THE best looking game on the Switch: Monster Hunter Rise Review

[ZyroXZ2]

curl-6 said:

ZyroXZ2 said:

While having the fur, lighting effects, and screen-space reflections at the level they do?  This is an incredible level of polish, don't make me dig through my footage for some water fights, lol... I'm wondering if your definition of "polish" is more along the lines of sterility/serenity in a scene.  SM3DW, while graphically good, is also very sterile, or "clean" as some people might put it.  Is that what you mean by "polished"?  For me, polish is a state, ergo, polished graphics is the fact that they have fur, lighting effects, alpha affects, four people, and four dogs, all running together without having to pull anything to make it work on very weak hardware.  I think polish is a state of completeness, a definition of "we took the time to make it all work and put it all together", or in other words, polish it.  Cyberpunk 2077 while graphically VERY impressive (I played it on a PC maxed out) needs a lot of polish.

I DO think you're mixing aesthetics up with graphics, though.  While I actually lump them all together in the "presentation" category along with story and music myself, generally aesthetics and graphics are two different things.  It's THE reason Nintendo fans are so adamant that Nintendo games still look better than "other" games that are often graphically superior across the board.  I think your preference is a sterile scene, something that focuses on the art style and conveys a sense of design direction by the artists as opposed to the more technical aspects.  As a reference point for this: Ratchet and Clank is a very strong combination of aesthetics and graphics.  My bet is if you agree on Ratchet and Clank, then you are definitely more inclined towards the visual appearance as opposed to the entirety of the scene (as in, alpha effects, on-screen action, etc.).

I wouldn't call games like Luigi's Mansion 3 or The Vanishing of Ethan Carter "sterile" in the least, there's plenty of nice flourishes and effects work throughout them, from the SSR and huge amount of physics-driven objects in the former to the latter's PBR materials and dense animated foliage. There's just less rough spots like those parts of the environments in Rise where the landscape is a bit too flat or low-polygon.

Again, I don't mean to imply Rise doesn't look very nice, it does. The SSR, fur, weapon effects, animations, etc all in a large seamless environment is a hell of a feat. The scale just comes at the price of more noticeable rough edges in my opinion.

Luigi's Mansion 3 (can we just call it LM3) was very sterile...  We'd have to disagree on that one, LM3 is a very "Nintendo"-clean game despite it being graphically excellent.  LM3's animation, though, was top-notch, and when combined with my mClassic, looked leagues better than anything else on the Switch.  That was until now, at least lol

And EC, I'm just not sure we're looking at the same game, those textures were pulled back HARD to nearly mud, and the resolution got really low and blurry, and included pulling back polygonal complexity, too.  I can't see how Switch owners praise this kind of stuff lol

I WILL admit I am spoiled: 4K TV, I even had the midgen upgrades last gen, and I have the current gen stuff.  It makes it VERY easy to see just how much of a gulf in graphical power the Switch is against the XSX.  This is why MHRise is so impressive, because they try so hard to keep up with the Jones, and the only thing that was holding them back was, indeed, the power of the Switch.  They squeezed every last bit out of it to pull off everything, even if, yes: close inspection shows shortcomings.  I don't think there'll ever be another 3rd party game on the Switch that will do everything it sets out to do without obviously parring back really hard.  The fact that I HAVE to look closely to see evidence of parring back is why MHRise impresses me.  At first glance, it doesn't even seem like they had to hold back (even though we all know they did because we've seen RE2R, RE3R, and DMC5 to know what RE Engine is capable of).

EDIT: Typo.

Last edited by ZyroXZ2 - on 08 April 2021