Both things can be true: I spent my first three hours playing Monster Hunter Rise screaming, "I hate this game!" at my Nintendo Switch screen. Since then, I have logged more hours in Rise than in any other game this year, and I've successfully convinced several friends to pick the game up as well. For some further context, I'd never played a Monster Hunter game before. I knew that the title did most of the explaining as to what the franchise is about--you hunt big monsters--but that was about it. Rise's debut marks the sixth main Monster Hunter game (the games have been popular enough to spawn several spinoffs, as well as a recent blockbuster adaptation starring Milla Jovovich), but that success has been a mixed blessing, as the series has become notorious for having a steep learning curve.

August is supposed to mire video gamers in the doldrums as they wait for the arrival of the first of the big Fall releases in September. The outlook for RPG fans is not so bleak. This August World of Warcraft gets a new expansion, the Switch gets a new Monster Hunter game while the PC gets a port of Monster Hunter World, and the first DLC packs arrive for the second games in the Pillars of Eternity and Ni No Kuni series. The RPGs on the horizon are both promising and varied. Here's what August has in store for players who enjoy RPGs.

Wherever you looked in Japan in 2008, someone was bent over a tiny PlayStation Portable games console (PSP) – and that someone was probably playing Monster Hunter. From clusters of young people playing on groomed lawns outside universities to suited salarymen on packed trains, the game had friends, family and work colleagues banding together to track and fight gigantic fantasy creatures. You had a good chance of finding a game to join if you pulled out your PSP in any public place. More than 40m Monster Hunter games, by Japanese developer Capcom, were sold between 2004 and 2017, but its success was confined almost entirely to its home country. Everything changed this year, though. When Monster Hunter World came out in January, it become not only the bestselling game in the series, but also the fastest selling game in Capcom's history, selling 6m copies in less than a month.