Topic: Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak (Switch) Review

[Shaymin]

Four hundred hours across two saves, and still no “god talismans."

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/60903/monster-hunter-rise-sunbreak-switch-review

The release history of the Monster Hunter series on Nintendo platforms has never put it in a position to have an expansion; previously the “ultimate” edition was on a different platform from the original, or the only version that was released outside Japan was the ultimate edition. The Sunbreak expansion for Monster Hunter Rise promised new challenges, monsters, and areas, and it certainly delivers those—but the biggest change might be the additional quality of life elements it brought to everyone.

The story of Sunbreak is set in the kingdom of Elgado, located close enough to the original Kamura Village that fast travel unlocks quickly. Following the events of the Rise story, a monster normally native to Elgado appears just outside Kamura: after defeating it, a main menace of Elgado attacks the hunting party on the way back. This brings your hunter to Elgado proper, which is trying to remove invasive species from the area including what is referred to as the “Three Lords”—monsters based on the werewolf, vampire, and Frankenstein’s monster. The plot, such as it is, leads to fighting stronger or elementally altered versions of monsters, before dealing with the “three lords” and some returning champions from older games, including the now-closed massively multiplayer Monster Hunter Frontier.

Previous updated versions of Monster Hunter releases have added a few single-player quests but largely focused on multiplayer, while the Iceborne expansion for Monster Hunter World on PC/PlayStation 4/Xbox One added no dedicated single player content at all. Although Sunbreak does require hunting in the hub quests in order to progress the story and unlock more monsters, there are two sets of quests that are required to be handled by a single player. These single-player hunts come in two forms: Follower Quests in which you lead characters both in Elgado and Kamura, and Support Surveys which allow you to select these characters for a quest. Each of the characters uses different weapon types and has different attack patterns that determine their healing frequency or aggressiveness, and none of the characters I found are alike. They’re a nice break from the quest structure in the multiplayer-optional quests, even if some of them are locked temporarily for story reasons (a character is essentially unavailable for a full rank due to plot concerns). The main ranking quests work on a star system, with four or five “key” quests to choose from when hitting a rank and an “urgent” story quest after clearing a couple of them. The “pick a few from the list” setup was used in base Rise as well, but the mid-rank interruptions are more frequent in Sunbreak since they’re often used to introduce new monsters.

With the move to new quests comes new techniques and items to carve, which are doled out throughout the story at a nice pace, though it seems like the ability to craft better “talismans”—equippable items which provide skills at high levels—is locked until after the end of the story, much to my irritation. (Since these talismans are entirely based on random crafting, I have been looking for a particular set of skills for more than a year now with no success: surely a higher tier of crafting would offer better chances.) The most hyped new addition to Sunbreak was the availability of new “Switch” skills which are special techniques that run on a cooldown, along with the ability to keep two loadouts of skills and swap between them on the fly. Depending on your playstyle, this can either be a nice upgrade or utterly game changing, and since the monsters have more attacks and hit harder it’ll likely lean more toward the latter. Sunbreak also added two new areas to the existing five main ones for hunts, which really test the user’s skill with the “Wirebugs” that serve as Switch skill cooldown and also allow for faster or more vertical traversal. Some smaller features were also added, such as the ability to “lock” talismans for later use or investigation.

Monster Hunter Rise ran smoothly on the Switch, even if it was running at 30 frames per second, and Sunbreak maintains things. There were a couple of incidents observed with both my roommate’s copy of the game and my own where the game would randomly mute for about five seconds in the midst of a hunt; I suspect this will be patched down the line. The expansion also raises the possibility of ten fighters being in a hunt at one time, as most of the quests for ranking up include a plot helper; we ran one of these online with two people jumping in and the frame rate remained steady, though it did seem to lower the resolution slightly and there was only one other monster on the map in these hunts when ordinarily there would be two. Still, it held up and that’s all I could ask for.

...we are going to take a shower after we get back, right? I don't want the dango to smell like Tigrex.

The main attraction of the expansion is the new monsters, and they don’t disappoint. I really wasn’t looking forward to the variants; there’s quotes in our Slack channel of me dreading monsters when they appeared in trailers. (“Oh great, they lit Almudron on fire, just what I wanted.”) But they’re fun hunts if a little tricky at first; the new monsters have cool motifs and the returning monsters are as good as I’ve ever seen them. Because of the new game setting, Sunbreak-specific hunts have new music which tends more toward the orchestral; it’s not good or bad, just… different. I’m very curious to see what they do with the series’s anthem Proof of a Hero eventually.

My main Monster Hunter Rise file went into Sunbreak north of 230 hours, and I put another hundred into a hunter on an alternate profile that was used for review purposes. I don’t think I’ll double that time on my main before the next Monster Hunter comes out, but it might get close. Sunbreak is a must for anyone who’s ever stared down a Rathalos and lived to tell the tale.