Monster Hunter Rise interview: Creating the Malzeno gear

Question: All of Malzeno’s weapons have a sort of metallic look with characteristic red crystals. Did you have a particular motif or theme in mind when you designed them?

Sakata-san:

Yes, the concept for Malzeno was “weapons that draw energy from congealed crystals.”

I’ll get to the congealed crystals later, so let me start by commenting on the shapes of the weapons themselves.

We were very particular about using beautiful curves for the weapons, to give them a general Westernized appearance. We also made proactive use of its three-pronged tail in the designs.

There are several reasons for this: in addition to giving each individual part a unique shape, it also creates some “openings” in the silhouette.

I’m going to have to get a bit technical here, but if you create openings in a silhouette, that means the weapon ends up looking lighter when compared to silhouettes without openings.

After checking with the design team, they agreed that this also matched Malzeno’s image, so we collectively decided to use three-pronged protrusions in a variety of ways for all of Malzeno’s weapons.

For blade-type weapons, this lends it a nice, sharp image, fit for severing. For long-range weapons like the bow, this allowed us to represent the tensile strength of the materials.