‘Wild Hearts’ Is The ‘MonHunlike’ That We Deserve

I love “Monster Hunter” with my entire heart, so when I heard of a brand new kind of monster hunting game coming out back in 2023, I was thrilled. While there were plenty of games trying to ape the “MonHun” formula in the PSP era, this could signal a second coming of this genre with proper budgets! “Wild Hearts” had potential, and I was in on the ground floor.

This Koei Tecmo joint followed the tried-and-true method of wielding a ridiculously large weapon to hunt big, honking creatures, and using parts of their corpses to make a fashionable hat. Boy, oh boy, did it execute on that gameplay loop.

“Wild Hearts” also delivered the goods with detailed environments ranging from rolling hills to the frozen tundra to a beach that evokes “Coral Highlands” from “MonHun.” With each locale sporting abandoned village ruins to drive home the devastation caused by these creatures.

Instead of going for the ecology of “Monster Hunter,” where you can broadly identify what kind of creature it is, but there’s no real life equivalent, “Wild Hearts” opts to go with a more straightforward approach.

First, they take a real animal like a pig or a wolf. Then, they slap on some nature to their bodies in the form of vines, trees, rocks literally growing out of them, and boom, you have a Kemono — the giant monsters of “Wild Hearts.”

These beefy critters are the perfect mix of familiar and otherworldly, so it’s easy to understand their methods of attack right up until the tigers start dropping spirit bombs, and the monkey hits you with a friggin’ bazooka. Thankfully, you come prepared with an arsenal of your own.

That arsenal is twofold: Your weapon and the Karakuri. To start off simple, your weapon is your main form of attack. “Wild Hearts” sports eight weapons that are completely different from each other. In a sense, it makes each weapon feel more like a class with unique animations, move set and miniature gameplay loops just like “Monster Hunter.”

Best of all, these weapons include an umbrella that allows you to “Mary Poppins” your way in and out of danger throughout the fight, a katana that turns into a whip sword, and a claw blade that allows you to maneuver in the air with a kind of Omni-Directional Mobility Gear from “Attack on Titan.”

The other part of your arsenal is the Karakuri. In “Wild Hearts,” these are tiny devices that the player can create to aid them in their hunt. The basic models are boxes to help gain height, springboards to help evade attacks, and the like.

Things get much more interesting when you start using Fusion Karakuri though. These doohickies can greatly dictate the pace of a hunt because the late-game Kemono are designed with these more complicated hunting mechanics in mind. You can probably still make it through without them, but you’re gonna have a rough go at it.

While these are interesting tools in theory, they can overshadow the skill expression of the weapons, and tend to dominate the gameplay by testing just how fast you can spam Fusion Karakuri to win a tough battle.

But the worst part of “Wild Hearts?” Its publisher. The original release was a joint venture between Koei Tecmo and EA Games, and It reviewed pretty darn well in spite of the PC port having major performance issues on launch. Making matters worse, “Monster Hunter Rise” released just a month later. This ultimately lead to “successful,” but ultimately disappointing sales. EA then announced the end of support just seven months after release. Woof.

To be clear, “Wild Hearts” is pretty far from a perfect game. Hitboxes are questionable at best, Kemono don’t react to weapon attacks enough, and the Fusion Karakuri system should probably be removed entirely. But the core experience is there, and it took Capcom 14 years and nine releases to get their formula to really penetrate the international market deeply. In the end, EA wanted “Monster Hunter World” money, but didn’t want to put in the effort or investment to give it a fighting chance.

But as luck would have it, Koei Tecmo wasn’t finished just yet. A handheld-friendly “Wild Hearts S” is being self-published on the Switch 2 in the next few weeks, and I’m hopeful that this could breathe new life into a surprisingly solid title. If enough people are dying for something to play on their shiny new consoles, perhaps this franchise can cheat death.