The basic idea of RISC was to reduce the complexity of individual instructions. Rather than having one instruction, you had several, but each of those would be

The basic idea of RISC was to reduce the complexity of individual instructions. Rather than having one instruction, you had several, but each of those would be easier to decode and execute. And, as history has shown, it was also quite a bit faster to execute such simplified instructions. Hence, assembling a single mnemonic into two or more instructions is fairly common on RISC architectures. But the instruction set at the machine level is still simple and direct, even if the assembler expands. As a fun fact, modern x86 will often just microcode complex instructions inside the CPU to several simple mu-ops and then execute those. In turn, they are just doing the same work as the assembler, but in hardware. It is necessary for backwards compatibility, but it is hardly elegant.