It's been like two weeks so I guess I should finally put the game down and say something about it, lol. So far, Rise has been incredibly good. There are a small handful of things holding it back, but just a small handful.
For starters, the gameplay is utterly amazing. Easily a match for GenU in how much fun it is. The silkbinds and switch skills more than make up for the lack of styles and arts. Leagues more fun than World ever was. The maps are really well-designed and fun, they're big but not excessively so, and there's a lot of stuff to find on them. It's really cool how they hid messages with lore in them around the maps. I found two thirds of them on my own. The Rampages are crazy fun and hectic. Solo, they're a lot to manage, but with other players, it's an incredibly fun experience. The music is also really phenomenal, new themes and old themes alike.
Some things that aren't so good would be cosmetic practices. You can't dye your armor until high rank, and you can't even use the color spectrum for dyeing until the end of high rank. Also, the only layered armor in the game at launch is paid. Very, very annoyed by that. I bought the deluxe version for the Kamurai layered set because I expected something dumb like this, and I'm annoyed that I was right. There are also a lot of paid cosmetics like hair styles and gestures, which is a practice that World unfortunately started and that Rise is unfortunately continuing. Also not happy that the starting hairstyles are almost 1:1 the same as World. That was really lame. Also, I'm not happy they brought World's weapon tree back. I never liked it.
This is more to do with the fact that it's an unfinished game, but there really isn't a lot of content. I already beat every low rank quest in the game, and it's only been two weeks. I finished every village quest on my third or fourth day with it. The number of quests and the number of monsters leaves something to be desired, but again, the game is still unfinished. The free title updates will hopefully remedy this in a satisfactory way, but it's still a pretty barren launch. It's hard to expect a game to have as much content as GenU did, but I still hope for more than this down the road.
Also, I do feel like they made the game way too easy. The village campaign was such a cakewalk, it surpassed World for easiest story. Thankfully, the hub quests are pretty satisfying in difficulty, feeling more like a proper MonHun game and not an extended tutorial. A lot of the quality of life is great, but it also kind of gets rid of a lot of the planning and preparation for hunts that made MonHun so fun. Like, there's no more temperature effects anymore. That's kinda lame. Permanent whetsones, I get that. Eating from camp? Yeah, forgetting to eat before departing did suck, but it was also part of the preparation. Storage from camp? That's directly going against the preparation design philosophy. At least, IMO. Sometimes QoL sacrifices part of the heart of the games for convenience, and new MonHun occasionally crosses that line. The good kind of QoL we really needed was stuff like the smithy wishlist and fast travel in the field, I am glad that's back.
For as much as I rambled about the smaller things, I really am having a grand old time with Rise. The new buddies are fantastic, the weapons are a ton of fun, combat and exploration is stylish and exciting, and the new monsters are all really darn cool to fight, especially the endgame elder dragons. Already at launch, Rise is much more fun than World ever was all through its lifetime. I'm having a whole mess of fun, and I hope the title updates really impress. I'm excited to see the end of the story.
