The “Monster Hunter” franchise has sold over 68 million copies worldwide and is most successful in Japan and constitutes about 27 million of total sales. A majority of “Monster Hunter” titles have been released for mobile consoles and mobile consoles are more common in Japan than in America. 

The best selling “Monster Hunter” title worldwide has sold around 20 million copies and was released before “Monster Hunter: Rise”

“Monster Hunter: Rise” originally released for the Nintendo Switch on March 26, 2021

and was released for Microsoft Windows on Jan. 12, 2022, ten days before the expected release date of Jan, 22, 2022.

 The expansion named “Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak” was announced with a teaser trailer on Sept. 23, 2021, but recently at the Tokyo Game Show, the director for “Monster Hunter: Rise,”  Yoshitake Suzuki announced new monsters that will be added into the game, such a spiky-backed monster named Lunagaron and the flagship elder dragon, Malzeno. Along with new monsters being added, a difficulty called “Master Rank” will be returning which makes the monsters stronger and have more health and is when most players feel like the real challenge of the game starts . 

A Loy Norrix student who’ll be playing this expansion is freshman Nola Mullins who said she likes the game.

Referring to the amount of freedom given to the player in the game, Mullins said, “You can do whatever you want while following the main quests,” Having beat the game multiple times, Mullins is excited to see the new stuff to happen. 

Another one of the students who will be playing this expansion at home is named Isa Slate, a junior at Kalamazoo Central High School. 

Slate said, “I am excited for it because there will probably be new areas, and I will say after going to some areas over and over again, it gets annoying.” 

I mostly agree with Isa’s statement because I’ve gotten tired of fighting the same monsters over and over, and I’m excited for there to be more challenges in the game because I felt like “Monster Hunter: Rise” was too easy and didn’t provide much of a challenge.

 The previous expansion for the earlier “Monster Hunter” title, “Monster Hunter World: Iceborne,” was released one year and nine months after the original game, similar to the release pattern of “Monster Hunter Rise.” 

“Iceborne” was released for a price of $39.99, so it’s likely that Sunbreak will cost about that much. Not much else is known about this expansion except that its expected release date is sometime during the summer of 2022.  A lot of kids play on their Nintendo Switch console during class, so a release date during the summer is a good thing so that students will be able to play at home rather than at school.