It’s always hard to know if this sort of thing is a coincidence, but it didn’t feel like it this time. Yesterday, after Capcom debuted a new Monster Hunter Rise demo coming to Nintendo Switch, the eShop went down, a possible sign of overwhelming demand. Early reports are good, hype is starting to build, and I’m starting to get the feeling that we’re going to get another one of these sleeper hits on Switch. I’m also not sure we’re ever allowed to say “it’s a quiet year for Nintendo” ever again.
It’s a thin start to the year for AAA gaming in general, which we can blame on the lingering effects of COVID-19 delays and the lull after the launch of new consoles. That’s great news for the games that are coming out, like Hitman 3 later this month an, in March, Monster Hunter Rise. And I’m starting to suspect that we’re going to see a now-familiar pattern happen with Monster Hunter on Switch: a game that didn’t initially register as a top-tier franchise for Nintendo wildly overperforming due to the popularity of the platform. We saw it with Luigi’s Mansion 3, we saw it with Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and we even saw it with Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity. Monster Hunter Rise feels like the obvious next candidate.
The franchise itself is on the upswing, after Monster Hunter World proved the first major Western hit. The game will likely still perform better in Japan than it will in the US, but this early hype and early chatter just makes me suspect that Nintendo will once again find itself with a “surprise” success. Monster Hunter World means that it still has stiff competition within the series, but I suspect that this is going to be a bigger hit than people expect, further driving the always-ascendant Switch.
The biggest example of this sort of phenomenon is definitely Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a quixotic little game that became a bonafide international sensation last year, though Rise will probably fall short of that very high bar. For one thing, the appeal of Animal Crossing just goes so, so much broader than the appear of Monster Hunter: a big part of the game’s unprecedented success was how it broke out of traditional gaming channels and into an even wider mainstream. Monster Hunter is cool and has room to grow, but I don’t think it has quite that much room to grow.
For another, COVID-19 lockdowns drove a huge amount of New Horizons’ success, and I don’t expect the world will be taking its first steps into a horrifying pandemic when the game comes out in March. We will, hopefully, be at the beginning of the end of a horrifying pandemic, which is similar but different.
Still, look forward to another hit. The Switch has the Midas touch with these sorts of franchises, and I expect to see it happen again.
"Demo" - Google News
January 08, 2021 at 09:52PM
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Something Is Happening With ‘Monster Hunter Rise’ On Switch After This Demo - Forbes
"Demo" - Google News
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