Alongside Rise, we also got a reveal for a sequel to Monster Hunter Stories. This is pretty exciting.
The first Stories game was a spin-off turn-based RPG that reminded a lot of people of Pokemon. You get a team of six monsties in your party, after all. The main difference here is you fight alongside them with a hunter's weapon. The rock-paper-scissors combat style was surprisingly fun at times, and just as risky as it sounds. The game was heavily focused on story, as the name suggests. You play as a brand new monster Rider, a people who live side-by-side with monsters in towns and raise them from eggs. This isn't unusual to see in hunter cities up to a certain extent, as small monsters like Aptonoths are raised as livestock. But Riders take this much farther by befriending and raising all types of monsters, even the dangerous and powerful ones. This caused them to become oppressed and driven into obscurity by the rest of the world. This first game focused on reintroducing Riders to the Hunter world, while investigating the mysterious Black Blight that's poisoning the land.
Stories 2 seems to be following a similar pattern of story-telling. It's unclear how much time has passed since the first game, but it seems to take place in a Rider village that pays great respect to the Rathalos. We only ever saw one Rider village in the first game, but we were told that there were others. I'm assuming this would be one of them. It seems like some unusual blight is driving Rathalos from their territories, and infecting other monsters and making them go berserk. This looks a lot like how the Black Blight worked, they're just glowing red now instead of black. I'm curious to see what the difference here is.
We haven't seen any gameplay at all yet, but I'm expecting a return of the rock-paper-scissors combat with improvements. However, I am concerned about the protagonist. In the first game, they were a silent protag until the very end of the game, but here they seem to be fully voiced right from the start and have a very defined personality and presence in the story and lore. I'm concerned that this will mean you cannot customize them in this game, which would make me really sad as the first game had a really great character creator. This game is even more gorgeous than the first, so it'll be a real shame if this game doesn't continue with that.
More than anything else, though, I'm really happy that this game is happening because without it, Stories would have ended up just like Fantasy Life on the 3DS; the only sequel being a bad Japan-only mobile game that literally no one likes or asked for. Stories 2 is a real savior here. Can't wait to see more about it.
The first Stories game was a spin-off turn-based RPG that reminded a lot of people of Pokemon. You get a team of six monsties in your party, after all. The main difference here is you fight alongside them with a hunter's weapon. The rock-paper-scissors combat style was surprisingly fun at times, and just as risky as it sounds. The game was heavily focused on story, as the name suggests. You play as a brand new monster Rider, a people who live side-by-side with monsters in towns and raise them from eggs. This isn't unusual to see in hunter cities up to a certain extent, as small monsters like Aptonoths are raised as livestock. But Riders take this much farther by befriending and raising all types of monsters, even the dangerous and powerful ones. This caused them to become oppressed and driven into obscurity by the rest of the world. This first game focused on reintroducing Riders to the Hunter world, while investigating the mysterious Black Blight that's poisoning the land.
Stories 2 seems to be following a similar pattern of story-telling. It's unclear how much time has passed since the first game, but it seems to take place in a Rider village that pays great respect to the Rathalos. We only ever saw one Rider village in the first game, but we were told that there were others. I'm assuming this would be one of them. It seems like some unusual blight is driving Rathalos from their territories, and infecting other monsters and making them go berserk. This looks a lot like how the Black Blight worked, they're just glowing red now instead of black. I'm curious to see what the difference here is.
We haven't seen any gameplay at all yet, but I'm expecting a return of the rock-paper-scissors combat with improvements. However, I am concerned about the protagonist. In the first game, they were a silent protag until the very end of the game, but here they seem to be fully voiced right from the start and have a very defined personality and presence in the story and lore. I'm concerned that this will mean you cannot customize them in this game, which would make me really sad as the first game had a really great character creator. This game is even more gorgeous than the first, so it'll be a real shame if this game doesn't continue with that.
More than anything else, though, I'm really happy that this game is happening because without it, Stories would have ended up just like Fantasy Life on the 3DS; the only sequel being a bad Japan-only mobile game that literally no one likes or asked for. Stories 2 is a real savior here. Can't wait to see more about it.
