Relief: ‘Monster Hunter Rise’ Includes A Dossier Of Each Monster’s Problematic Behavior So You Don’t Feel Bad When You Kill Them

Boy, we have been absolutely loving our last few weeks slicing up Rachnoids and exploring the world outside Kamura village in Monster Hunter Rise. And, hey, if you happen to be on the fence because the idea of hunting creatures for loot doesn’t quite sit right with you, we have some great news. One of Rise’s best new features is a dossier listing every monster’s problematic behavior so you don’t have to feel bad when you kill them.

Turns out these beasts have some pretty ugly history, gamers, and they deserve everything that’s coming to them!

What’s great is that this dossier—accessed by hitting the triangle button—erases the twinge of regret we always felt in past Monster Hunter outings as we mowed through Kelbis for horns and pelts. Pair this with a robust new morality system that lets you know immediately that the monster you are stalking is an anti-vaxxer or has made uncomfortable passes at female coworkers, and we’re talking about a game that’s not only a blast to play, but also really cares about easing the burden on your conscience!

Seamlessly integrated into the gameplay, accessing the new Problematic Stats system is as simple as locking onto a monster, popping open the radial menu, and selecting “offenses” to discover that, say, the Barroth in front of you once screamed at an elderly supermarket cashier back in the late aughts and that there’s video evidence to boot! It’s all in service of making sure you should feel free to smash their head in with a hunting horn without any misgivings.

With this huge gameplay improvement, all players can rest easy knowing that these monsters are just suffering the natural consequences of their past bad behavior. When you see that a monster listens to Ben Shapiro’s podcast, the thought “Why am I hurting this animal?” immediately drops out of your head and instead becomes “How can I hurt this animal?” Plus, newbies who may have been turned off by what was once a world of complex, inaccessible lore, ecology, and culture will find everything has been streamlined to make each decision to take a life not only easy, but easily rationalized.

Sorry Wroggi, but that’s what you get for continuing to enjoy the works of Orson Scott Card!

With so much justifiable concern over the moral implications of violent games and their power fantasies, it’s great to see a developer like Capcom take a step like this that makes their franchise more accessible to everyone. In the future, OGN can only hope that more titles—whether Super Mario Galaxy or Horizon Zero Dawn—go the extra mile and include problematic behavior systems so we can continue to hop on Goombas’ heads and smash down robotic dinosaurs without any regret whatsoever!

The Onion