I liked it for traversal/exploration as a one-game gimmick, but I think it kind of ruined a majority of fights because you barely had to think about positioning, and if you got hit you could always tech a billion years late and come back unscathed immediately.
The overly fast pace in Rise was, to me, worse than both the pace in Worlds/Wilds and the old games, because it made the maps feel the smallest by far (also didn’t help that it was a Switch game). Every fight feels overly formulaic, there’s zero prep it exploration, you just pick up the same twinklies when the quest starts. W/W both feel more true to the older games in this regard (even though I also don’t like how Wilds auto-marks the monster but it’s whatever to me really, I’ve always hunted in hunt quests and gathered/explored outside of them).
While Worlds/Wilds feel like natural evolutions and biggering of the core format (in both good and less good ways), Rise to me feels like some sort of weird limbo where everything is way too convenient and streamlined in a way I think feels boring and immersion-stifling.
I LOVE how the world in Wilds feels so alive, with outbreaks and forecasts, and being able to create quests from monsters you spot in the world instead of grinding the same optional quest with the same target rewards (which you still can). It feels dynamic and interactive in a way I think is great. My main complaint is still that it’s kind of too easy (wounds are great but feel slightly overtuned, even now as I’m on HR 40), but I don’t play MH for the difficulty, I play it to kill dragons with friends and have a good time.
Sorry for rambling, just got thinking more and more as I was typing :)
No need to apologize, ramble on, we're sharing viewpoints here!
I agree that the pace in Rise is overly fast and a bit frantic, but like I said it seems to borrow a lot from GU and that's why I value it so highly (GU is still superior in my book, I think I mentioned it before).
The lack of preparation/excessive streamlining is certainly there, but to me it affects every game post GU equally - a lot of information and supplies is basically handed down to the player whereas before you were expected to actually observe a monster's behavior and exploit it, but no, you are often just told flat out what the weaknesses resistances are and so on. You have to fight the monster, yes, but regardless you are given a wealth of information for basically free.
Rise maps feel compressed even further than they already are due to quick traversal options, like you said, but Wilds stumbles on the same issue in a different way: the maps are large, open and beautiful, but you are actually doing very little exploring unless you purposefully ignore what I like to call "ride by wire", that is, the Seikret will just tail the monster with laser focus precision at all times, so am I really exploring, or just having downtime between monster scuffles?
All in all, Wilds is an excellent entry, mind you, save for the performance issues that are beside the point in this particular exchange, and I like it infinitely more than I do World by a huge margin.
Further, I feel Wilds adds very important and welcome changes to the core gameplay in the way weapons now work (having innate offensive skills, I feel it should always have been that way) and I also think the way armor sets now work is a net positive.
Difficulty... that's always a big can of worms isn't it? difficulty is very relative and I do think a lot of people confuse low difficulty with merely convenience. It's undeniable MH games became more and more convenient as time went on: in MH 1 the decoration system didn't exist, in Dos you couldn't remove decos once applied, in MHFU dung bombs were finicky... I could go on, really.
Does all that mean some games are harder than others? surely, but they are probably harder for the wrong reasons.
