While I'll still do them all, it is a positive change that you can pick your key quests now. And yeah, I remember well the days of having to look up which quests were needed to progress. I appreciate the lengths they're going to to make this game as accessible and user friendly as possible without losing its core appeal, given its a series that has traditionally been quite inscrutable. 

Also, Magnomalo Armour: (I love the Samurai and Oni influences)

Magnamalo gear, tougher than tempered steel. ? #MHRise pic.twitter.com/NAHTszBP7n

— Monster Hunter (@monsterhunter) March 2, 2021

The armor looks fucking sweet. I wish the female got the cool mask though :/

The Palamute Magnamalo set looks so good, I may actually be crazy enough to spend the parts on that first.

Honestly, my favorite set so far for the Palico is this gear (I don't know why but even though I read Palamute my brain interpreted Palico two times so I'm just gonna roll with my original thought and post it anyways lol): 

It's from the Rakna-Kadaki, the new spider. Also one of the few instances where the female armor I think is WAY better than the male armor (I guess it's a little tacky being an overly-designed wedding dress and all but it's very beautiful lol). 

For the Palamutes, as far as "complete sets" go I'm a little unsure. But I do think THE BEST tail piece is this: 

The Palamutes get like a cool mermaid-tail from the Somnacanth armor. I'm not sure I'd wear the FULL set for the Palamute (it kind of looks like the color scheme goes better in darker environments). But I'd definitely want that tail piece. And I think the Somnacanth human armor will probably be one of the first things I grind. 

One thing's for sure, the new armor sets are AMAZING! 

New Monster Almudron in action:

Almudron thrives in the muddy areas of the Sandy Plains, sending waves of mud towards threats. Be ready to put up your guard, or Wirebug Dash out of the way! ? #MHRise pic.twitter.com/ZY7YGJC6pD

— Monster Hunter (@monsterhunter) February 23, 2021

Mind Almudron's muddy tail! #MHRise pic.twitter.com/J0erfo27Zm

— Monster Hunter (@monsterhunter) March 3, 2021

Every time I think I've nailed it down, my mind goes to another. I simply can't figure out which is my favorite monster: Almudron, Goss Harag, or Rakna-Kadaki! They're all soooo good. 

This clip made me reconfirm Almudron ... for now

So far it's a very close call for me between Goss Harag and Almudron for best new Monster, though Magnomalo is pretty badass too, and all of them are at least good.

4 more days (including today) until the Monster Hunter digital event. 

I'm pretty excited. One thing that is interesting is that the leaks of the Monster roster were apparently only based on marketing material, and even then Capcom has changed their marketing material a bit since the initial leaks (switched around what trailers the monsters were revealed in as well as what monsters would be in I think).

Datamining covered a lot of new ground as far as the roster goes. But the thing is, the datamining was only based on the demo, which obviously was scrubbed very clean. Despite this, we got a LOT of new soft-confirmations from it. Even moreso since they announced a few days ago that crafting materials from monsters that aren't in the game wouldn't be a thing in Rise, which basically confirmed a lot of monsters just by the material pieces that were datamined. 

The "base" roster of Large monsters, when including the datamined and leaked ones, is already pretty big, especially compared to World. What's going to be interesting is what Elder Dragons they confirm, though. We have

Spoiler!

6 confirmed already (5 if you don't include Jhen Mohran). And we know that the Elder Dragon Chameleos is going to be the first free DLC monster. We also know there's going to be two "Elder-Dragon tier" monsters (I guess 3 if you include Bazelguise, but he's pretty easy to be considered Elder-Dragon tier). I kind of wonder if there's a few more Elder Dragons that are yet to be confirmed because the demo was mostly spotless, or if we know them all already. In general I wonder that for all the monsters, but I almost feel llike it'd be too greedy to expect more large monsters, so i'm mostly curious about Elders (especially since they are usually the most important end-game content. 

Ordinarily I'd be super psyched for the Digital Event, but after the amount of coverage we've gotten so far, with four trailers and two previous "Directs", I feel like I've seen enough haha.

Just three weeks to go til I have the game in my Switch; hopefully Crash 4 will help those weeks go by at a pace faster than treacle flowing uphill in Canada.

Digital Event live!