A broken-hearted girl is escorted to the sky, where she takes on the role of a biker. In this dream-like world, he runs on neon streets and in other parts of the world, picks up collections and navigates, all the while accompanied by electronic sound. This is Sayonara Wild Hearts, a wonderful miracle that seems to fade as the momentum increases.
Sayonara Wild Hearts uses watch messages, but unfortunately disappears as a game. The first few stages make you humble by spinning your character left and right on the tracks, taking heart sketches and other overlapping sets to get the highest score. And, of course, that's probably just that. The view changes in some intriguing ways, with the camera pulling back until your passenger is a small animal or tragically moving around portions of the tunnel as you ride freely against a wall or roof. Doing the trick of the camera aside, he does the same basic thing for all the remote information. A couple of times it explodes in that format, like a VR-inspired game-within-a-game that plays a bit like an arcade shooter, but unfortunately this contraption is much shorter.
You meet at breakneck speeds most of the time, but instead of feeling excited, I was reminded of those moments in the first 3D Sonic games where you slam into unrelated moves. Sure, it looks clean, but if you don't go out of your way to pick up the lights, you won't miss anything more than a pair of medals when the stage is completed. Most of the time these things shine so fast that the detection is more dependent on memory and repetition than on the display.
Music is an integral part of Sayonara Wild Hearts, though the action with the strand is out of tune. Instead, the two elements support each other, much like a music video. There have been times when I've taken aggregated collections in time and music or driven with speed boosting sound and beats – as well as some timed indicators against a few bosses – but you don't have to be a solid internal metronome to succeed.
The story is alluded to at dinner, and I'm not sure I fully understand what it is trying to say. Is this girl first meeting a previous relationship? How close are you to the various aspects of his personality? Is it something completely different? I'm sure that the final stage was meant to be a reduction of all the previous victories, but without truly adhering to what was happening, it is sinking.
It made me so happy to watch Sayonara Wild Hearts, even though interacting with it left me cold. In fact, I probably would have liked it more as if it were just a short film. As it stands, it's an incredibly interesting topic and a number of disappointing things.
