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Wild Hearts Review - Less Flavored Monster Hunter
Butcher79
My parents didn't have much money when I was growing up, but we still lived in the Cheerios family. I actually preferred the Cinnamon Toast Crunch sugar bomb, but the point is, we could at least afford real Cheerios instead of Nut O's or Tasteeos or whatever the brand name was. Growing up, I cared about that name as much as I longed for a pair of Nikes or a real Jansport backpack. As an adult who is now brutally forced to pay for cereal out of my own pocket, I am much more inclined to try other brands of cereal.
That's what it's like to play Wild Hearts - I take a risk with the underdog, hoping that another action developer can actually make Monster Hunter as good as Capcom, if only someone would give them a chance. As long as there is some glimpses of great action, but poor PC performance, shallow monster pool, and awkward hardware mechanics all dampen Wild Hearts' attempt at emulation.
Monster, uh… fighter
The line that developer Koei Tecmo uses here is blatant: you can imagine the writers sweating around trying to twist the dialogue around the words "hunt" and "monster" while every conversation is about monsters you need to go out and hunt. The resulting world seems a little less outright fantasy and a little more folklore. The action is clearly set in feudal Japan, and most of the text uses Japanese words: kemono (beasts, not monsters!) for the behemoths you fight; karakuri for the gadgets you build to help you hunt; tsukumo for mechanical creatures that serve as your AI companions.
The small cast of characters like the blacksmith Natsume and the washed-up samurai Ujishige you'll encounter in the first hour are more subdued than the campy anime hunters and cat cooks from Monster Hunter. Wild Hearts is a very big change that I first appreciated and then quickly tired of, as the result is that every character mutters about how they want to protect the city and clumsily confesses to their stock NPC backstories. After a while, I started taking my headphones off whenever someone spoke.
... most of the time it's frustratingly clumsy.
Anyway, I really can't imagine anyone playing these sorts of games for anything other than sticking monsters with a pointy end, and that's where Wild Hearts mostly succeeds. There are eight weapons, a meager arsenal that ends up full of surprises. My favorite is the bladed vagasa umbrella that attacks by spinning like a top and gets stronger when you parry enemy attacks. This is the only weapon in the game with a defensive option that saved my life and made me look like a broken Mary Poppins in action. (Image credit: Koei Tecmo)
The shape-shifting karakuri staff can also be four weapons in one: every blow you land can be combined into shape-shifting with its own set of attacks. Your starting weapon, the katana, "awakens" when you fill up your hit meter, unfolding into a whip-like longsword that you can swing around you for a flurry of hits. It turns out Hearts of the Wild is still a beautiful anime, at least when you're in the thick of things.
Kemono battles are worthy of this weapon and its complex movements. Each fastidiously animated beast has some kind of affinity with the elements and Mother Nature Gone Wild design, like a sap-covered sap spewing asthmatic nightmare pollen, or a golden shard, a porcupine with giant crystals for spikes. Some of the designs really surprised me in a good way, going beyond their obvious gimmick. Lavaback, the giant flaming gorilla, appears to be straight-forward until he goes berserk, then suddenly uses his melted arms like elastic bands to shoot you feet-first with a slingshot.
Some of the kemono designs stand out, but Wild Hearts recycles them disappointingly quickly - there are a few clearly shared moves and archetypes once you reach the second area, and later on you get the standard elemental remixes of some of the monsters where you change fire to ice. It's still tough, exciting fights, and my kemono strategy changed completely depending on which weapon I used. But the variety can't match the Monster Hunter deep roster in at least four (out of five) zones I've explored so far.
I've only fought 30 completely different monsters in 11 hours, and one of them is a gimmick fight that I barely counted.
One big new idea for Wild Hearts combat allows you to build traps and defenses in the middle of combat. You summon karakuri out of thin air by holding down the right mouse button and pressing one of several keys - at first you create simple boxes to jump off or springs that catapult you to a monster, but soon you'll unlock combinations. who erect a defensive wall or set off fireworks to hit the flying monster from the air.
I appreciate that it gets rid of a lot of unnecessary stuff, but it leaves some core parts of the experience anemic.
Sometimes this leads to exciting moments, such as using a spring to only dodge the monster's attack and attack mid-jump, but most of the time it's frustratingly clumsy. Sometimes I used all my build ammo while right in front of the monster and the karakuri instantly exploded because I was too close; other times I've pressed C instead of Q, failing combos and just stacking a bunch of useless crap in front of me. Move too much while building and the karakuri can fall in the wrong place, ruining the combo placement as well.
As with building in Fortnite, I expect to see amazing high-level play from master hunters who are accustomed to the karakuri system, but what annoyed me the most was that I couldn't press a single hotkey to build something. what I want, instead of fiddling with the menu in the middle of a fight.
Pain Alignment
(Image credit: Koei Tecmo)
The more I played Wild Hearts, the more I found it remarkable. not Elevator from the Capcom series. There's just a lot less stuff, and it's actually kind of a relief. Monster Hunter is known for being one of those games that overwhelms you with systems, subsystems, side activities, and a huge number of item types, all on top of combat that takes hours to learn. You grind certain resources to make equipment, and other resources to level up that equipment, and even more resources to improve that equipment; there are various types of hunting and research tracks to advance. The last one, Monster Hunter Rise (opens in a new tab) gave you a dog и a cat companion that you can customize, level up and go hunting with you, and a whole separate system for recruiting additional feline companions to send on your own missions.
Compared to him, Wild Hearts looks more modest. There is one resource to upgrade your tsukumo hunting buddy, the armor has one upgrade level, and there is almost no fuss with crafting items or stockpiling potions, bombs, or any utility equipment. This game doesn't give you the feeling that it wants you to play it for 300 hours. I appreciate that it gets rid of a lot of unnecessary stuff, but it leaves some core parts of the experience anemic.
Some of the weapons are excellent, and many of the monsters on my personal list rank higher than Capcom's set.
Equipment progress is slow and deeply unsatisfactory. There are no small steps here to make you feel progressively stronger, just upgrades that give your armor a human or kemono "kinship" that feels woefully underdeveloped. Over 20 hours later, only 22 of the 60 armors I unlocked actually qualified for one of these upgrades, and I haven't yet been able to take advantage of any of the additional skills they provide. Wild Hearts likes to give you perks like "3% Fire Resistance" with limited options to stack the same effect. Nobody cares about 3%.
The weapon skill tree seems huge and exciting at first, until you realize that there is a single upgrade tree that is applied to every weapon in the game that really knocks the breath out of it. I really appreciate that you can make up for any resources spent to reconfigure weapons as many times as you like, nevertheless encouraging you to choose the right elemental affinity for battle.
If some of these features were more robust, Wild Hearts could pass for a well-thought-out hunting game. But surprisingly weak PC performance - I barely averaged 60fps at 1440p on my i5-13600K and RTX 3070 and a mix of medium and high settings - and graphics on par with 2018's Monster Hunter World. (opens in a new tab) make it more budget-friendly than aerodynamic. (One later area even dropped my framerate to 30s and 40s).
Some of the weapons are excellent, and many of the monsters on my personal list rank higher than the Capcom pack, but anything that doesn't involve the heat of battle could use a little more love.
After 30 hours I don't Nut Oh Wild Heart Transformation. Deep down, I hoped for an exciting discovery, to find something bold in this giant mythical beast killing game, which I liked more than a well-known famous brand. But for now, it's mostly the less flavorful Monster Hunter.
If I'm itching to smash the face of a giant boar with a ridiculously large hammer (please don't judge my extremely specific cravings), Wild Hearts is fine. There just isn't much reason to take it first off the shelf.
WILD HEARTS STANDARD EDITION PC
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