Wild Hearts S review for Nintendo Switch 2

I’m trying really hard to judge Wild Hearts S on its own merits, but I’m failing miserably. There are just too many ways to consider the game.

The obvious one, of course, is how it stacks up to Monster Hunter, which Dustin covered pretty well back when Wild Hearts first came out on every other platform. I’d agree with pretty much everything he wrote: it’s not hugely different from Monster Hunter, but the way that Wild Hearts weaves in crafting – sorry, “Karakuri technology” – adds an interesting quirk to the gameplay. Where older Monster Hunter clones like God Eater and Toukiden from back in the PSP/Vita days didn’t add all that much to the formula, being able to use magic to create objects out of thin air and use them in your epic battles adds a fun wrinkle. I wouldn’t say that it transforms Wild Hearts into something completely different, but it’s different enough that it sets the game apart a little.

Similarly, you could look at Wild Hearts S and wonder how it compares to the regular Wild Hearts that came out back in 2023. On that front, Koei Tecmo themselves have you covered, but the short version is: it’s mostly identical. Now you can have up to four players playing at once, provided that all the players have a Switch 2, and that’s more or less it. The game also features “balance adjustments,” which is good, I guess, but I imagine that if you played Wild Hearts already on another system, you’re not going to notice a huge difference between the game you played before and Wild Hearts S.

Unless you’re talking about visuals – which is the third way to look at Wild Hearts S: how good a port is it? After all, as we saw with Sonic X Shadow Generations, thanks to the Switch 2’s hardware being much more powerful than the original Switch, it’s fun to see how much better games perform now. And on that front, Wild Hearts S is…fine. It works, which is almost certainly something you wouldn’t have been able to say about Wild Hearts and the original Switch, but it’s not like the game looks incredible on the Switch 2. Wild Hearts S is definitely not in the same league as some of the very visually impressive games we’ve already seen on the Switch 2, and there are definitely moments where the game stutters and struggles a little to show everything happening. So as a showcase for the latest Nintendo system, it hardly bodes well for more challenging future ports.

Of course, all of these things are important to consider when thinking about Wild Hearts S, since it doesn’t exist in isolation. And that means that even if it doesn’t perform perfectly, and even if it’s not all that different from the original game just because it has an “S” in its name, we’re still talking about a game that’s taken the Monster Hunter formula and added enough wrinkles here and there that it’s more than just a clone. It makes for a fine time if you want to take down some monsters, either solo or with up to three Switch 2-owning friends, and all things considered, that’s a perfectly fine thing for a game to be.

Koei Tecmo provided us with a Wild Hearts S Nintendo Switch 2 code for review purposes.