From its humongous roofs with large, extending eaves to foods such as onigiri and candy apples, the new Japanese-inspired environment in Monster Hunter Rise is beautiful. It’s not just the architecture and cuisine that takes its cue from feudal Japan, however—the new monsters are also inspired by Japanese folklore. Taking cues from the development team’s home country and culture, all of these influences weave together to set the game apart from previous entries in the Monster Hunter series, explains Rise’s game director, Yasunori Ichinose.
“The compositions and what we express with the maps we create have been changing in each iteration of the series,” says Ichinose.
For Rise, in particular, the stage and map concepts were a fusion of man-made buildings and natural objects. In the game’s locales, you can find many of these artificial structures blended into the surrounding environments. The temples and shrines in Shrine Ruins is an example. It’s a lush green forest that used to be a holy ground for prayer, but has since been abandoned and left to decay as monsters roam the area. The Flooded Forest contains ancient ruins that are submerged in a constant stream of water that covers the entire field, with monsters lying underwater. Large dragon bones and the remains of a large Dragonship rest in the center of Frost Islands, which are left over from a fight between heroes and a giant dragon that once used the islands as its nest. “We tried to express that the ecology of monsters is closely related to the world in which people live,” explains Ichinose.
