General Gaming Sayonara Wild Hearts Launch Trailer

[Pikachu]

 

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Sayonara Wild Hearts is a euphoric music video dream about being awesome, riding motorcycles, skateboarding, dance battling, shooting lasers, wielding swords and breaking hearts at 200mph. Coming September 19 to Nintendo Switch, PS4, and Apple Arcade. http://sayonarawildhearts.com
 
Created by the award-winning studio Simogo—best known for the critically acclaimed games DEVICE 6 and Year Walk—Sayonara Wild Hearts is an adrenaline-pumping arcade game in which players take control of The Fool, a masked biker on an interdimensional quest to find and break the hearts of rivalling bikers.
 
The game features a custom-written vocal pop soundtrack tightly interwoven with gameplay and includes a cast of stylish characters based on tarot cards, while synthesizing electric pop, dance, fashion, anime, arcade games and subcultures, and much more.

 

[XxEvil AshxX]

So before I read the description, I watched the trailer. My first thought was that it looked like those old shitty iPod commercials. Then I saw it's coming to the Apple Arcade.

 

 

[ShreddieMercury]

Hell yes!! I've been waiting forever for this!  If anybody is not familiar with Simogo's games, they're amazing.  Year Walk and Device 6 are two of the best mobile games I've ever played.

[ShreddieMercury]

Eurogamer has a great write-up about this and gave it a Recommended: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-09-17-sayonara-wild-hearts-review-exuberance-precision-and-shattered-love

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Sayonara Wild Hearts is such a simple thing but also such a complex thing, such a heartfelt thing. And so dense! Its exuberance is precision, its chaos is sheer choreography. It can reference Panzer Dragoon, Jet Set Radio, Dyad and Thumper while remaining entirely coherent, entirely itself.

 

[Moa]

They had me at Annapurna Interactive.

[Moa]

I just played through the main mode of the game and it completely fell flat for me.

 

I'll get the good out of the way, visually the game is spectacular although I wish there was a little more variety to the environments and choreography. The falling out of a window sequence as shown in the trailer was a neat visual metaphor but it happens at the beginning of the game and there isn't much more like it throughout the rest of the game. That is more or less the only good thing I have to say about the game.

 

Now for the mediocre, I played the game on a controller and everything felt so floaty and imprecise that the game became frustrating. Along with the sloppy controls (which probably are a lot better on an iPad or something) the gameplay itself is dull. The game mechanics aren't all that bad but at no point did I feel like what I was doing on the screen interacted meaningfully with the music, I never felt any of the flow that makes rhythm games so entrancing. Finally, the music was a letdown. The majority of the levels are 1-2 minutes and are just a repetitive beat with little in the way of melody and no lyrics or variety. After each level you're briefly kicked back to a menu so any momentum that the filler levels might have contributed to the game as a whole is lost (although post-game there is an album select mode that plays straight through without kicking you to the menu, which would be nice if the game was worth playing again). There are a few more fleshed out songs that play during what amount to boss levels, unfortunately the best of these songs is in the trailer and some of them are as forgettable as the filler levels.

 

For me, two moments really stood out in the game, the first was the level with the song from the trailer because the song was good, and the second was the closest the game came to being engaging, a sequence where the music snaps between two different realities ala Titanfall 2. Overall, the game was a kind of cool audiovisual experience but it failed as a rhythm game. It is easy to see how much effort went into the game but it's hard not to be disappointed that so much of the finished product was forgettable.