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What Works:
✅ Unique Karakuri Mechanic: Building structures for combat and exploration adds a new dimension to the monster-hunting genre.
✅ Compelling Monster Design: Kemonos are interesting fusions of real animals and nature elements.
✅ Streamlined Monster Hunting: Focuses on the core hunt without pre-hunt rituals.
✅ Variety of Weapons: Offers multiple weapons with distinct learning curves, with the wagasa being a standout.
✅ Beautiful World: Azuma provides a diverse and visually appealing world to explore.
✅ Fun Gameplay Loop: Crafting gear and weapons from defeated kemonos fuels the gameplay loop.
✅ Strong Monster Hunter Inspiration: Provides a familiar experience for veterans while offering a fresh alternative.

What Doesn't Work:
❌ Abysmal Performance: Inconsistent frame rate and blurry visuals make for an unpleasant experience.
❌ Confusing Upgrade System: Unclear weapon upgrade paths can be frustrating to navigate.
❌ Limited Monster Variety: May feel repetitive after encountering a limited pool of kemonos.

🌿 A New Monster-Hunting Adventure

Wild Hearts storms onto the scene, offering a monster-hunting experience that blends formulaic familiarity with refreshing innovation. Priced at a premium $79.99, this title by Koei Tecmo, published under the EA Originals label, promises a thrilling adventure. However, despite its captivating potential, my experience on the Xbox Series S was a crushing disappointment.

🎮 A Disappointing Experience on Xbox Series S

Here's the truth: Wild Hearts, on the Xbox Series S, feels like a magnificent bird with clipped wings. Despite numerous attempts, I couldn't bring myself to finish the game, let alone invest enough hours for a thorough analysis. The allure of diving into the world and carving my path as a monster hunter simply wasn't there, shrouded in the haze of underwhelming performance. This is a harsh reality, especially considering my well-documented love for both video games and a good bowl of soup (seriously, who doesn't?). In fact, Monster Hunter, Capcom's monstrous success (pun intended), holds a special place in my gaming heart.

🌌 Drawing Inspiration, Forging Its Path

Wild Hearts, however, manages to carve its own niche while drawing clear inspiration from its predecessor. It avoids blatant imitation, presenting a compelling alternative within the monster-hunting genre. Here's where things get interesting – at least on the Xbox Series S, where the true potential of Wild Hearts remains frustratingly blurred. Theoretically, Wild Hearts has everything to keep me hooked for hours on end. Stunning visuals, a world teeming with ferocious beasts (kemonos), and a satisfying gameplay loop fueled by crafting and exploration – all the ingredients for a monster-hunting masterpiece. Unfortunately, the reality on this platform falls short.

The pain lies in the performance. Here's the deal: Wild Hearts is a genuinely good game. You can practically feel the Monster Hunter influence coursing through its veins. From the rhythmic hunts against intriguing kemonos, where dismembering body parts yields rewards and alters their behavior, to the meticulous progression system centered on crafting weapons and armor from these very monsters and the fantastical world of Azuma, everything evokes a sense of familiarity. Even the plot, a simple tale of a nameless hunter defending a village against the fury of the kemonos, feels comfortably familiar.

⚔️ Combat and Strategy

The Monster Hunter DNA is evident, but Koei Tecmo wisely avoids a simple copy-and-paste job. For instance, Wild Hearts offers complete control over camp placement. Here, you can rest, embark on missions, craft gear, and essentially set up your personal hunting haven. This freedom adds a layer of personalization to the experience, allowing you to tailor gameplay to your preferences. However, this system is tied to a resource management mechanic and the aptly named Dragon Pit, creating a somewhat intricate web of dependencies.

🌟 Exploring Azuma

While Azuma isn't a true open world, it borrows the Monster Hunter approach. Think of it as a collection of diverse biomes, each a sprawling and vertical playground filled with resources and secrets. Fans of the genre will find the combat in Wild Hearts instantly recognizable. Facing off against colossal kemonos demands a measured and tactical approach, relying on well-timed dodges and defensive maneuvers. Mastering not only your weapon of choice but also the kemonos' attack patterns becomes paramount, as certain attacks can leave you vulnerable and open to devastating counter-offensives.

Wild Hearts simplifies the genre's formula to a degree, making it a more approachable entry point compared to its inspiration. Gone are the elaborate pre-hunt rituals involving meal preparation and meticulous item selection. The focus here is purely on the hunt itself, with monsters exhibiting no signs of fatigue or capture mechanics. While I never found the kemonos themselves boring, their battle strategies felt somewhat predictable and monotonous.

On the other hand, the eight available weapons offer a satisfying learning curve. The katana, the first weapon you encounter, serves as the centerpiece of the Wild Hearts experience. However, the real showstopper is the wagasa – a multi-bladed umbrella that demands exceptional timing and mastery in parrying kemonos attacks.

🔧 Karakuri Constructions

And that's exactly what sets Wild Hearts apart in the genre. These karakuri constructions bring a Fortnite-like feel that fits very well into combat, allowing you to build boxes, trampolines, gliders, or torches to complement the gaps in your weapons. The inherent strategy of this mechanic can be both simple and deep. For instance, a box allows for a quick jump, which even helps with traversing the world, but building a trampoline on top of a box already covers much more distance and verticality.

Fusion Karakuri, however, are special contraptions unlocked during battles against specific kemonos. These serve more specific purposes, such as the Bulwark, built by piling six boxes together. When used at the right moment, like the charge of a Kingtusk (a giant boar), it allows it to be repelled and knocked down, open to a quick and efficient counterattack. There are many other variations, and they all enrich the gameplay, making it very fun. But this mechanic isn't only valued in combat. Dragon Karakuri, directly correlated with the Dragon Pit and the aforementioned resource management, are persistent devices (similar to structures in Death Stranding) with a number of passive uses, such as traversing long distances through a cable car line, or searching for scouting kemonos with a wooden radio tower. Karakuri is also cleverly integrated into the narrative, with its presence well justified both in the plot and in the presentation of Wild Hearts.

🔨 Crafting and Progression

Still referring to karakuri, this system features an upgrade tree and other unlockables like aesthetic elements: benches, signs, and others. However, the vast majority are quite useful, such as a box that stores all food items, a wind vortex to propel the hunter high in the air, and even a structure with shell-shaped paddles to collect fish, important ingredients in cooking or to sell for more money.

🎣 Encountering Kemonos

I haven't discussed the kemonos much, but the truth is that these creatures are a fantastic mix of real animals, such as boars or monkeys, each with a fantastic aesthetic, with various elements of nature like vines or moss. Each one fights in its own way, and, similar to Monster Hunter, each one has vulnerable weak points to various types of damage. Although I haven't reached the end of the game, from what I understood, the variety of monsters ends quickly, but this could also just be a bad habit of the other franchise mentioned here, one that has been around for several years.

After defeating a kemono or completing a demand, two options are given: return to the camp on the map to continue exploration or return to Minato, the main city and central hub of Wild Hearts. Here you are free to talk to the villagers, accept secondary demands, shop among general items and accessories, or, more importantly, visit the blacksmith (also available at a camp via Dragon Karakuri) to build equipment, weapons, or armor based on the kemonos you've been defeating and their parts.

🛠️ Armor and Weapon Crafting

This was the system I struggled with the most. When creating armor, something essential for facing stronger monsters, it's possible to forge two varieties, human or kemono, of some pieces: notwithstanding the visual difference between each, the armor of the human variant, for example, focuses on defensive-oriented abilities, with the kemono variant focusing on an aggressive style.

Weapons, however, are not easy and are more complicated to understand. Unlike the linear system used by Monster Hunter, dividing creations by categories (monsters), in Wild Hearts, each weapon follows a non-linear path, inheriting the abilities of the previous option in conjunction with the new ones acquired. In theory, it seems simple, but in practice, you battle against a giant diagram, going from one side of the screen to the other trying to understand what might be better or not. I want to believe that over time this system becomes a simpler subject to tackle, but although it's a bit frustrating, I admit that planning both the armor and the next weapon upgrade has become a focal point of the experience, and a goal always to pursue to improve the combat style that reflects the weapon used. Despite everything else, each armor was always visually more appealing than the previous one.

❌ Performance Woes on Xbox Series S

Let's address the elephant in the room, although I don't want to dwell on it. Wild Hearts on the Xbox Series S is not recommended. On other platforms, like the Series X, yes. However, on the Series S, you face inconsistent thirty frames per second performance with atrocious visual appearance. I often had to rub and blink my eyes because it's a blurry and unfocused experience, almost like those demanding third-party titles on a Nintendo Switch. It's sad to admit it, but that's the reality.

👍 A Promising Future

It saddens me that a game as competent and fun as Wild Hearts is corrupted by mediocre visual appearance (on the Series S) and such poor performance. However, enjoyed on a platform with strong performance, Wild Hearts firmly believes that the title will capture your heart, with plenty of fun things here.

The combat is crisp and challenging, with the karakuri constructions introducing a freshness rarely felt in the genre. The loop between hunting kemonos and developing new equipment is addictive (despite the slightly confusing progression), and the Asian aesthetic is very appealing and atmospheric. The Monster Hunter formula takes a few bumps in favor of originality and also simplicity, making Wild Hearts more accessible for newcomers.

🌟 M I S C 🌟

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◻️ 📝 Website link published on March 28th, 2023.
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◻️ ✍️ Reviewed in European Portuguese, translated with A.I.
◻️ 📜 Review Number 124.

✨ F I N ✨