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Hearts Are Health

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https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/hearthealth_6451.png
Take it, I've got five of them.

He's got heart! But when he's hurt, he loses some. Keep an eye on this counter, because if Chauncey turns "heartless," the game's over.
— The Horde, instruction manual

A common bit of widely understood symbolism in Video Games: a heart is used to represent someone's health or life. The Life Meter or lives counter may be made of hearts, and health-related pickups and power ups may be in the shape of hearts as well (see Heart Container).

The reason the heart specifically is used for this trope is because of the positive connotations the heart has picked up over the millennia: "lifeblood", love, as well as it being considered the most important organ by the medical community for the longest time (and it's still considered the second most important organ behind the brain, but brains are rather squicky and have different connotations entirely, mainly intellectual, so they should be mana if anythingnote ).

This is so common, that some games can confuse players when hearts represent something else (such as the Castlevania games or Kid Icarus).

Compare Heart Container, Heart Symbol, Healing Potion.

Examples:

Video Games

  • 100 Sleeping Princes and the Kingdom of Dreams and AkaSeka: Tiles with heart marks on them will restore the team's HP bar when they're cleared.
  • Adventure Story: Matt's Life Meter is formed out of Heart Symbols.
  • Aladdin (Virgin Games): The powerups that restore health are blue hearts with goatees: this is fitting considering most of the other powerups involve the Genie somehow as well.
  • Amnesia: The Dark Descent: Health is depicted in the inventory screen as an anatomically-correct heart. The more injured you are, the more wilted it looks.
  • Angry Birds: Transformers: The Transformer characters use hearts for their health meters, while their enemies get the standard green-to-red meter.
  • ANNO: Mutationem: In the Mysterious Console roguelike DLC, Noni's health is displayed as a heart meter. Hearts are occasionally found by rummaging through breakable objects or given by a weapon chest.
  • Arc Doors: The extra life powerup looks like a heart. The introductory story explains that the evil wizard who's behind the protagonist's plight had divided hisnote  heart and hid its pieces across the levels.
  • Arena.Xlsm: Heart Symbol is used for representing the ability to restore Hit Points back to full.
  • In Armillo, Armillo's hitpoints are represented by hearts. He starts out with two on normal difficulty and three on easy, and an extra one can be purchased as an upgrade from the shop.
  • Danganronpa represents the player character's Influence gauge with hearts. Said gauge is reduced by making mistakes, and if it's reduced to zero, the player will be unable to convince the others of the truth, resulting in the class being unable to find the culprit.
  • In the Darkwing Duck Licensed Game for the NES, Darkwing's life bar is a single heart, but he can take four hits before dying. Collecting a thin can will restore one hit, and collecting a first-aid kit will restore Darkwing's health to its full extent.
  • Decap Attack plays with this; your health meter is comprised of actual, realistic beating hearts.
  • In Dillon's Rolling Western, Dillon's health is represented by hearts, and collecting Heart Pieces from ruins increases his health by one heart for every three pieces.
  • Distorted Travesty 3, being a Zelda fangame (among many other things), borrows the life meter, heart containers, pieces of heart, and heart shaped healing pickups
  • Don't Starve uses a heart to depict the health meter. As the character's health depletes, the heart starts to shrivel up.
  • In Dungeons of Aether, hitpoints are represented by hearts, with the player characters having a total of three, regular enemies having either two or three, and bosses having four.
  • Enter the Gungeon uses little red shotgun shells, crossed two at a time in such a way as to form little hearts. As well, the palette of items that extend your health are heart-themed.
  • Minecraft has these. If you're riding a horse, its health bar is rendered in horse butts (which are of course heart-shaped). In Hardcore, these hearts have menacing eyes (or maybe blood vessels), which is a worrying reminder of the finality of death in this difficulty.
  • Minty Fresh Adventure! and Fresh Minty Adventure: The Life Meter at the bottom of the screen, is initially in three sections, represented by three Heart Symbols.
  • Ninjish Guy In Low Res World: You can replenish lost health by collecting blue hearts.
  • A pixelated heart represents health in No More Heroes and its sequels, with the pixels being the real units of health. In the first game, the max health increases change the color of the center of the heart, creating layers of pixels with each color.
  • In Octogeddon, Octogeddon's life bar is represented by hearts. Also, white submarines and planes with heart symbols can replenish your health when hit.
  • One Step From Eden:
    • The Hit Points measurement's symbol is three diamonds in a triangle shape, the Heart Symbol-iest that can be represented with a minimum of diamonds.
    • The "Sell Health" pact shows a Heart Symbol being slashed at. Its effect: Take 140 damage.
  • Your life meter is this in Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures.
  • In Polyroll, the titular character's hitpoints are represented by hearts. He starts out with three and the player can gain three more by completing the various Heart Palace levels in the world map. Taking damage will deplete one heart at a time, while collecting 10 gems will restore one.
  • Postal 2 pokes fun at this by having your health counter be represented by an actual beating heart. It beats faster and takes on different shades as the player's health decreases or they use certain substances in the game (sickly green and beating noticeably faster when under the effects of catnip, beating impossibly fast when withdrawal starts setting in after smoking a health pipe, etc.).
  • Prehistorik Man does as well. It also has heart containers.
  • Primal Rage has a slightly more gruesome application this: your lifebar is represented as a major artery ending in a beating realistic heart, and your stun gauge is represented as a spinal cord ending in a brain: when the stun gauge is depleted, the brain crackles with electricity, and when you take damage, the heart beats faster. If you lose a round, the heart explodes and the brain is fried to ashes.
  • The Princess Remedy series connects its Hit Points to a Heart Symbol-based icon.
  • Purple represents its health restoring items as hearts.
  • The Life Meter in Sapiens depicts a heart of variable size when you're still quite healthy. It is replaced by a skull when you get weaker.
  • Serious Sam uses the standard heart symbol on one end of Sam's health meter. A giant heart is also used for the games' Ultra Health pick-up, which adds 100+ hit points.
  • In all the Shantae games, the player's health is represented by a series of red hearts, which can be expanded with Heart Containers.
  • Shovel Knight: Unlike the Life and Will orbs of the other protagonists, King Knight's health is represented by hearts. The hearts only represent one point of damage each, meaning that King Knight has less health than the other characters (but also has more ways to regenerate health).
  • Simple Samosa Game, the official web game of Simple Samosa, also has a heart health meter.
  • The Smurfs (1994) uses hearts as a Life Meter.
  • In Snoopy's Grand Adventure, Snoopy has a health bar that consists of three hearts, and over the course of the game, he can upgrade it up to nine. If Snoopy gets hit, the heart he loses will float above him, and he can re-collect it before it disappears. In addition, Snoopy can also regain lost hearts by collecting cookie power-ups.
  • Spelunky combines this with Cardiovascular Love: it uses hearts for life, and they are restored by the floating love hearts that appear when you get a kiss from a damsel.
  • Splatterhouse is another game that uses realistic-looking human hearts for life points (and hockey masks for lives).
  • StarTropics I & II both use hearts as a Life Meter which are filled by Heart Containers, similar to Zelda.
  • Stitchy In Tooki Trouble: Stitchy's health is represented by three hearts in the top left corner of the screen.
  • In the XGen Studios Web Game Stick Arena Ballistic, your Life Meter has a beating heart next to it. As you take damage the heart becomes damaged, leaks blood and beats more weakly.
  • Super Mario Bros.:
    • In Super Mario Bros. 2, hearts restore health, and the Super Mario All-Stars and Super Mario Advance remakes use hearts for the health meter (the original NES version uses hexagons instead).
    • In Super Mario Land and Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, hearts are instead extra lives. This is probably due to color limitations: how would you distinguish between a normal mushroom and a 1up Mushroom? In the latter, one of the bonus minigames at the end of the level makes it possible to pick up a 3up, which is a heart with a "3" on it. In Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, hearts alone don't restore extra lives; instead, the player has "Heart Points", and collecting hearts adds ten heart points, while defeating an enemy adds one heart point. Collecting 100 hearts adds an extra life.
    • In Super Mario Odyssey, hearts are used to recover health.
    • In the Paper Mario games, your health is explicitly called "Heart Points", and picking up hearts that enemies drop refills it a little — both you and your partner in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. There are also Recovery Blocks which refills your Heart Points (and Flower Points) if you hit it, though you're charged coins for the service in the second game.
    • Super Princess Peach uses incremental hearts as its health meter, with two different sized heart collectables to refill it. Small hearts restore half a heart (one hit), while big ones restore a full heart, or two-hit points.
    • Luigi's Mansion (Series): In all the games, Luigi's health is represented by a heart that shrinks as the character's HP decreases. The health consists of 100 HP, and can be replenished by gathering stray hearts (their size determines how much they'll heal Luigi).
    • Mario Party 10:
      • In Bowser Party, each member of Team Mario has their health represented by how many hearts they have. They can collect more over the course of the game, and they lose them when they take damage during the Bowser mini-games. If a player's health reaches zero, they will be removed from the team's vehicle, and will not be able to roll to move forward on their turn.
      • Certain minigames give all players a health bar with three hearts, with one heart being taken away whenever a player takes damage. Running out of hearts will result in that player being eliminated, and in the event that multiple players survive to the end of the game, the tie will be broken by whoever has more hearts. Minigames using this health system include Snake Block Party, Peepa Panic, Beeline Shrine, Paintball Battle, and Bullet Bill Bullies.
  • The Super Star Wars games uses a lightsaber as your health meter, but hearts are used for health restoration.
  • Terraria not only uses hearts to denote your HP, but you can increase your maximum health by mining and collecting underground "heart crystals", and in the later game by harvesting heart-shaped life fruits in the jungle. Most enemies can also drop heart pickups that instantly recover some health.
  • Tesla: The Weather Man uses hearts for the Life Meter and as healing pickups.
  • Given a Shout-Out in an issue of Heroic Publishing's Tigress title, in which a supervillainess graphically slaughtering her way through a compound explicity compares the experience to a videogame — complete with all those neat hearts you find.
  • Tiny Toon Adventures games:
    • In the 1991 NES game of the same name, everything kills the player with one hit, unless the player has a Heart Container in their inventory. If they already have one in their inventory when they find another, they will get an extra life (of which, they can hold up to nine).
    • The sequel, Trouble in Wackyland, has a three-heart health bar. However, heart power-ups are very rare to find in the game.
    • In Babs' Big Break for the Game Boy, the player starts out with two hearts. A little heart will add one heart to their health bar, while a big heart will extend it up to three. Completing a level will reset your health bar back to two hearts. Playing on hard mode will subtract one heart from your health bar.
    • In the sequel, Montana's Movie Madness, the player stars out with three hearts in their health bar, and heart power-ups are only accessible through a bonus roullette. If it lands on Babs, she will extend the player's health bar to the maximum of four, and if it lands on Plucky or Hamton, they will restore the health bar to its full extent. Like in Babs' Big Break, completing a level will reset the health bar back to three hearts, and playing on hard mode will subtract one heart from it.
    • In Buster Busts Loose if played on Children or Normal mode, the player starts out with three hearts in their health bar, and can extend it up to five by finding crystal carrot power-ups. Completing a level will reset the health bar back to three, and playing on Hard mode subtracts two hearts.
    • In Buster's Hidden Treasure, the player starts out with three hearts in their health bar and can extend it up to five by finding bell power-ups. Unlike Babs' Big Break, Montana's Movie Madness, and Buster Busts Loose, the player's health bar will retain its extra hearts after a level is completed. However, if the player loses a life, their health bar will reset back to three.
  • Extra lives were originally represented by stars in the Touhou Project series, but were changed to hearts from Touhou Shinreibyou ~ Ten Desires onwards.
  • The Treasure Hunter Man series:
  • Heart Containers in An Untitled Story take the form of hearts radiating with red light.
  • Viewtiful Joe runs on pink-colored hearts the shape of peppers.
  • Viscerafest has its protagonist Caroline straight up eating realistic (if albeit alien) hearts to heal herself, mostly gathered by gibbing organic enemy corpses.
  • The health display in Wuppo is a small heart bubble that follows the player. Enemies also occasionally drop little bubbles with a heart inside that you can eat to replenish health.
  • The Witches' Tea Party: Chapter 3's deduction session that ends the chapter, has two Heart Symbols in the upper right as effectively a Life Meter, to represent the number of times that Charlotte can deduct incorrectly before getting a negative ending.

Non Video Game Examples:

  • Gets called out in Jonti Picking's show 8-Bit Pwny Club, in which "Eating Hearts" takes the number one spot in a list of "Top 5 Unhealthy Power-Ups", pointing out that you're basically gnawing on bits of internal flesh like some crazed zombie ghoul.
    Cookie: So, to the people of Hyrule, the Zelda games are like Resident Evil?
    Dare: ...Sure, why not?
    Cookie: That is it. I'm quitting powerups. I'm going cold Chocobo.
  • Kakuzu in Naruto really does have five hearts and won't go down until all five are destroyed. Memetic Mutation carried it even further—as the new chapters of the manga progressed, fanart would depict him with a decreasing heart meter.
  • In Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: The Season Towns, those who are in the video game-inspired Season Towns are given Guardian Stones, which create a protective barrier for them whenever they are attacked by someone; the Guardian Stones also disintegrate when they are used, and there's a finite number of them. While the Guardian Stones are not heart-shaped themselves, they do have a heart symbol etched into them.
  • Simple Samosa: In "Khelo Samosa", the gang is trapped in an arcade game and must beat its levels to save everyone else stuck there. Their health meter is represented with heart symbols.

 
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Video Example(s):

Paper Mario The Origami King

Mario picks up hearts to gain HP, demonstrated here.

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Paper Mario The Origami King

Mario picks up hearts to gain HP, demonstrated here.

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