[Too-Late PSA...?] Monster Hunter Rise -- In the Event of Discontinuation
6Apologies in advance for the extreme length of this video and description... but I feel strongly about this matter.
I'd SAY this is a "public service announcement"... but I'm really late to do anything about it myself, so... it's not like I'm actually DOING anything for this minor crisis of preservation. I'm barely staying ahead of it myself... sometimes.
In this regard, I suppose I'm a bit of a cautionary tale of my own, rather than someone helping keep things on straight. Maybe more of a postmortem autopsy...
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Monster Hunter has a bit of an odd relationship with its event quests... specifically the ones made with regard to outside third party content and collaborations.
Make no mistake, some of these are really interesting things. Things I'd never have thought would come to pass, even. Some absolutely lovely, top-shelf crossover content.
My personal favorites have been some truly outlandish collabs with Shonen Jump properties... actual, honest-to-goodness manga content adapted into the games. Plus a nifty pirate-themed getup modeled after the publication's distinctive mascot. An absolutely ornately-crafted Final Fantasy-style quasi-organic armor straight out of the imagination of Tetsuya Nomura. Actual crossovers with tight-fisted Nintendo of all things (especially notable before they started loosening up on their IPs for a bit of late), including Zelda and Fire Emblem and Mario and Animal Crossing! Across multiple games!
In the HD era, such collaborations grew rather sparse, but the efforts grew all the more elaborate and interesting. Added entire monsters to hunt from both The Witcher and Final Fantasy. The bulk of them from Capcom, of course, but they're still getting increasingly detailed and bespoke engineering feats for wholesale replacements of both hunter and hunting buddies.
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But now with increasingly (always-)online connectivity... some strange things have been afoot... ... ... ones I find a bit troubling and disturbing.
In the two most recent Monster Hunter games, World and now Rise... events can be taken BACK... that is, the crossover content removed and lost to the ages.
The Ubisoft-based events for Assassin's Creed have been taken out of the game, the items earned from it no longer usable to create a signature item with unique gameplay impacts. The box office blockbuster movie tie-in quest and rewards are now rescinded.
The is happening to a couple of Monster Hunter Rise's notable tie-in events. Specifically, ones pertaining to Sonic the Hedgehog and Universal Studios Japan. The latter of which is a bit of a surprise, because they've been one of the most longstanding of all the various collaboration partners... and even then, the relevant tie-ins are STILL in the previous game, amidst other delisted collabs!
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However, and here's where things get at least a LITTLE bit brighter... if we're to call it that. A silver lining to all this doom and gloom, at least.
Rise uses the old style of event quest distribution, the one that most games in the franchise have made their bread and butter, in contrast to World's initially irregular coming and going of online-enabled quests in rotation, something that the mainline series hadn't tried since Monster Hunter Tri on the Wii, in fact. The upshot here being that if you download the quests before they're no longer being distributed, you get to hang onto them in your expanded save data in perpetuity. You just won't be able to download them after the fact.
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NOW we're finally onto the point of order that has captured my curiosity.
With a totally blank slate for save data, you'll definitely need to start up the game, get to the point where they stop trying to teach you how to interact with the home base's facilities... and THEN you can get the courier cat NPC to give up the goods. You MUST do this before the quest distribution is ended.
Somewhat surprisingly, it seems to do this... automatically now? At least the end of Senri's spiel leads straight into telling you what's available in add-on content. You don't need to manually goad him into downloading it for you. (This might be a tip of the hat in favor of user friendliness to the sunsetting of the quests in question.)
THEN, I went out and made a SECOND fresh hunter alongside that one, to see how the procedure works out... and I didn't even need to do that much. The game apparently already recognized the relevant data and announced it being present and accounted for. Senri just needs you to claim it for the new player's amassed content reserves.
I hesitantly take this to mean that you can conceivably make and unmake and remake as many save game files as you want afterwards, so long as the downloaded data remains intact for you to use at your leisure thereafter. Maybe.
I still wouldn't risk it, personally. So I have spare files "just in case." (We'll see!)
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More super-untimely public service announcements where that came from!
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