Monster Hunter Riders Shows Off Battles In Preparation for February 19 Release

Capcom has released a ‘Battle’ trailer for Monster Hunter Riders, the upcoming smartphone RPG game that takes place on the continent of Felgia, where Monster Riders are prevalent and have an entire guild for themselves.

From the trailer, you can tell that like Monster Hunter Stories, Riders and Monsties fight as pairs. However, rather than having just one Rider and one Monstie, you use three Rider pairs for your main party. Battle takes place in turn-based combat, and you choose skills rather than an attack triangle. With the larger focus on the characters, it’s not surprising to see that Riders have their own skills that showcase their weapon attacks with their personality, and some skills will use items common throughout the series as well. Skills use SP, and if you save your SP, you can opt to use powerful Tag Skills.

Here’s a look at the gameplay via a livestream below (starts 7:02 mark):

The quest being undertaken is a Monstie Collection Quest that lets you get various lower rarity versions of monsters, and is also a great place to try out new party combinations. Other quests where Monsties can be earned include Invasions, and Defeat quests.

You can tell the turn order from the top, and at the bottom are the attacks you can use. The middle-top button is Attack, while the four buttons at the side are Skills. Skills are separated into Rider Skills, Monstie Skills, and Tag Skills. All these skills use SP, and as you might expect, stronger skills use more SP. By using SP, your Memory Stone (middle-bottom button) will fill up, and when fully charged, you can use it to power up an attack once per battle.

One interesting thing to note that the battle theme comes from Monster Hunter Stories as well.

Capcom also explained how the game’s gacha will work. While Monsties are earned via quests, Riders are obtained via gacha. Same characters can appear at different rarities, and they will be used to power up the character if you get duplicates.

Finally, here are a few more monsters confirmed to appear in the game:

Iodrome

Glavenus

Great Jaggi

Royal Ludroth

Brachydios

Monster Hunter Riders will release in Japan on February 19, 2020 for iOS and Android devices as a free-to-play title. Pre-registration is now available for both iOS and Android. The game is currently downloadable on iOS via the JP App Store, but will not be playable until the 19th.