Working up the energy to longpost about Wild Hearts. It's time to restart the #agenda

The Game of the Year features for 2023 have gone live on RPG Site, so I'd be chuffed if you gave them a look.

You can begin with the staff picks, and if you're in the mood for a whole workday's worth of deliberations (including some of the surprise decisions that made it into our top 10 list), listen to the epic-length Tetracast special episode, too:

There's also the reader poll results, featuring the votes of thousands of internet randos:

And the staff's 2024 Most Anticipated list, where I make sure to put a finger on the scale for Suikoden spiritual successor Eiyuden Chronicles:

The Monster Hunter-like game, not the stylized rhythm romance(?) game. I never played the other one.

So I'll start off and say that I think that it's a B grade Monhun, but I think it's still pretty good.

Early game criticisms are that it feels really stingy with materials, just base level stuff. They give you a lot of cues to upgrade your weapons and armor during chapter 1, but the actual materials to do so really aren't available until chapter 2. You can maybe upgrade the weapons once, maybe twice at most.

Hell, half the weapons aren't even available until chapter 2. They just completely gate off 3-4 weapon types.

The map design is overall kind of bad. Lots of weird walls, and I find myself skyrim horsing up walls and trees. And a lot of the maps are just kind of hard to navigate, I find myself getting lost trying to simply navigate from one area to another often.

I wish the NPCs had name labels. It's a small thing, but I have had a hard time remembering who is who, and the game says to talk to some NPC but I have no idea who that is.

The writing is fine, but they have a habit of sprinkling in Japanese words at the beginning of sentences. And often repeating that word in English. The game is in Japan and all, but the weird language mixing just feels off.

It has a lot of positives though. The weapon upgrade system has a cheap cost and you can rollback upgrades and get the materials back, so changing your mind on a weapon upgrade is easy and fine. Weapons can also inherit skills from upgrade paths, so they're a little more flexible.

Armor has 2 upgrade paths, human and kemono, which can have alternate skills on certain sets. Also if it has an alternate form, it has an alternate look. Though one downside seems like there isn't an actual layered armor option, at least as far as I can tell.

The karakuri items are generally fun, and give options like blocking big attacks even if you're a bow user. Or giving mobility in general. And the more permanent ones let you do things like establish a camp anywhere on the map.

The tsukumo is basically a palico, but doesn't blow you up. Objectively an upside, though loses it being funny. Still a funny little guy though, and it often spits out healing mist and tries to distract monsters when you're at low health. You scout the maps for it's upgrades. I like it in general.

I've liked the monster designs overall. Nothing so far has been super standout, but they're been fine.

I'll see if it drastically improves or ruins the experience for me, but it's definitely a nice "I've played Rise/World and would like something more".

So I finished the main story, though I haven't gotten into the G-rank postgame stuff.

I'll say that the monster variety is pretty limited. Including all of the boss/event type monsters I think there are only about 15 unique monster types. And paired with sidequest stuff, and monsters having Mighty and Volitile forms, and they reskin at least 7 of those, you really feel that repetition more than you do with an average MonHun.

I'll also say the writing really leaves a lot to be desired overall. They really like trying to flavor English idioms into Japanese ones, but it never really lands. Except I guess with the fisherman who relates everything to fishing anyway. One thing that particularly stood out to me was the offscreen death of a major character, and it kind of is written as a plot hole that only gets investigated in a side story. It's weird, and was really poorly handled overall.

Katakuri also have some polish issues. Fusion katakuri are made by putting down katakuri in a set order, but the game's auto-target can get real janky and result in you throwing them down out of order or all over the place. It makes a real mess, wastes your resources, and feels like just having some kind of shortcut set button would be better overall. And while hypothetically strategically choosing which basic ones you take on a hunt sounds interesting, there are only 6 basic ones so you feel more like you're just missing basic parts of your kit rather than choosing the right tools for the hunt.

Near the end of the game they introduce what are basically arena quests, where you get a set loadout to do a hunt. They introduce it as a good way to get familiar with weapons you haven't used. However none of the hunts have a tutorial for the weapon, and it gets introduced in chapter 4 of 4. You also can't change your katakuri during those quests, so I hope you fixed your loadout before you started. It made trying out the Hand Cannon really miserable until I looked up a video guide on how to use it after I finished the quest.

They also have charms/talismans. They're random with no way of rerolling them. I just wish it didn't, or had a better way of trying to get good ones.

Cooking is also really overly complicated when it doesn't need to be. I like farming/processing food to get buffs, but it is again poorly explained and really only utilizes drying/smoking which makes pickling/fermenting a way of recycling less desirable materials, which just feels like a waste.

It's one of those games where I wish that it had a little more time in development because I feel like it would be a really amazing MonHun if certain things were ironed out. I'm complaining but I really liked it overall, but I feel like it really had the potential to be a lot better than it ended up. Still worth checking out if you like a Monster Hunter though.