Wild Hearts is EA’s venture into an open-world monster-hunting title where your goal is to hunt the monsters of a Feudal Japan-inspired world called Azuma. You’ll get to create your character from the hundreds of available options, try out weapons, including the Karakuri Katana and Bladed Wagasa, and eat all the food in the world.
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If you’re anything like the other players of Wild Hearts, you’ll be doing all this frequently. With an average completion time of 30 or 40 hours, if you chase after side quests, there’s plenty of time for players to do things the same way.
9 Design Iconic Characters In The Character Creator
With the character creator, you can do much more than adjust the protagonist to your liking. You can also recreate your favorite characters to share online for all to see. Everything can be adjusted, the hair and hair length, your character’s build, positioning of facial features, face markings, makeup, and even factors as small as changing the smile lines of the face.
Think about it, you can technically slay monsters as mercenary Cloud, as an already established monster hunter Geralt, or as a creepy realistic version of Luigi if that’s more to your liking. A few people have shared their makings on Reddit and Twitter, but the number of players who’ve done this will be far greater.
8 Use Tactics You've Carried Over From Monster Hunter
Wild Hearts still manages to be its own thing and is by no means a copy of the Monster Hunter games, but the two share a whole load of similarities. The entire premise has the groundwork for a great Monster Hunter game, and the combat is also reminiscent of this. Rather than compare the two to decide which is better, you can use whatever knowledge you’ve come out of Monster Hunter with to turn the tides in your favor in Wild Hearts and vice versa.
If you know how to land hits and dodge in time in Monster Hunter successfully, you’re already halfway there with how to achieve this in Wild Hearts. Since the two are in the same style and genre of video games, many will have tried out both titles.
7 Keep HDR Off For A Better Experience
The popularity of HDR has grown massively in the past few years, but there’s been a growing discussion of how it rarely makes the games with it look better. Most people prefer the feature disabled altogether. Wild Hearts also shares this HDR feature, but the thing is, it makes many of the otherwise beautiful environments look washed out and foggy, with the bright parts of the game looking too bright and just generally not looking how you would expect.
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Turning HDR off and adjusting the brightness fixes this problem, delivering a much smoother and more enjoyable experience. A trip to the settings before starting a new game is something we all do. Many will have turned off HDR during this time.
6 Eating All The Food
Food is the life force in Wild Hearts, and it will heal you up after a stressful fight, with additional stat benefits to ready you up for the commencing journey. Now this food can be found absolutely everywhere, so you’ll rarely spend a moment without any on your person. You’ll also get used to taking a bunch of damage during each fight and constantly munching on whatever food you can locate.
Chomping down on whatever’s in your inventory is the simplest solution to staying spry and on your feet. To the outside viewer, it can look silly to stop mid-fight and pluck out a tasty treat, but it is totally worth it to keep yourself in the fight.
5 Always Building Watchtowers To Track Monsters
Watchtowers help locate the monster you’re currently hunting, making things far more manageable than fumbling around while searching for them. Monsters aren’t terribly difficult to find either way, as the game does a lot of hand-holding with highlighting the points of interest for you. However, using a watchtower will speed up your search, so you don’t have to think about struggling to find where they are.
Sometimes you don’t want to spend time manually tracking your target and instead want to jump straight into battle to test out your new moves.
4 Chill Out To The Soundtrack
Described as sounding like something straight out of a Studio Ghibli movie, the Wild Hearts soundtrack brings the whole game together. As opposed to the inherently dark nature of slaying deadly monsters to protect people, the music is often calming, similar to Final Fantasy and The Tales Of series, with blends of string instruments differing from mildly calm to faster-paced and hard-hitting when facing bosses.
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But the music really becomes special when you travel around Azuma, getting time to take in the spectacle of the world around you. It doesn’t remove the fear of what’s waiting around the corner, but it’s the best time to chill out and vibe with the music.
3 Play The Story With A Friend
The entire story can be played single-player or with two additional friends as long as those you’re playing with are at the same point as you. If they’re a few missions before or after you, the multiplayer won’t work correctly, and although most will be playing from the beginning with their friends, it’s still worth knowing if you plan to start co-op partway through.
Having a friend by your side to play with is a far better experience than being alone, and most prefer to play this way. You won’t have as much trouble with the enemies, and you’ll get to laugh at any silly antics everyone gets up to.
2 Building Blocks
Crates are practical for all things inside and outside of combat. During combat, these boxes can be built to garner a vantage point to get yourself high enough to attack an enemy from above. Placing down these crates will slowly become second nature after a while opening up all kinds of ways to use them.
Outside of combat, blocks are great for designing areas around your camp, reaching taller places that are out of reach, like trees and cliffs. They're also suitable for practicing how it's best to use them in the next battle. There’s always a fresh new way to use these boxes, and players will ensure they fulfill their duty.
1 Switch Between The Five Starting Weapons To See Which Is Best
Progression unlocks further weapons to try out, but everyone starts with five weapons to use forever. These are the Maul, Bow, Nodachi, Karakuri Katana, and the Bladed Wagasa, and they all cater to different styles. Where someone might prefer a tank build, there’s the Maul, a gigantic hammer to smash down on your foes. For players all for speed, you have the Bow and the Katana.
And while everyone eventually settles into a select battle buddy, there’s no reason not to switch between weapons on the regular to see how they fare instead.
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