Capcom announced Monster Hunter Rise Sunbreak – the G-rank or Ultimate edition for Monster Hunter Rise, due out in Summer 2022.

For the most part, fan sentiment around the expansion has been mostly positive- considering the lack of content in Monster Hunter Rise as of late, fans are just happy to have new monsters and gear to hunt for via the Sunbreak update.

That being said, there has been some debate at the speed of which the expansion was announced. Newer fans, likely those who are used to World’s more frequent updates, are commenting about the long wait, despite the fact that this expansion was announced 6 months after the base game’s launch, making it shorter than the announcement of Iceborne, which followed just under a year after the release of Monster Hunter World.

One such user, Jim,  paints a picture of Rise being an incomplete game, with Sunbreak being an attempt to get more money for it.

“Yeah basically ‘hey its the second half of the game we made, now with an actual ending’“, they write.

Most confusion in the community has mainly stemmed from just how quickly Monster Hunter has grown since the release of World in 2018- that they expect multiple expansion releases, or instead decry the fact that the G-rank expansion would be locked behind a paywall instead of being a free update.

But the truth is Rise is pretty much following the footsteps of every Monster Hunter before it- only this time more accessible than previous generations.

One community that’s likely to take offense is people holding out for the PC release of Monster Hunter Rise, however. With Sunbreak unlikely to release at launch for the PC version of Rise, it means things like story details for Sunbreak will probably be spoiled for them before they can play it on their PCs instead.Mon

The History Of G Rank Upgrades

For those new to this, here’s how Monster Hunter releases work: Monster Hunter has typically 3 tiers of quests, with Low-Rank, High Rank and a more difficult G-Rank. Base versions of a game (usually just numbered with no subtitle a la Monster Hunter 4), will only include up to High Rank, with a G Rank re-release announced at a later date.

For veteran Monster Hunter fans, the new system has been a godsend. Before, Monster Hunter games were released exclusively in Japan first, with the Base Games never if at all getting English localizations.

The last game to follow this tradition was Monster Hunter 4, with the west never getting to play it until 4 Ultimate’s announcement, which added the G rank and a new chapter to the game’s story.

With Monster Hunter Generations, fans finally got to play the base game version of a title- albeit still much later than their Japanese counterparts. That mood was further soured when Monster Hunter XX (the Japanese title for Generations Ultimate) was announced shortly after Generations’ release, meaning Japanese fans were already able to play a more complete version of the game.

These regional releases didn’t stop until Monster Hunter World, which saw the first game to be released simultaneously for all audiences. Similarly, rather than release a whole new game, Iceborne was released as DLC- meaning you didn’t need convoluted steps to transfer your character, as was the case with Generations and Generations Ultimate.