"Recall, as you journey on: a hunter yields not."
— Mujina the Musician
Wild Hearts is a video game for PC, Playstation 5, and Xbox Series X/S that released on February 17th of 2023. Developed by Omega Force (makers of the Dynasty Warriors and Toukiden series) and published by Electronic Arts, it's a roleplaying/action/monster hunting game set in Sengoku-era Japan with a fantasy twist, and the kemono (ie monsters) follow the familiar "animal plus element" formula — gorillas who shoot fire, ravens that drip poison, and so on.
The game takes inspiration from the Monster Hunter franchise and is structured in a similar way. Players can take missions to hunt particular kemono, collect their body parts, and use them to craft better weapons and armor, then rinse and repeat. There are five weapon classes to pick from at the start, with more unlocked later in the game.
The big difference between Wild Hearts and the Monster Hunter franchise is its building mechanics. With a system reminiscent of Fortnite, players can bring up a simple submenu during gameplay to build stuff like crates and springs, which can then be combined into more complex structures to aid the player in/out of battle. For example, two pillars of three crates transforms into a wall that you can hide behind, leap off, or trick a kemono into attacking only for it to get knocked back. Building is quick and collaborative, with one player's buildings being semi-permanent and usable by others.
More complex structures, called Dragon Karakuri, include tents, campfires, forges, zip lines, giant fans, and pickle jars, amd let you customize each map. The game encourages you to place tents in certain places by reducing their cost at those locations, but beyond that, buildings don't have to be placed at certain "nodes". Each zone has its own "budget" for these Dragon Karakuri, and enhancing your budget is a key mechanic.
Not to be confused with Sayonara Wild Hearts.
The game in general provides examples of:
- Abnormal Ammo: One Dragon Karakuri is a launcher that launches basic karakuri. How useful it is to you depends on where its placed and what basic karakuri you use as ammunition.
- All Myths Are True: In a sense. Many of the kemono are modeled after mythical beasts from folklore, like the tanuki.
- An Interior Designer Is You: Some Dragon Karakuri are purely decorative and let you kit out your campsite. Visitors to your campsite will see them, too.
- Artificial Brilliance: If you place certain Karakuri in the village hub, particularly the vines that allow you to zipline across places, you may occasionally find NPCs using them for themselves.
- Attack on the Heart: It's not explicitly stated, but your first confrontation with a kemono leaves you with a wound that damages your heart. That's why the little karakuri that Mujina gives you has more-or-less fused with it.
- Bittersweet Ending: By the end of the main campaign, the hunter has defeated the Celestial Dragon and ended the cycle of death in Azuma. However, the battle overtaxed the karakuri seed, killing them. Or so it would seem at first,, as the hunter later wakes up in the middle of a forest, with their fate from there onwards and their connection to the karakuri seed left unclear.
- BFS: True to genre conventions and its inspiration, this game has some very big swords. They're called nodachi but don't look like real nodachi — more like giant cleavers with some embellishment.
- Botanical Abomination: The Celestial Dragon is a massive tree-like dragon that uses all the elements in the game capable of summoning a rainstorm that could flood all of Azuma. Mujina refers to it as "the source kemono". You don't even see its face for most of the battle until it "blooms" out of the bud that serves as its head for the majority of the fight.
- Butterfly of Death and Rebirth: When a kemono dies, its body turns into kochō butterflies.
- Colossus Climb: Players can jump on and cling to kemono. From there, they can hitch a ride, or navigate over a glowing weak spot and yank out some thread, which also stuns the monster. However, the clinging is a little finicky, and moving around the monster is equally tough, especially when the monster is moving, so players typically don't actually climb around the monster unless they really, really need to.
- Cooking Mechanics: There are plenty of ingredients laying around and purchasable, from meats to plants to spices and herbs. With the drying rack and pickle jar karakuri, you can whip up little delicacies that boost your stats during a hunt.
- Cute Bruiser: You're welcome to use the game's rather detailed character creator to make a very small, very cute hunter who can go the distance with giant lava monkeys.
- Cute Machines: Tsukumo are little robot orbs that may or may not be sentient. They follow you around, make cute *clunk* noises, help out in fights, do little dances, and generally try to tug at your heartstrings.
- Dead All Along: Mujina is actually the ghost of a hunter who challenged the Celestial Dragon and failed.
- Death of a Thousand Cuts: Some weapons, like the bladed wasaga and claw blade, work this way.
- Duel Boss: The Celestial Being, a humanoid configuration of kochō butterflies that the hunter must face after defeating the Celestial Dragon alone, not even aided by their tsukumo companion.
- Expressive Mask: Mujina wears a karakuri mask that matches his tone.
- Fantastic Vermin: Some of the very small, non-threatening critters are essentially just vermin with extra bits, like a lizard whose tail is a plant, or a squirrel with flowers on its back.
- Finishing Move: When performing one last attack on a large kemono, the hunter will say "Gomen..."note in a somber tone and put it down in one final strike.
- Gameplay and Story Integration:
- It's stated that kemono have the power to alter the environment around them, and every hunt showcases that in a different manner. The most common are kemono making tree roots to try and impede you or make platforms for themselves, but there's quite a few who manipulate other elements as well.
- There are also story changes that occur to the locales themselves: between chapters, one island goes from temperate to frozen-over due to a powerful ice kemono's presence. When your main hub has several buildings destroyed during an attack, the destroyed sections remain so throughout the following hunts until rebuilding efforts are complete.
- Great Bow: It's hard to tell exactly how large the bow weapons really are, but they appear to be pretty sizable, likely based on the Japanese daikyu, which were typically about the size of a standing adult.
- Green Around the Gills: Played for Laughs. Suzuran has a bout of seasickness when she travels with you by boat to the second area.
- Like Father, Like Son: Natsume's dad was also skilled with karakuri. When her mother died, all he had left was his forge, his daughter, and karakuri, and Natsume is just as focused on them as he was.
- Master of Threads: Karakuri, when summoned, frequently appear to have glowing green threads throughout, and pressing and holding the left shoulder button (on console controllers) show a path to the target monster that looks like long, waving threads. These are Divine Threads, which are identical to ki, and your character is implied to be a natural master of them, thanks to the little karakuri embedded just next to your heart. In gameplay, they're usually just called "thread."
- Morph Weapon: The katana and staff. The katana can switch to a whip for bonus damage (in the form of more hits per swing) and increased range. The staff has a few transformations, each with its own benefit.
- Multishot: The bow's horizontal mode fires one, then two, then three arrows in sequence.
- Non-Malicious Monster: Are kemono bad, or is living alongside them simply difficult? Suzuran even acknowledges that an early major crisis ( the Earthbreaker's attack on Minoto) is just the result of kemono doing what comes naturally — expanding its territory and looking for "food."
- Parasol of Pain: One weapon option is essentially a battle umbrella.
- Planimal: Many kemono have plant-like elements thrown in as well as animalistic elements, sometimes veering more towards the former than the latter.
- Port Town: The main hub, Minato.
- Power-Up Food: Like Monster Hunter, eating provides buffs you'll want during your hunts. Most food seems to provide a bonus to your health, but other buffs include resistance to elements, more stamina, more damage, better dodges, etc.
- Rain of Arrows: The bow weapon has an option to fire a dozen or so arrows, all at once, in a nice high arc.
- Ridiculously Fast Construction: Karakuri, when built, appear rapidly. And fusion karakui assume their final forms seconds after the last basic karakuri is in place. Basically, you can make dozens of fairly complicated structures at a speed that would make a professional jealous.
- Ring Menu: The quick chat options operate off of a ring menu, activated (on consoles) by holding right on the d-pad.
- Royals Who Actually Do Something: The Steward of Minato wishes she could be this, and feels more than a little embarrassed that her position is totally ceremonial and carries no real authority.
- Spike Shooter: Goldshards are big porcupines and, yes, shoot their spikes, which persist on the battlefield for a moment or two. Some of these attacks spread out in such a way that a hunter holding perfectly still will be unharmed.
- Spring Jump: One of the early basic karakuri you learn is a spring, which (by default) launches you horizontally and gives you a few invulnerability frames. They can be upgraded to launch you further, and when charging the nodachi's Charge Attack recovers stamina. And since they're cheap and useful, it's easy to find your battlefields strewn with dozens of them that allow you to chain jumps together.
- Subsystem Damage: Like in Monster Hunter, attacking some body parts repeatedly will break them, which allows you to collect them and also reduces the monster's ability to attack with them.
- Support Party Member: Your Tsukumo, a little karakuri orb with sentience (?) that follows you around during single-player hunts and provides support. Their damage output isn't high, but they can distract monsters and spew out healing mist.
- Unbreakable Weapons: Unlike Monster Hunter, your weapons don't degrade, lose sharpness, or break. Any weapon you own will last you forever, regardless of how many kemono you plunge it into.
- Wrestler in All of Us: Lavabacks perform a textbook dropkick in both its normal and enraged forms. It's as terrifying as it sounds.
- Wandering Minstrel: Mujina appears to be this, a mysterious itinerant bard. He's actually the ghost of a hunter who died fighting the Celestial Dragon.
