The lavaback, a giant flaming gorilla, seems straightforward until he's enraged-then suddenly he uses his molten arms like stretchy rubber bands to slingshot himself at you feet-first. Some of the designs really surprised me in a good way, going beyond their obvious gimmick. Each fastidiously animated beast has some kind of elemental affinity and a "Mother Nature got shitfaced" design, like the sapscourge, a sap-covered, pollen-spewing asthmatic nightmare, or the goldshard, a porcupine with giant crystals for spines. The kemono battles are all worthy of these weapons and their complex movesets. Wild Hearts is still pretty anime, it turns out, at least when you're in the thick of the action. The starter weapon, a katana, "awakens" when you fill up a hit meter, unfurling into a whip-like longsword that you can swirl around you in a flurry of cuts. The shapeshifting karakuri staff might as well be four weapons in one: every hit you land can be comboed into a form shift with its own set of attacks. It's explicitly set in feudal Japan and sticks with the Japanese words for much of its text: kemono (beasts, not monsters!) for the behemoths you fight karakuri for the contraptions you build to help on your hunts tsukumo for the mechanical creatures that serve as your AI companions. The resulting world feels slightly less outright fantasy and slightly more folklore.
The line that developer Koei Tecmo is walking here is blatant: You can picture the writers sweating as they try to contort dialogue around the words "hunt" and "monster" while every conversation is about the monsters you need to go out and hunt.
So far there are some glimmers of great action, but poor PC performance, a shallow monster pool and a fiddly equipment mechanic all dilute Wild Hearts' attempt at imitation. That's what playing Wild Hearts feels like-I'm taking a risk with the underdog, hoping that another action developer can actually do Monster Hunter just as well as Capcom, if only someone would give them a shot.
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