You explore a colorful world hatching monster eggs and riding your favorites into simple rock-paper-scissors style turn-based battles. Building a team means matching monster types and abilities, and gene-channeling lets you customize a monster's skills using parts from others. The story leans warm and easygoing, with flashy team attacks as a reward for building a good bond with your creatures.
Gameplay video
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Screenshots & review notes
Overall
It trades brutal hunts for something gentler and more heartfelt, and while purists missed the series' usual bite, this turned out to be a lovely change of pace.
Moment to moment
The rock-paper-scissors combat is easy to pick up, and gene-channeling to breed stronger monsties gives just enough depth to keep battles interesting over a long campaign.
Art and atmosphere
Bright, storybook visuals and genuinely spectacular attack cutscenes make this one of the better-looking RPGs on Switch, even if the frame rate can dip in busy areas.
Worth your time?
A strong choice for younger players or anyone wanting an RPG about companionship rather than combat mastery. The story's slow start may test the patience of impatient players.
Frames captured from the gameplay video above; notes are our own take on the game.
What it's like to play
You play a young rider who can hatch and raise monsters called monsties from eggs found in dens scattered around each area, and rather than fighting monsters head-on with a weapon, you explore on foot or riding your monstie, sneaking into dens to grab eggs while trying not to wake the monster guarding them. Battles are turn-based, built around a simple rock-paper-scissors style triangle between power, technical, and speed attacks, where picking the right type against an enemy's chosen attack lets you land a critical hit, and pressing an extra button at the right moment adds bonus damage. Your rider and monstie fight side by side, and building up a shared meter lets you unleash a dramatic combined attack together.
The story follows your search for a legendary Rathalos egg amid a mysterious phenomenon threatening the world, giving your monster collecting a proper narrative reason rather than just a checklist. A system called gene-channeling lets you transfer specific abilities from monsters you no longer need onto your favorites, so raising a big roster and experimenting with builds becomes a genuine hobby rather than a chore. A full campaign runs somewhere around thirty to forty hours, and difficulty rises steadily as tougher monster types and larger battles appear later on.
The core rock-paper-scissors combat, while easy to learn, can feel repetitive by the later hours if you are not actively experimenting with gene-channeling and team composition. Some areas show noticeable frame rate dips on Switch when things get busy on screen. It works well both for Pokemon fans wanting something with a bit more mechanical weight and for Monster Hunter fans curious about a gentler, story-driven take on the same creatures.