Monster Hunter: World, or Rise?

Originally posted on Reddit.

I’m a third fleet MH vet (MH Tri was my first), and I’ve played every single MH game and spinoff since that generation. So here’s my very opinionated take.

World is a more complete game. Rise is a more condensed game.

World will give you amazing cutscenes, graphics, a more fleshed out story, richer environments, and an overall more varied presentation for the price. You will spend hours even in base World (i.e. non-Iceborne) just exploring the maps. Each hunt can last you 45-minutes to an hour at the start as you learn the game’s mechanics and monsters’ behaviors, and that’s not counting the prep time (choosing your gear, item loadouts, food choice, etc.). And that’s just a single hunt. It was truly developed to be a console game you sit down and play for extended periods, and the endgame reflects this as well.

Rise is much, much, much faster. Cutscenes are few and to-the-point, the monster introduction videos are entertaining but short and skippable (nothing is skippable in World), maps are not necessarily smaller but are much more quickly traversible given the various methods of travel, there’s no longer a need to track & investigate monsters so you already know where they are from the start of a hunt, and hunts themselves last 20 mins even for a relatively inexperienced player (5-10 mins for a vet playing semi-seriously). It’s meant to be quick, the game was developed for the Switch first and foremost which is a half on-the-go mobile console. There’s even an Amiibo mechanic in the game which the devs couldn’t bring over to PC and didn’t bother translating into a different method.

That said, I prefer playing Rise, but I will never forget or regret experiencing World. World was the very first time MH was developed, marketed, and released simultaneously to the entire world. It was what opened the gates of MH to the rest of the world outside Japan, and the MH team knew this. So they put everything they had into it. And it shows.

That doesn’t make it better than Rise, just different. I have more play time in Rise+Sunbreak now than World+Iceborne, because it’s easier to pick up and put down. If 15 minutes is all I have to play, you bet I’m going to turn to Rise instead of World because in 15 mins I can finish 1-2 hunts in Rise vs half a hunt in World. I simply don’t have that much time to game these days so it fits my schedule better.

Take these into consideration if you only have the budget for one game. But in the end, know that you can’t go wrong with either one.

One thing I’d like to note is that there is no crossplay or cross-save for MH Rise between the Switch and PC versions. If you planned to mainly play MH Rise on it, I’d perhaps consider a Steam Deck instead so you can play games you already own on Steam on it, including MH World and Rise. However if you wanted to try the rest of Nintendo’s library of games, then the Switch is not a bad choice.