Expecting a 7-hour retrospecrive on MH Sunbreak within the next day

Yeah we are going to need that retrospective now Rad.

It's so cursed to see Daimyo hermitaur in the shrine ruins I love it

5:22 I'm so happy that we finally have a truly relaxing, soothing village theme again after so long. The real cozy themes like Pokke, Yukumo and Moga are the best.

I have 1 complaint: They didn't add new food for the meals, when IceBorne did that it was a fun change. I can't believe they didn't add Sushi but instead it's till Dango Edit: this obviously includes the base game too you idiots, it's called an aesthetic and it adds to the feeling of the game. I want Rise to be as good as World and that includes having a variety of visuals for the food, they constantly updated it with different meals so why not Rise?

Rarely do I watch a review before a game I'm anticipating comes out, so I appreciate you dodging spoilers while still providing an informative assessment. Definitely my favorite MH channel.

Figured I would drop my two cents here, since I would say this review is the one that I would say most shaped my expectations going in. For context, I've played damn near nonstop since release, and am just about half way through MR5 since I'm kind of taking it slow. Also a 3U vet. I think you are pretty spot on for the most part, but I will say that the difficulty concerns seemed to me to be a bit overblown. You do a good job of kind of contextualizing it, but I think the issue actually has less to do with the monsters and more some of the sets. For example, the dignified set is seriously one of the best SA/ CB sets in terms of skills in ant monster hunter game, and you get it basically mid game. Some monsters are actually insanely fast (Magmadron) and using slower weapons like Greatsword with them can be really difficult even with highly upgraded armor. I think some of the difficulty complaints tend to be more weapon or set focused, as some monsters can be complete pushovers with some weapons (Garangolm with CB) while others are a complete nightmare (Magmadron with GS). I think the issue comes more down to set balancing that seems a bit obscene some times as opposed to monsters being too weak or predictable.

"Rise was easy" Me struggling with teostra: 😅 "Yeah, it's super easy."

People don't hate the clutch claw/slinger because it's always available to use, they hated it because having to tenderise the monster every other minute to do even remotely reasonable damage was absolute cancer. I still love Iceborne, but I can't defend the clutch claw for that lol.

14:54 there sure is! Go to setting and then controls and it’s near the top. You can turn it either off (so like how it was pre sunbreak) or off only during hunting. So you don’t accidentally wall ride during a hunt.

Can't wait to play Sunbreak. From my perspective as someone who started with Tri, difficulty wasn't really a driving factor in my love for the series. Even if it isn't as difficult as past entries, I play monster hunter for it's world, atmosphere, creature design, and gameplay loop. If Sunbreak nails those, difficulty is less of an issue for me. That being said, I've actually heard multiple differing opinions in regards to Sunbreak's difficulty. Maybe you're just underestimating your own abilities?

The lower difficulty curve has at the very least kept my non monster hunter friends engaged with Risefor much longer than my previous attempts to get people into the franchise. So I'm not spending nearly as much time doing solo play and for that I'm grateful. Thanks for the Review it was really well done!

Great review, for me honestly difficulty being lower isn't a big downside, having gone through GU recently after completing Rise and for the sake of comparison replayed couple HR and Grank hub quests in MHFU, I'll be fine to have a generally more ''chill'' entry in the franchise. I enjoy throwing myself against a wall, but if I get a game where I don't have to spend a weekend trying to not get bodied by G-rank green plesioth I'm good with that especially if Capcom up their game when it comes to event quests and post launch content, I'll gladly go up against something akin to hyper or apex monsters and suffer when I've done what I want in the core experience.

The issue with clutch claw wasn't how "easy" it was to use, although I would argue that wallbangs did far too much damage. The issue with clutch claw was softening and how that impacted monster hitzones. The hitzones were designed around softening. While this isn't a terrible thing in a vacuum, in the actual game it was miserable. Having to soften twice with light weapons sucked, and made me unbelievably happy that I'm a charge blade player. The AI of the monsters in master rank meant there weren't always good opportunities to act on the soften. In some worst case scenarios, actually hitting the spot you softened is impossible, meaning you have to soften AGAIN before you get to actually fight the monster.

This has got me even more excited than I was before, thanks for bangin all this out so quickly!

Difficulty in these games is a touchy subject and hard to criticize accurately. Basically, people like SuperRAD are very good at these games, and get better each new title. This means that the relative difficulty of every new title goes down. The problem is that the devs can't just keep making the games harder. That would essentially gate new players from playing. Also there is a setting that disables walling running in combat only.

I haven't heard a melody been described as 'aggressively calming' before 😂

Gore Magala is my favorite monster in the franchise, but (nearly) every new monster in Rise is an absolute slam dunk in flavor and theming. While there aren’t many new monsters which kind of sucks, the few that were added in Sunbreak quickly became new favorites. The Citadel is also the best map in the game without question, it’s an incredibly diverse area with tons of detail and paths to travel, but it highlights one of my biggest pet-peeves with Rise, that Monsters are constrained to their arenas, and their only way to get at you when you run out of their range is for them to smash a wall and knock you back into the ring. It would be amazing if a monster could actually chase you beyond an arena, like a Rathalos flying over the cliffs to bombard you with fireballs, or a Tigrex climbing over the uneven terrain to give chase, or an enraged Gore Magala using his arms to crawl through the ruined city area looking in each building for you, that would be incredible.

She was maggin your malo, but she was gorin ma gala

I started with 3U and since then I've absolutely been loving the increase of mobility of each release. Rise gameplay-wise hits all the right spots for me. I love feeling like a powerful badass with tons of options to handle every combat situation while keeping the combat as engaging and dopamine infusing as ever.

Number 1 goal is to be in a position to get a review copy for the next monster hunter release.

In regards to the matter of palamute item sniffing out: if you don't have gathering spots memorized, and want to do a loop of multiple items, it is *incredibly* useful since it allows you to have all the spots you want to hit show on your map without needing to constantly open your map and switch between them.

18:05 is it weird that when i saw gore doing that move, my brain immediatly went "oh, better valor sheate"

This was the review I was waiting for, and it makes me more excited for Sunbreak

The tone and storytelling in Sunbreak was an improvement from the base game (characters actually having names also helped for I found the lack of names in World to be pretty distracting) and the gameplay was pretty fun with how much you could get away with than in the past. I also really loved the idea and inclusion of the support hunters NPC mechanic and I hope they make that into a permanent gameplay feature that can be used for every quest type instead of being set aside as an off branch thing. Imagine if in a future game I don’t want to go through the trouble of fighting Alatreon (who Iceborne ruined) with randoms when I can just have the NPCs fight with me instead? Yeah, I really want that, especially when randoms aren’t always reliable and on the off chance nobody is playing months or years down the line. Meaning multiplayer wouldn’t have to be a crutch for certain monsters nearly as much as it is now. Unfortunately Sunbreak also got extremely lazy with regards to monsters that should be in the game yet they aren’t (Tetsucabra, Zamtrios, Gravios, etc) and the lack of the double sets of armor (and enough cutscenes featuring my character) severely dampened my enthusiasm in the replayability department. Even old and new monsters still lacked proper weapon designs in parts and even their theme songs (also a World issue). Not to mention the fact that turf wars hardly happened 95% of the time across both base Rise and Sunbreak which infuriated the hell out of me, for here I am expecting an awesome battle to happen only for Tetranodon to just b*tch slap Arzuros into wyvern riding mode instead every time they ran into each other. It also goes to show how ultimately worthless the apexes were for they ended up being just watered down, cheaply renamed versions of past monster deviants without their own unique armors and weapons, and instead just gave you pallet swapped Kamura weapons which were not only immediately obsolete just as you unlocked them, they quite literally became useless phantoms upon starting Sunbreak since they cannot be upgraded into master rank either. The Arch-tempered monsters in World were a massive headache but at least they still gave you something to make the pain worth it (decorations and snazzy new suits of armor). Were the apexes enjoyable fights by themselves? Sure I guess. But if there’s no incentive to go through the trouble of hunting them then why bother, I might as well just go mine for resources from the nearby rocks since clearly more effort was put into that instead.

there is a setting to change the auto wall running. you can disable it specifically during combat. it's in the controls section of the options menu

In terms of the story, I like the idea of the interaction between Malzeno and the final boss, it's a neat reference to the idea that vampires receive their powers from the devil. Also honestly I think the image of the Qurio swarming the Anjanath and the afflicted Lunagaron quest with all the dead monsters everywhere were actually pretty disturbing, reasonably impressive for a MH story. Was kind of surprised Gore and Shagaru got so little fanfare in the story though, Gore isn't even technically required to progress the plot and Shagaru just suddenly appears for an urgent, is called super dangerous, and that's it. Elgado is fine, nothing special but fine. I'll probably go back to Kamura for most of my remaining play time though, the music is too good and I'd rather get my quests from Minoto than the loli princess. Also it's a bit goofy to me that they're still eating Japanese dango in the European Elgado. I get the two nations have history, but it feels like it's just asset reuse to me.

as small as it is, having the soothing village theme back is a welcome change. i always felt so suffocated by world's hub and kamura's music, like it doesnt give you a chance to enjoy the quiet time of prepping and upgrading like pokke or moga did.

Already planning a BBQ with my family for the 5+hour retrospective review of sunbreak

The only downside to Elgado's music being so good is that now I have a hard choice between keeping the original BGM or the Pokke/Bherna BGMs that I used in Kamura.

This is a great review bro. I never watch Monster Hunter Reviews but I watched this all the way through.

You had me sold me you mentioned Kittenator. Sunbreak will be a masterpiece.

Can't wait to finally play this game, after recently doing a playthrough of GU on a new save file, I can say for certain that I am hyped for the Magala's

I was really looking forward to your review of sunbreak. One can tell that you care deeply about the franchise, but are still able to view things critically. Thank you for all the effort you put into your videos!

Remember folks take these reviews with a grain of salt, until you experienced the game for yourself.

I like to imagine that since you’re always a low rank hunter or supposedly a new one, you just haven’t gotten any quests and that’s why the games have such crazy monster progression. Because the guild realized that you’re just some demon spawn who never sleeps

Thanks for the honest (and spoiler free) review.

14:40 I believe there was a setting [at least in the demo] that let you toggle between wall running at all times, not doing it in battle, and some third setting

The worst thing about all the new players joining during monster hunter world is, that for the most part, none of them have any idea that for every single main line monster hunter title in the series, MH1, MH2, MH3, MH4, and MHWorld, we have always gotten a corresponding portable game that goes with it MHFreedom for MH1 MHFreedomU for MH2 MHPortable3rd for MH3 MHGeneratons for MH4 and MHRise for MHWorld Not liking the portable titles is a fine enough opinion, but because almost none of the World players have figured out how the mainline/portable titles work in the last 5 years, they shit talk rise and cry like the series is doomed and we're never getting another game like world again, even with the trailers for Wilds dropping people STILL think it's going to be Rise #2 instead of World #2, even going so low as to review bomb and spread it to people who might be interested in the series.

Im that guy who loves old school aproche as much as this fast phased. I loved dark souls 1 but at the same time i loved sekiro. Im so hyped for this game.

"Does it make up for base rise's difficulty? No." "Rathian ran circles around me"

Its really good hearing ur review/critique on sunbreak cuz after watching the latest trailer, I had my concerns regarding the absence of rampage (which I was expecting them to fix it someway due to having a guild card reward of doin 50 rampage quests lol). But for the time being, we'll just hav to wait and see what it offers in the future (hopefully a lot more locales, frontier monsters and/or story)! Thanks super!

Finally got to MR100 and I agree with mostly everything you've said. I don't particularly enjoy the veteranism of "earlier = better" because I tried replaying my first MH recently and it was an utter disaster. The lack of QoL really weighs heavily once you have options, but I didn't care about that when I was a kid. The only major disagreement I have is that the game isn't hard. Maybe it's not hard for you, but I've played thousands of MH hours and I still got my ass handed to me during the MR unlocks and with some of the anomalies. Granted, I'm playing a challenging weapon, but even then, the game feels at the right difficulty without artificially bloating it up with non-solo-scaling hub quests, massive hitboxes, overall sluggishness and animation lock, etc. But you might be considerably better at the game and that's fine too.

“Monster hunter games aren’t as hard as they used to be” >plays long sword

Are the cutscenes played at the start of the quest like in base Rise or are the cutscenes like MH W IB and 4U where you're more involved and it transfers you to gameplay right after?

the fucking town theme is actually making me excited, I can't wait bros one more day

I'm very glad to hear your review first then, I'll watch Rui and Gijin later. Also the option to turn off hit effects for you and other players is a God send thx Cap.🍖🍡

my stomach hurts from laughing at the description awesome review!

Kinda reminds me of when gen ultimate released and people were talking about how power crept the hunters felt with the new abilities and what not Gu was probably one of my favorite in the series. I love when they go for a less grounded approach.

So this essentially is just...every problem I had with base Rise addressed and taken to its best? Well bugger me.

The description made me laugh way more than it probably should have

As someone who played Warframe a lot. I am kinda used to being as powerful as a god so MHRS from the beginning of Rise all the way to Sunbreak. And this being my first Monster Hunter game. It was a very pleasant trip. Yes. It has beaten me. Whipped me around all over. Poisoned. Paralysed me. Etc etc. It was still an enjoyable trip. My favourite part was the characters to me. They had life. Personality. And when Sunbreak allowed you to bring them along your hunts. I was thrilled. Because my Online experience was utterly terrible. All of them were either Try Hards who told me I was too slow and booted me out. Or people who rush in unprepared and carted themselves in a speedrun record. So hunting with my favourite NPC’s was an overly fun experience.

Ok. This review has convinced me to buy Sunbreak and get back into it. Already put 350 hours into Rise but I guess I can put in 300 more.

I really like the idea of follower quest hope it is brought back into mh 6

Great review man I'm hype!

heads up! there is actually a way to turn off automatic wallrunning while in combat, by setting that option to "Off (In Combat Only)".

Yeah I'm never going back to Kamura. The little part you showed about Elgado and bgm. Yeah I'm staying there forever

Seeing that you feel like the game is already complete and that the first title update is really just adding extra stuff instead of finishing the game is a HUGE load off. I was worried that the game was unfinished because of how Rise released but I’m happy to hear that it’s complete! Can’t wait to play!!

So about buddy upgrades. Yea you get the ability to upgrade the buddies. Following the trend of the expansion as a whole they chose to eliminate a bad mechanic which was the rng fishing you needed to do to get a good cat or dog. You now can swap out all of their abilities and teach them the skills a different pet already knows. All you need to do is a few side quests and level the buddies that know the target skill. So now at best you need one of each type then you just stack the skills you want on them.

Great stuff Monsieur Rad

Looks like sunbreak has been good so far ,though i can't judge because i haven't played it yet, hopefully in the Future they make the game better and hopefully they listen to the community of this game because it's lacking something just like you said, I would love a difficult challenge in this just like the older games and some Frontier monsters in the future

I can't wait to play sunbreak but it's releasing at 5am in the UK 😭

The greatest change was that they linked your item sets with the radial menu. I have NO idea why they didn’t keep that feature from World and brought it into base Rise.

My guy, best thorough review. Thanks for the insight now I’m ready to achieve the god status when I get my hands on this!

"i know, i play longsword" good job, admitting it is the first step toward recovery man i can't wait until tomorrow

Being honest, the last MH that felt difficult going through the game for me was 4U. When you hit around G3, the monsters can be really unforgiving and I felt like that was lost in GU. GU is so over the top with Adept style, Valor & Absolute Readiness being incredibly solid options that it made the majority of the game feel really easy compared to previous entries. The only time I felt the game got hard was with G-Deviants. Deviants were the answer to the crazy styles and arts the hunters got but it made the rest of the game feel way too easy in comparison. I suppose thats sort've my issue with MHGen-onward. The series has gotten less grounded since then with systems that either make the game easier (quest scaling) or gameplay changes/additions that make the game easier (i-frame spamming). This is probably my favorite series of video games and I welcome the change but I realize it's not going to go back like it was when I was a teen playing Unite or 3U. Anyways, great review! Really enjoyed this video.

Great video can’t wait to watch you stream sunbreak

Man Espinas rocked my world, that was the biggest challenge for me yet

Thanks to you I've been playing frontier recently, loved the history series and really interesting to see your thoughts on sunbreak :)

For those wondering, yes you can turn off wall running during combat.

Correction: apex monsters were removed concerning rampages, not entirely. The apex event quests are still available for high rank. Technically not removed for master rank either, just replaced.

Definitely getting this. I like Rise a lot so this is just icing on the cake. And I've played EVERY Monster Hunter release including the Iceborne expansion of World. Frankly World didn't do it for me but this game is just very fun.

I just feel like, what the F were the Apex monsters for if I don't have another set of armour or weapon upgrade after i fought that thing? Instead we have the garbage rampage weapon system

My biggest hope for sunbreak is for capcom to make it even crazier from new update to update. And since the frontier devs are very much involved with sunbreak that may very well happen 😏

I find the most interesting thing about this review is how most of the things you praise Sunbreak and Rise for ante the things I dislike the most. The pacing and speed of combat the aggression of the monsters ETC. I do like the switch skills and endemic life though that's something I'd like to see continuing forward.

I can't believe you cut away before the Espinas Sacred Sheathe attack on the tail LMAO. Amazing vid Rad, keep it up chief!

In terms of roster I really enjoy it had a quality over quantity approach and I’m glad that there making the attempt to improve the difficulty them again I can’t tell you how many times I got killed by that “STUPID FLEX”

I don't want to eat dango anymore. I want real food.

Lavasioth and Hypnocatrice have been worked on for a while and were planed for both main series and frontier but released first in frontier so techincally Espinas is still the first frontier monster to make it to the main line :D Also holy shit, Shagura is so much fun to fight!

Long-time fan of the MH series, but only just discovered your channel recently. I waited until I was into the post-game of Sunbreak to check out your review so I could form my own opinion, but it's reassuring to hear such a similar perspective on everything. I don't really go out of my way to use endemic life, but it was definitely interesting to hear them compared to the slinger and claw from Iceborne. I also, by chance, have been using the LS a lot so far into the expansion, and I really love that Sacred Sheathe, to the point that my playstyle now revolves entirely around it, so I don't use the skill swap ever, really. It seems like a feature that will be much more useful for other weapon types as I explore them later, but the amount of armor skills and bonuses directed at using it frequently is a little intimidating, as though I'm not playing as intended. Biggest gameplay issues I have with Rise/Sunbreak would be: 1) Wyvern Riding just breaks the pace of the fight when I really don't want to engage with it. I didn't know about the options for it, so thank you for pointing it out 2) Apex monsters are just gone and, although I don't miss the rampages, it feels like they utterly wasted such an easy inclusion 3) Difficulty. YMMV, but I used my same high-rank armor for most of Master Rank and never felt very pressed to upgrade until the Master versions were available for my pieces. 4) HR/MR points are not counted until you reach your current cap quest and complete it. It seems as though MR does start to tally in the background *after* you beat the main story of Sunbreak, but this is still beyond irritating, as I feel like I'm being rushed to finish the story instead of taking my time with sidequests and building armor slowly through the tiers aaaand 5) "Meta" dominance and overall combat flow seems to be changing a lot in a direction I'm not liking. Counters are available on basically every single weapon, so 100% damage skills is still the obvious choice. It feels like tremor res, earplugs, and other defensive/utility skills are next to useless these days. Not to mention that playing with other people feels like reading a wiki or reddit thread, as a lot of the people I interact with seem to know the "best" this and that, and tend to optimize into cookie cutter BIS instead of just being ourselves. This all started with World, but Rise/Sunbreak has reinforced it EDIT: 6) Spiribirds. I knew I forgot one in my initial write-up. These things are counter-intuitive to me. They're a fun way to incentivize exploring the map for a while, but after a few hundred hunts, they've become straight up tedious busy-work that I still have to do every single time

Low amd High Rank where never hard to begin with. Everyone complaining about it was just a scrub.

Although I do feel like the game easier than other entries of the series I think this review is more negative than it should be, first off Espinas in Rise in my opinion is way harder than in Frontier, coming from a person who has played Frontier to G3 Zeniths, Espinas in Frontier gave you a good while to whale on it while it was tired and it's charges were very linear, it was coin flip whether it would poison you or not due to the janky hit box since some parts of its body would poison you if they landed , the fire balls are way more telegraphed and Espinas just suffered from being a old gen wyvern fight. The game isn't insanely hard like your retrospective makes it out to be. Sure the supremacy monsters in Gou rank are stupidly difficult but nothing else in the game beside Musos are even close to that level of difficulty. The second point I want to address is when you say that the game won't be as difficult people want it to be, I disagree because through playing the game solo (Multiplayer makes every hunt easy even in frontier) I've probably carted more in Sunbreak than in MHWI or GU since monsters take advantage of wire bugs and counters do hit multiple times or can catch in the air, Though hunts are shorter in this game than any other monster hunter game I feel like monsters in sunbreak finally are fast enough to match you speed, heck most monster can 3 shot you in this expansion if your wearing armor relative to the rank.

For the Auto wall run, its actually very fun for me while using Heavy Weapon/Charge (Mainly Greatsword) feel like im playing Ariel GS again XD

14:12 This helps for solo content and I'll explain why: Puppet Spiders. Although they are sort of a "hidden" endemic life, some maps do allow you to sniff 'em out, and that gives you extra optimal damage when setup with the Ruby Wirebug. It's a little scrubby, but some of those endgame hunts go by a lot smoother when you're soloing them. This is all from my personal experience and I'm not the best but I'm also not one to cart unless I'm stunned

Using Monster Hunter language. The true gentleman's choice.

The follower quests thing actually sounds so cool. It's reminiscent of God Eater 3 or Code Vein but usually I would elect to solo everything in those games since the AI partner(s) completely trivialize the game. Hopefully the Rise variant is more balanced since it is a really cool idea for worldbuilding, immersion and multiplayer experience for people w no MH friends that don't care to play with randoms either.

Ok first thing the review overall was good second my thoughts on challenge from monsters i tend to think it veries from player to player so each has different views and the 3rd thing i want to bring up the long sword charge move i honestly wasn't expecting us to dodge around like a madman before the attack with it and im sorry in advance if i missed you saying what im about to ask my only question is did they do sunbreak story like in world/iceborne that you could do it solo or co op or split it between the two like base rise did ?

I am hoping that you could make a retrospective of sunbreak after the last title update has been released.

I think percieving this game as you describe in the end of the video really is the best way to go about it. It's what makes me love rise and GU, they are games in which the point is just being ABSURDLY over the top. Buuuuuut I do hope the next gen of MH games goes back to something more akin to old school MH in terms of being a little more grounded, because the over the top nature of gen 5 and GU is like dessert in my opinion, it's great, but I think we've had too big of a dosage in the last few years and now it's time to go back to the "main course" if you will

Scaling is what made me drop GU. 30 min hunts solo are a slog.

I’ve always struggled the most with monsters that are hyper aggressive. Monsters such as Tigrex, Rajang, Nargacuga, Espinas and even Zinogre at some times. In world it felt like almost all the monsters were hyper aggressive and I was scared to get hit but in Rise I found myself constantly praying for a monster that would give me a challenge. Sunbreak helped with that a lot

Really hoping they add some super tough endgame monster fights like they did in iceborne. Alatreon and Fatalis were some of my favorite fights and I fought them over and over a bunch just for the thrill.

I started with mh rise and I love it

personally, i like the reduce in difficulty. it make me less worry about having the best gear, and I found myself experience more with different build and use the less powerful weapon just for the look

19:54 had to rewind a few times I was so taken back, does Gore always fall into traps? Is that new? I only fought him in GU and I never bothered to try cuz I assumed he was Elder Dragon tier lmao / also great review still haven’t finished the New Vegas one great work👍🏻

That booster makes me interested on how it'll work with slugger...

Later in Rise I feel they presented some good challenges but there was no point t since no rewards to build a set for or decorations/talisman drops. So I feel if Sunbreak can just give us a reason to hunt in the end game and then release challenging, purposeful hunts in updates as well I will be satisfied. It looks awesome and I can't wait for midnight tonight if it drops then est

This was a great review !. but i hate it because it made me impatient 10/10

so evade distance does affect the sks dodge, good to know.

Rise has the best combat and systems for gearing we've ever seen in monster hunter its really a shame to see people hating on it so much only to go back and realise how flat everything else before it feels