on. 

[darksnowman]

Got S+ on the Gotta Hoard Fast! quest (2* difficulty). Quite possibly my greatest achievement in Monster Hunter. LOL.

[darksnowman]

After tons of online searching (such as how to find out my HR and what are scraps, among plenty of other stupid questions) and discovering various online groups to bounce questions off, I proceeded to take on the two license quests under the village section to boost me up the hub list—albeit marginally. Because village and hub don't feed into each other otherwise, and apparently pursuing the village side is baby mode and not the done thing. Not offline for story and online for communal grinding, then, as I'd believed. Do those quest maidens not compare notes?? Then I threw on the online and incredibly, people joined. If you build it, they will indeed come. Where I'd been ticking them all off before progressing on village, the bare minimum number of quests to get up through the star rankings were done in the hub.

On quests where no one joined, it was a 20-30 min slog, but depending on the others, quests were done and dusted in a breezy five. I'd love to be able to OHKO these beasts. It put it into perspective to not see these players join me inside the monster to carve it threefold at the end. On a rampage quest, someone who has clearly mastered the game smashed it by setting out traps and barrels and doing something to reduce the cooldown on the kiln thing. I enjoy the rampage quests but all I pretty much do is set up the stations and then jump into the thick of it with my sword. On this big victory, I at least delivered the death blow despite being a passenger. Eventually came the Narwa encounter in it's very own arena. This was like a proper boss fight from Mario with floating platforms. It was well done but I doubt I'd have emerged victorious without the other three players mucking in—at best, I'd have timed out. I wasn't a complete deadweight but I wasn't far off it because my playstyle of ZL+Xing to victory wasn't designed with flying monsters in mind.

After all that (this is the condensed version) the game finally allowed me to take on the other Sonic quest: The Super Shady Look-alike. In keeping with MH, doing it once wasn't enough to let me make all the layered gear, so away we went again. Thankfully twice was nice. 

All this because I don't know if these Sonic quests becoming "unobtainable" this month means they'll be chalked off my quest list or if it just means the add-on content will no longer download for new players. Everything's clear as mud with MH. 

Until I see more quests will be unobtainable, it's time to get back to some games with nippier controls.

Edited January 15 by darksnowman
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