Sayonara Wild Hearts is a music-based action game. This isn’t a rhythm game per se but is just one where music is a key theme and plays a lot into the gameplay. Start up the game and you will be immediately greeted with a stylish aesthetic that looks fantastic and complements the fast-paced nature of the game. It doesn’t have a tutorial, but you can easily grasp the controls. The main thing is using either the d-pad or the analogue stick to move the character. The game has you constantly advancing through the level, like an endless runner or an on-rails shooter. You can move the character, generally left to right, but the perspective (or the camera angle) constantly changes. The goal of each level is to reach the end but there are many obstacles along the way.
Each level has items for you to collect and these gives you the points for those levels. At the end of each level, you get a rank of bronze, silver or gold depending on your score. These items are generally scattered in the level in the form of hearts of varying sizes. The higher point ones are usually in a harder to reach area. The larger hearts, and to a degree the smaller ones, will generally guide you on the path that you should take. This is an important element to recognize and understand given the game moves you forward so fast in most of its levels.
As already mentioned, the game is fast paced and at times, it is too fast. The camera angle constantly shifts, even multiple times in rapid succession within a level. The character will usually be running, riding, or driving so fast, that sometimes you cannot reach in time. Obstacles appear and you need to move out of the way, and soon. Some of the faster paced more confusing levels feel like you need trial and error to know what is coming up. While others feel like a faster version of a puzzle from a platforming game. It is a unique blend of various gameplay elements that surprisingly end up working well together.
There are rhythm game elements to the game. The music mostly matches the action and the beats, if you notice, will be timed to your actions. There are button prompts from time to time that you need to hit the X button in time. It’s just that this aspect isn’t enough to push it into a proper game in the rhythm genre. You can die in this game, whether that’s by hitting an obstacle, or falling off an edge, or missing a button prompt, but it quickly reloads you back to the beginning of that section. There are frequent checkpoints which makes it quite generous, but the downside is that you lose your combo multiplier. There is an anti-frustration feature in that if you die too much in one section, it will offer to skip it for you. Usually, this is more annoying than beneficial because you feel that you can get through it, so you don’t want to cheat to get ahead. Plus, the game isn’t too hard to complete.
There is a story here and it has a heavy theme around tarot cards and its arcanas. It is a fantasy story and the cutscenes are played out as part of the levels, integrating the story well. The heroine goes through the levels and encounters the other arcanas. The 23 levels of the game are structured in a way where you will play levels that depict the heroine traveling, then encounter the bosses, before fighting and defeating them. The levels range from very short (barely over a minute) to fairly decent in level (a bit over 5 minutes). Finishing all 23 levels the first time around without any regard for your rankings will take only an hour though.
Despite its short length, the time you do spend in the game is fun and engaging. The speed at which you go through some of the levels is manageable but it’s the gracefulness of the movement of the characters, and the way the camera smoothly moves through each action sequence, that keeps you going. The game constantly changing its gameplay styles is also a positive, despite how you might feel when realizing that the first time. The boss rushes, where the speed takes front and center are the high points of the game. Despite that, there are times where it goes so fast that you cannot react to the signs of an attack in time. All this leads to what is a surprisingly coherent and sweet ending.
The game is designed to be replayed due to the brevity of each level, as well as the scoring system. Achieving the higher rank of a level is not easy, you will most likely not get it on your first try. Finishing the game the first time around unlocks a mode where you can play through all the levels back-to-back without returning to the menu screen. The game flows so much better this way. Given that the short length of a level, and how the end of one naturally connects to the beginning of the next, the story is told in a much more coherent way. Getting gold rank for all the levels will unlock another mode where you only get one life to beat the whole game, but by this point, you should be familiar with all the levels.
Overall, Sayonara Wild Hearts is a fun game. It may be short, but it is a blast to play and there is incentive to replay the levels at least twice or thrice to check out what you may have missed the first time around. The fast-paced action, the colorful and unique stylized aesthetics, the awesome music, and the changing gameplay mechanics in each level which keeps the experience fresh, leads to a great experience.
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