There are roughly a few hundred posts in the discussion forum on whether or not they should purchase the game (MHR) and/or the expansion DLC (MHR: Sunbreak). I’ve gone through pages of these discussions, gathered some of the most frequently asked questions and compiled them into this guide. Majority of these answers provided are written by myself, with full effort on trying to be as clean, straight to the point, factual, objective and unbiased as possible. The questions are divided into multiple sections very loosely, so it would be better if you look up specific question through searching for certain keywords. There should be no major spoilers in this guide, but there are some non-specific mentions about end-game contents. I will censor anything that I consider a spoiler even if they are very minor.

Please do not hesitate to point out my mistakes or misses. Your suggestions will help improve this list, and help fellow consumers to make better decisions.

• To better utilize this guide, press CTRL + F and search for specific keywords to save you some time browsing. I don’t expect anyone to read through these long essays.
  
• This guide is mainly written to help fellow users to make up their mind about purchasing Monster Hunter Rise or the Sunbreak expansion, whether or not you are completely new, or already owned the base game.
  
• If you are still very undecided, try to have a quick look through the questions, and see if you can come out with anything I’ve missed, then make a post in the forum with clear questions.
  
• If you want to add/ask a new question in the comment section below, be sure to click “Subscribe to thread” if you want to get notified when I replied.
  
• Words in bold are important points, Words in italic are less important notes, or my personal opinions

MHRS has a free demo, make sure to try it out as it will probably answer most of your questions right away. You don’t need to own Rise to play the Sunbreak demo, it is a standalone app itself.
By playing the demo, you should be able to experience things like graphics, controls, combat and optimization etc. Since MHRS is an expansion DLC of MHR, it is basically the same thing but with more content, so its demo will more or less tell you the same thing about MHR. The demo downloads can be found within link below:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1446780/MONSTER_HUNTER_RISE/

For those who are deciding between MHR and MHW, check out this guide instead

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2912359664

Depends. If any of these core elements of Monster Hunter sounds interesting to you, you should have no problem liking the game:
①Fighting bosses, learn their moves, improve your skill.
②Loot bosses, use their materials to craft better gears and improve your stats.
③Trying out different classes, builds and strategies.
④Multiplayer that allows you to help/gain help from/cooperate with other hunters.

All three of these games have a similar gameplay loop which is “hunt monsters for materials → craft better gears → hunt stronger monsters”. All three of these games are also combat heavy 3D action RPG, with multiple playstyle varieties based on your choice of weapons and builds. These are their essential similarities with Monster Hunter.

All three of these games, especially newer titles of Toukiden and God Eater, have fast paced combat. While MH is more methodical.

Toukiden and God Eater are narrative driven games, whereas MH has less focus on the story and individual characters. Dauntless is a free-to-play game that involves a massive amount of grind.

In terms of complexity, a majority of players think MHR has far more variation on build crafting, and far more depth in the combat system. Monsters in MHR generally have bigger move pools compared to other games.

Similar to the souls-like genre, Monster Hunter is a PvE pattern game. Meaning you have to learn your opponents’ moves to overcome them. In general:
①MH has significantly less rolling i-frame than souls-like, and thus different methods are required to avoid getting hit. These methods including counters, guarding, or by properly positioning yourself outside of an attack’s hitbox.
② MH requires manual aiming for both melee and range, and the camera lock-on is relatively less convenient.
③ Depending on where you hit a monster, you deal different amount of damage. So positioning and aiming is crucial in MH.
④ Monsters are bulky in MH, each encounter with a large monster (boss/target…) might take 5-25 minutes on average. And you are highly likely to repeatedly fight the same monster multiple times to get its loot for gears. Thus, you might not find the sensation of novelty that often in MH.
⑤ Souls-like games, especially those from Fromsoftware, have their unique ways of designing levels (maps) and storytelling to encourage exploration. Such elements do not apply to MH, where maps mainly serve as fighting ground and story is minimal.
⑥ In souls-like games, you are very likely to keep discovering and fighting new enemies, and very unlikely to fight the same bosses again after beating them. In MH, you will keep fighting the same monsters usually for their loot. When a player is stuck with a difficult boss in souls-games, they are likely to keep retrying until they eventually improve enough to barely beat the boss. In MH however, players are more likely to keep fighting the same difficult boss over and over again to a point not only you can beat it with ease, the boss might not even hurt you at all. Hence, overcoming difficulty curves in souls-like and MH offers a different sense of satisfaction.
⑦In souls-like games, each weapons have very limited moves, but a large sum of unique weapons with unique abilities compensated that. In MH, there are only 14 types of weapon classes, each with over hundreds weapons, but they all share the same moves (if in the same class).

For MHR, it takes about 10-20 hours to finish the campaign (stories). After the campaign you will still unlock new contents (quests, monsters and gears) for quite some time. And to complete all available quests, it might take up to 100 hours. You also have 14 types of distinct weapons to learn and master, where some might even make familiar monsters feel fresh to fight. For a majority of players, the end game mainly involves repeated grinds to overcome RNG for perfecting their build.

For Sunbreak, it takes about the same amount of time to finish the campaign and complete all quests. However, the end game in Sunbreak adds another layer of RNG, so basically there are more things to grind if you like.

It is usually rare for someone to start a new save just to replay the game, as it often means you need to grind for the gears again. Thus, the ‘replay’ value mostly comes from trying out new weapons, builds, strategies, or helping/messing around in online multiplayer.

*To note, the average play time one would spend in a MH hunter game is highly tied to a player’s skill and knowledge of the game, so do not take these ‘hours’ too literally

Depends.
① There aren’t any content that late-comers cannot get, except pre-order bonuses which were all cosmetics.
② There are still a relatively active player base. And you shouldn't have trouble finding teammates if you look for them in the right places like forums or Discord servers.
③ As of now (December 2022), Sunbreak is still being updated and have new content planned to come within the next few months, so in a sense you are not late to the party at all.
④ However, you might need to do some grinding so that your progress is qualified to access latest contents.

Yes. Every single quest (fights/encounters/hunts/match…) can be beaten solo, with a decent amount of skill, and a suitable build that requires little grinding.

No. Amiibo reward is a feature exclusive to Switch. Hence so are the rewards. They are unobtainable on PC legitimately.

No. And highly unlikely to be added in the future.

No. And highly unlikely to be added in the future.

There are currently no official announcements regarding this issue.

They are all cosmetic items that give you more variety of layered equipment (skins), voicelines, gestures and chat stickers. None of the DLCs provide any benefits other than better look. The only DLC that grants meaningful content is the Sunbreak Expansion.

Do note that even without purchasing any of these cosmetic DLCs, you can still unlock plenty of other cosmetics just by playing the game.

No. The story doesn’t connect. You don’t need to play MHW before MHR. However, if you did, then your personal player skill will get carried over, and makes you better at recognizing monster patterns and mastering weapon move sets, therefore making the game experience smoother.

Depends. The essential similarities between MHW and MHR is that both involve a lot of monster hunting. If you enjoyed the core gameplay loop of “hunt monsters for materials → craft better gears → hunt stronger monsters”, enjoyed mastering your weapon, and enjoyed learning and eventually overcoming a new monster, then yes, you would like Rise as well.

However, combat of MHW and MHR are considerably different according to many players. MHW combat is more methodical, slow, and requires more skillful positioning, planning and predicting. MHR combat is more reactional, fast, and requires decent reflex and good use of relatively wider and more complex weapon movesets.

Aside from combat: MHW’s world building is more lively, detailed, and immersive, filled with more optional activities like exploration, photography, critter catching and such. MHR lacks such recreational possibilities, where most of its effort has gone into creating a complex, in-depth and varied combat system.

The Deluxe Edition only adds a Deluxe Kit which consists of a few cosmetic items. If you don’t care about these things, whether or not you want to buy MHR alone or MHR+MHRS, you don’t need to buy the Deluxe Edition.

Buying a bundle is always more cost-efficient than buying each of two separately.

Yes. The game by default starts in singleplayer mode, meaning you start without a lobby, and no one will be able to join you if you didn’t manually create a multiplayer lobby. When you are creating a lobby, you can also set it to only allow Steam Friends, or only allow joining with a password.

Depends. If you mean in-game matchmaking, the game is region locked, where the matchmaking is only done with other players near your Steam Download Region. You can manually switch the Download Region to a more populated server to overcome the difficulty in finding random strangers.*

If you mean the community as in Steam forums or Discord servers as such, then it is relatively active and easy to find groups.

*There is a mod that removes this soft region lock and thus making you able to matchmake with people from a wider region, or even worldwide if you don’t care about latency

The game is balanced for co-op, where monster HP gets proportionally scaled up as your team increases in number of players. In brief explanation, there are few ways to co-op:
① You create a lobby, people comes in, one of you accept a quest, others would join as client, and all of you go on to the quest area together.
② You accept a quest and select “send join request”, go to the quest area, then people will join you as you play (you are the host).
③ You can select “accept via join request”, to join other players (you are the client).
There are no ingame/real life costs/charges for playing multiplayer. You can do it whenever you like.

For MHR, there are Village Quests (consists of ~50 quests) and Hub Quests (consists of a few hundred quests). Village quests are strictly single player, where Hub Quests, which make up almost 80% of the game, can be played in co-op whenever you like.

For MHRS, its quests work similarly to Hub Quests, so no portion of it is restricted to singleplayer, meaning all MHRS quests can be played in co-op.

Yes. All players in the team will receive the same loot as if playing in solo. However, the quest reward money will be divided by the number of team members. The actual amount and rarity of loot you get in co-op will be decided by RNG. Meaning your friend might get more goodies if they are more lucky, even though you are both in the same team.

Yes. A quest will be marked as complete no matter whether you did it solo, in co-op as host, or in co-op and client. Meaning if you are playing in co-op and your friend is at the same progression as you, you don’t have to do the same quest twice just so both people can progress. You only need to do the required quest once, and both side will get the same progression.

Yes. You can play with MHRS owners even if you don’t own MHRS yourself. However, you cannot join any quests that are restricted as MHRS-only (aka Master Rank quests). Meaning:
①You can join them if they host MHR quests
②They can join MHR quests you hosted
③You cannot join them if they host MHRS quests.

Sunbreak unlocks a new multiplayer lobby (works like a gathering hub) which you cannot access unless owning Sunbreak. It does not affect your ability to join and team up with your friends, it only means you can’t see their characters if they didn’t come to the MHR lobbies like Hub or Kamura Village.

No. The multiplayer is cooperative, where every member in a team works together to take down the target monster. There is no PvP, no leaderboard of any sort, and no ‘contribution statistic’ to see which player did the most damage/is the MVP after a hunt.

*However there are mods that make this information visible, but only to mod users themselves.

Highly dependent on personal capability. Try the demo to figure out if the combat is too fast/complex for you. But do beware that the demo is slightly harder compared to the actual game where you can make a proper build that fits your QoL needs.

For most, it is not hard to pick up a weapon and button mash to victory in the early-mid games. But for the majority, it takes a long time to perfect their skills enough to take on any fight like a graceful dance. It doesn’t take a lot of skill to beat the game, but it takes patience to identify your mistakes and improve from there.

Some weapons/playstyle are relatively more complex to others, and if you were to dive deep into the meta-community you will find a mind-boggling amount of complex theory crafting, calculations and such on optimizing your performance. However, as said before, you only need to be at least decent to beat the game.

There are a few. But most of them only provide cosmetics or gears, none of which brings something like a new mechanic or gamemode to the table.

After beating the story, there are still many new quests, monsters and gears to unlock as you level up. Story mode one makes up a small portion of the game.

The true end game is when you've finished unlocking everything. In this phase, most player would continue playing for the sake of grinding for RNG to perfect their builds, collecting gears for new builds, trying out different weapons/classes etc.

There are a lot of 'difficult quests' available post-story, and some even more difficult 'challenge quests' with buffed monsters would come in the form of event quests. If you are still unsatisfied with the official content, you can mod the game for custom kaizo quests to fight challenges other players designed.

In general, grinding in this game is mainly for obtaining monster loot, where some rare loot may require more repetition. The loots obtained are mainly for crafting gears. If you don't renew your gears often during progression, many of these grinds can be avoided.

There isn't a mandatory level requirement or grind needed to beat the main story. However, there are some extra contents in the end game that require a higher level to access.

The end game is where the grind truly begins, where most players grind for perfect builds (perfect RNG), gear collection, achievement and so on.

To note: all of the RNG grinds are completely optional.


The main gameplay loop involves “hunt monsters for materials → craft better gears → hunt stronger monsters”. You are basically doing this for the entire game from start to finish. In the actual end game where you no longer unlock stronger monsters, you will still be fighting the same rosters for purposes like collecting gears or rolling better RNG for equipment.

The gameplay of Monster Hunter reduced to its core can be terrifyingly simple and bland at first glance. However, you are granted 14 weapons types, each with multiple play styles, a vast variety of build selections and quite a lot of monsters each with distinct movesets.

In conclusion, if you enjoy beating up giant monsters, skin them and make yourself cool looking hats and gigantic sticks, and see yourself gradually becoming better and dominating these enemies, then you wouldn’t even think the game is repetitive at all.

*There are minor optional contents outside of battles. These are explorations and sightseeing like taking pictures of the environment or various creatures including your enemy monsters etc.

All cutscenes are skippable. Story is only a tiny fraction of the entire game, and it doesn't force many dialogues on you. Dialogues are unskippable, but there are only a few mandatory ones, and can be quickly gone through via button mashing.

Yes. In short, based on the weapon (class, a total of 14 of them) you choose, you can further customize your movesets that could drastically change how you play. Furthermore, almost all monsters in this game have their own armors/weapons, which can be mixed and matched to your own favor, creating a lot of possibilities in build crafting.

In Rise, the builds are relatively limited to a few meta-builds. In Sunbreak, the amount of distinct and interesting skills and weapon movesets almost doubled, and thus offering even more build varieties.

There are no achievements that require an intense amount of skills or knowledge to obtain. Majority of the rarest achievements merely require a huge amount of grinding to overcome RNGs. 50 out of 100 achievements are obtainable solely in MHR, while the other 50 are MHRS exclusive. All of the achievements can be done purely in solo, even offline.

No. Nothing in this game is time gated with real-life time, and there are no seasonal contents that become inaccessible once missed. Event quests (and collaboration contents) in this game are released in the form of updates, where you only need to receive the data once to have it permanently available in your save-file, even offline.

Most of the equipment are designed with a semi-fantasy aesthetic, while there are also some cosmetics that represent real-life outfits like suits or casual wearings.

There are also gestures, player voice overs and stickers etc either unlockable through playing or purchasing DLCs.

There are no marketable cosmetics in this game.

You will gain access to layered outfits (player skin/armor transmog) very early in the base game. However, layered weapons (weapon skin/transmog) are only accessible in end-game Sunbreak.

The maps are designed to be relatively flat and simple-structured where the majority of lands are used as fighting grounds. In general, you can run across each large map (hunting grounds) in about 1 minute. There are multiple large maps, and a few smaller ones that simply serve as arenas. The large maps each offer a handful of secrets and collectibles.

In general, the equipment aesthetics ranges from medieval-fantasy, scifi, steampunk, modern outfit, traditional cultures to tribals etc. Visuals is the factor I care least about in any games, so pardon me for not being able to offer a good answer. In terms of quantity, there are over hundreds of unique equipment sets in MHR+Sunbreak combined, with more obtainable through micro-transactions.

If you are still unfulfilled with the in–game options, there are a lot of visual mods out there which are relatively simple, accessible and stable.

There are roughly 70+ monsters in MHR + Sunbreak combined. Plenty of these are reskins (subspecies), but they each have distinct movesets and most with unique equipment.

Subjectively, the game is pretty well-optimized and can run smoothly even on low-end hardwares that meets basic system requirements. There are only a few crashes, and it loads significantly fast even on HDD.

If you have specific inquiries regarding specific hardware pieces, custom builds or custom OS, I recommend searching them directly in this game’s forum for technical reports. Unfortunately this is not a section where I have enough expertise to help.

According to Steam reviews and Steam discussions, the game seemed to have a lot of issues regarding savefiles. The relatively mild ones involve savefile deletion, while the relatively severe ones involve game corruption that prevents creating a new savefile, hence making the player unable to start a new game (nor read their existing saves).

Currently there are no official announcements regarding this issue. Players are highly suspecting it to be caused by either modding, cloud save error, anti-virus, software incompatibility etc, but none are proven to be the direct cause.

Currently there isn’t a known direct cause for savefile issues, hence there isn’t a direct prevention method. However, you can minimize your risks by avoiding modding and most importantly, routinely make a manual backup for your existing saves.

The game uses Steam Cloud-saves, and is sometimes reported being faulty and cause savefile deletion or rewinds. Hence, making a manual backup is highly recommended.

No. All content including events should be available even in offline mode as long as you have downloaded them before via updates.

The game is designed to be played on a gamepad/controller. The keyboard and mouse controls are not perfectly optimized according to some players. However, the accessibility of controls highly depends on the adaptability of players.

You don’t need a controller or gamepad, the game has full keyboard and mouse support.

You don’t need a mouse with side-buttons, but it would theoretically make some of the controls easier to perform. The game by default have actions bound to Mouse Side Buttons, so be sure to check the settings first before playing.

You cannot rebind controls for gamepad/controller without using external means like Steam Big Picture or DS4 emulator etc. However, the game offers a little free room to customize buttons used for a few actions. You can customize KB&M controls freely.

Sunbreak is an expansion that adds new (Master Rank) content to Rise, which includes new story, monsters, quests, gears, maps and such. Sunbreak to Rise essentially works like High Rank to Low Rank. It grants you access to a new progression (in terms of difficulty and gears), meaning your High Rank gears will have to be gradually replaced with Master Rank gears, and you will have to fight Sunbreak variants of easy monsters step by step until you unlock harder monsters, meaning you will have to rematch with MR Izuchi until you unlock MR Rathian etc (MR variants get new movesets so it should not feel repetitive). Along this new progression, you will also unlock new Sunbreak-exclusive monsters.

Because of the way Sunbreak implements Master Rank, you can always revisit and play Rise contents where you left off, just like how you can always redo Low Rank/Village contents even when you’ve reached High Rank.

No. Both the Quick Swap feature and new movesets added in Sunbreak are only available when you progressed enough in Sunbreak. Once unlocked, you can use them anywhere even in the base game quests.

Yes. Technically, the Sunbreak store shares the same pool with base game store, but it also adds a bunch of new stuff including new collectibles into the pool. You can still get the base game collectibles even after the Sunbreak loots are added into the pool.

Owning Sunbreak has no noticeable effects on your experience in the base game. You can only start Sunbreak, and access Sunbreak exclusive contents, when you’ve passed certain points in Rise. To be specific, you need to finish part of the main story in Rise to be able to start playing Sunbreak content. To be even more specific, you need to complete the Hub 7★ Quest: Serpent Goddess of Thunder in order to unlock Sunbreak.

In short, yes. Sunbreak adds a new rank (Master Rank) to the game with its own MR quests, arenas, gears, etc. Sunbreak to Rise is basically High Rank to Low Rank, or Hub to Village. You can always swap and play the contents between these options freely, at any moment you wish.

No.

You only need to beat a small part of Rise’s content to unlock Sunbreak. To be specific, you need to complete the Hub 7★ Quest: Serpent Goddess of Thunder to unlock Sunbreak. If you are new, it usually takes about 10-30 hours.

You cannot skip the requirements without using external mods/cheats. However, if you can find someone who’s already with Sunbreak end game gears to help, they should be able to quickly carry you through in the matter of less than two hours.

If you do not own MHR, then you can access both MHR and Sunbreak from others sharing to you. If you own MHR, you will not be able to access Sunbreak even if others are sharing it to you. You need to purchase the DLC yourself if you already owned the base game

Yes, you can mod the game as you wish, whether it is visual mods or mods that affect your gameplay entirely, or mods that cheats you items. There are no official laws or regulations regarding modding, and there have never been a single report of players getting banned for modding. In fact, there isn't a ban system for MHR.

Modifying your game always has risks. Generally, light modification like swapping models to make you look like characters from other games etc, is the less risky. Medium modification like cheating items by editing savefiles can corrupt the savefile when done wrong. Heavy modification like altering game code to change certain game systems might risk irreversible damage to the save file.

It is always recommended to routinely manually backup your saves before modding, and before game/mods updates

Depends. As aforementioned, there is no ban system nor any online regulations, so playing online with modded games is legally alright. However, some mods might not work or even crash your/others game, and some might negatively affect other players' experience. Hence, proceed with care.

It highly depends on individual mods.

The modding community is very active. Currently, a majority of mods are visual mods that swap models of equipment or characters for aesthetics’ sake. There are also some gameplay-related mods that add brand new monsters, weapon/monster movesets, custom quests (usually kaizo quests, hence custom difficult challenges) etc.

Since the game is still being updated and mods require an active moderation to make sure they won’t break after each update, this creates a heavy workload for modders especially those who are involved in large projects like adding custom monsters or introducing gameplay overhauls. Hence, I suspect the modding community will become more active after the game has ended in receiving major content updates, which is expected to be around Q4 of 2023.