Recent reviews by ottoyuen1

It's one of the best games I've played. It builds on top of the vampire survivors formula, and integrates the Hololive personalities very well into each character's unique abilities and in-jokes. The game runs well and I have not encountered any bugs (although the game does slow down when there are a ton of enemies on-screen and you have a few chrome tabs open), and the difficulty scaling or each level can be overcome as you progress more into the upgrades without excess grinding. The game rewards you with repetitive play as winning stages with a character gives you character-specific points that make that character stronger. For the grinders, you can even aim to max out everything and receive the 1 coin reward for getting all achievements so casual players aren't really missing out.

Best part? this game is a true labour of love, I'm impressed how Kay went ahead and developed this game out of pure passion and skill, and refuses to accept compensation despite the quality of the game, which imo surpasses the amount of fun you get from many AAA titles.

Best-er part? You can fish in this game now.

Summary: It's a very different MH game: fun, but lacks replayability unlike previous entries.

The most fast-paced MH entry ever! MH Rise shifted to a counter and reaction-centric gameplay, which makes hunting fresh compared to older titles but also takes away some of the charm of significant pre-planning and monster-reading. There are many console-centric decisions that made the game as it is today, but I'll only discuss the game as it is.

1. Monsters and the hunt
Monsters are (almost) all on steroids. They move very fast with little breathing room, so each hunt is either action-packed or somewhat frustrating if you mismanage you wirebugs and timing. While the quick gameplay adds more action to each fight, the game also is very reactionary and you, as a hunter, rely on quick decisions and counters. The monster variety is pretty good, not just regular wyverns but carapeceons, and leviathans add fight mechanic diversity which I say is really good (more in Sunbreak even!). However, monster element is skewed towards fire. The number of different fights is big enough to last you a while. Unfortunately, weapon and armors still skew towards a few monsters so there is little reason to hunt a majority of monsters, I.e. monster diversity is fine really, and the hunts are rather intense.

You can also get spiritbirds that give you boosts that last the quest. I think the system to decide the hunt's difficulty is nice (get birds get buffed, or don't and get a challenge but it eventually becomes a pain to go through every quest. It's nice for a casual hunt and harvesting materials, but not great for repeated runs.

A side note, the game features siege-like rampages. I like the gameplay (many would disagree) as it gives a new kind of fight, but I can 100% agree it's frustrating to solo. You alternate between using mounted weapons and your own weapon, but you also have to micromanage the whole field's weapons which would easily be overwhelming and friutrating to deal with. Imagine trying to repel 5 monsters all attacking the gate at once! Always bring friends and save the big guns for the big one!

2. Weapons and wirebugs
Weapons are unbalanced as usual! Some weapons like HH lack the power and oomph compared to the switch axe, etc. Ranged weapons are either overpowered or too squishy, up to the point you either play perfectly or cart immediately (amplified in endgame hunts, see endgame section for spoilers). Wirebug moves, the new addition to Rise gameply, are mostly fun to use however! They give cooldown skills for each weapon, which you need to manage to prevent carting.
You can also customize the moves too, so most weapons have useful alternate skills that change the style of your hunt (most of the time) and that freshens up gameplay. Wirebug movement also helps with mobility and for better or worse, make it too easy to avoid attacks at times. Unfortunately, this also means some weapons over-rely on wirebugs that contray to its intended usage, make hunts very monotonic (see: Hammer). Nevertheless, the weapons and moves are quite diverse to play with.

3. Armor skills and crafting
I'm not really too fussed about min-maxing, but it's easy to find that certain armor become the bread and butter of armor sets, making 90% of armors irrelevant. With maxed out weapons you may lost out on a few minutes of a hunt compared to an optimal set, fortunately. The unfortunate part is the charm system: it's basically gacha. You roll for talismans (charms) that come with random skills and skill slots, so getting a really good set does rely on getting a good random talisman. It forms part of the gameply loop, but it also means you cannot guarantee success despite getting good at the game. It may not mean much for casual players, but it's still frustrating trying to get some specific skills you may like. All in all? Armor sets are diverse but not really, and getting good skills is a bit iffy in the game.

4. Misc
Movement is greatly improved with camps,scout points and your palamute. It's really fun to traverse the environment, although as a switch port, the environment and graphics are significantly inferior to MH World. Food skills are easy to work with before a hunt. Multiplayer is pretty decent too, with minimal disconnections (as per UK with decent internet, can't say for others) but sometimes matchmaking just cannot land you a quest despite people playing globally and at the same time, if in an SOS (heard there's a mod to help remove matchmaking restrictions).

5. Endgame [Contains a comment on Sunbreak]
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Rise base endgame is basically non-existent.

Sunbreak iendgame is a grindy system with Qurio crafting: you get marginal benefits with long repetitive grind, requiring multiple hunts of a specific group of monsters for a single small improvement. Oh and also armor skill gacha.
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6. My issue with Rise (and sunbreak)
Other people have probably commented on the grindy system, poor weapon balance, over-reliance on wirebugs, monster fights and atrocious tracking (apparently fixed), and lackluster graphics so I won't mention them here.

MHR lacks replayability. While you may hunt a monster a few time for parts, there is no reason to revisit a fight for the most part, other than for their parts in part, part of the reason why many people in part part off with the game.
In base Rise, each quest is hard-coded with what monsters appear in what quest, with minimal variation when you redo them. The spawn points are extremely limited, and the same 3 monsters appear at nearly the same place every time. There is no variation in hunts at all, nor are there new quest types to shake shake things up unlike investigations in World.

7. Story
I nearly forgot to mention this, but the story is a nice snippet to go through.

8. Summary
The review isn't a complete commentary of what the game is, but I'll sum it up as: a new fresh experience to MH, but not really worth revisiting much after...until you get Sunbreak (Which improves a few things, but still suffers from an uninteresting gameplay loop... a story for another day). I still do genuinely enjoy it though, it has kept me entertained for a lot of hours, although I will say I'm spending less time on MHR overall.

Summary: It's decent and solid, but not groundbreaking

It's a pretty fun game overall, story wise. The difficulty isn't high to proceed, and most missions don't frustrate you. There are special artifact missions that give you a challenge, which can be solved by grinding recurring missions a bit and focusing on overpowered units.

Did I mention overpowered? The game features a lot of series and unsurprisingly, most, if not all, main character units outshine side character units by an immense margin. If you'd like to play the game with a wide cast, you'd likely be at a disadvantage iin the game. Not too much of a big deal but worthy of note for people who want to play around.

The story is relatively straightforward and self-contained, you don't need a lot of series knowledge to play the game (for better or worse, a lot of original series contexts are stored in the Library for you to read). Like other SRW games, the plot line revolves around the MC battling recruiting and battling enemies of other series, then facing the world-destroying crisis together with other protagonists. Finely executed even if cliche. There are few, although insignificant typos and translation errors that do not affect the game much, or at all.

The battle system is also straightforward. You use energy or ammo to attack within your range, and damage dealt depends on hit chance and crit chance, which are improved upon skills and upgrades. The AOS system also gives you further boosts and is worth grinding for, Gameplay isn't groundbreaking, but solid enough to enjoy without frying your brain with overloading systems.

DLCs are a huge mixed bag unfortunately. DLCs 1 and 2 give you new units and additional scenarios and dialogue in-game, but do not add much to the story line, if at all. Same goes to DLC3/expansion pack, with minimal interaction to the main game itself. The units themselves are cool (save to Dancougar in DLC3, the animation is extremely disappointing), but you don't need them to improve your in-game experience.

All in all? A decently solid game as a SRW entry. You may need a guide to unlock secret units on your subsequent playthroughs, but for a relaxing day of watching mechs go boom, this is the game for it.

(Written while trying to hide any bias towards included series, so I decided to not discuss the series included. But imo Gaogaigar and Gridman is there and that's enough for me to get the game kek)

Each level is unique and the bosses aren't easy to breeze through, while not impossible to beat. Mechanics design is pretty good, you can afford to make some mistakes while the grazing system rewards you for taking risks, which make the game engaging yet (not that) frustrating. Travelling between areas is a bit of a chore to collect everything but manageable. Pixel artstyle is on point and most importantly, it runs smooth as hell, perfect for a reaction-platformer like this.
Recommended especially for those who'd like a challenge.

What can I say? I spend too much time on this game here. Exploring is great with many creatures and items to gather, with many hidden paths and environmental interactions to discover. Monsters are in full HD too, which makes hunting really enjoyable. Sadly, monster variety is much lower than other games in the franchise which is quite disappointing. Still, the weapon mechanics and learning how each monster move (and fight each other) make up for the rest. A really good game, I promise.

A step up to the original Portal game. It has an expanded story which tells us the interesting history of Aperture Labs, and includes much more new mechanisms to gameplay! I really liked how they kept reflexes to moderate and more puzzle-based, so there isn't too much tension to gameplay. Soundtracks and graphics was amazing too! Multiplayer more is as entertaining as ever, with managable difficulty progressions.

This is a very interesting JRPG with a complete story. Nice music, cute animations and characters, and a proportional leveling system, where persistant grinding is not needed to go through the story. The in-game jokes are pretty meta (however, there are a lot of references only gamers and those who understand game developing history in Japan would know) and the English translation is not broken. Voice acting in English sounds weird, but this can be fixed by using the Japanese voices toggled from the settings.
I spent 70+ hours on this now, and it never gets boring. There is a progession in difficulty (leveling) only for non-main story dungeons, so gameplay is not stressful. I like the fact that you can choose between 11 characters (16 with DLC) and play around with different abilities, and a very simple crafting system. Battle scenes overall are not spectacular and attack animations seem to lack the action it deserves, but are still fun to watch. Hail the skip button for skipping lengthy battle animations too!
My only complaint is that FPS drops and the game becomes laggy at 2 specific dungeons (Sakura Row and another similar dungeon), which outs me off from exploring through them. Some battle transitions are slow too, but it is not a big issue.
If you like JRPGs and cutesy fun, with little stress, this is recommended.