Sayonara Wild Hearts

 

The game presents itself as a story of a broken heart, with a path to self-realization and self-love, but immediately turns itself into psychedelics as soon as it gives the player the control.

It decides to become a rhythm game, except there's no real sense of tempo because the visual cues are treated more as quick-time events, as environmental obstacles in the story, than the player having to immerse themself in the music, like Tetsuya Mizuguchi's "Rez", or having the challenge feel in flow with the story at hand, like Keiichi Yano's works such as "Gitaroo Man" and "Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!". It is a fast-paced chase sequence, except that the presence of checkpoints at every corner and an unlimited amount of attempts reduces the weight and intensity of the tracks, as if the game couldn't stand the player losing, unlike high velocity games such as Toshihiro Nagoshi's "F-Zero GX". The psychedelic stylization with rapid camera movements and angle shifts distorts the clarity of the chase sequences, and thus their spatial coherence, making them pale in comparison, even within the animation world, to Takeshi Koike's "Redline".

The game's apologists may say that the comparisons are unfair, as "Sayonara Wild Hearts" has narrative aspirations after all, yet ultimately, the most aggravating aspect of this work is the story itself. The game avoids going into specifics: The only aspect of the protagonist that is known to the player is that her heart was violently broken, presumably by a disappointment in love, but they never know what circumstances caused them. They never know if it was unrequited love, if it was abuse, if the relationship ended abruptly, if she was cheated on. Nothing is set up, which on the one hand lets people project themselves into the game, but on the other hand quickly reveals the game's lack of interest in developing depth in its discourse, to resort instead to vague psychedelic metaphors about the main character's feelings to showcase a style - are the enemies literal arcanas? are they abstractions of the self? or from past relationships? saying "all three" doesn't help the game's case - , not dissimilar to Conrad Roset's appalling "Gris". Yet pain, heartbreak and trauma is always specific, it always manifests itself differently to everyone, and it deserves to be treated with respect for each individual. "Sayonara Wild Hearts" instead recourses to cowardly pat the player in the back through hyper-stylized action sequences that they can't really lose, and merely telling them, according to an interview with developer Simon Flesser [1], that they're awesome. The discourse of fake positivism, the discourse of wholesome games, the discourse of lies. Thus, when the game comes to its final act and the main character starts kissing the arcanas as an expression of forgiveness (to herself? to her past relationships?), the climax feels hollow and unauthentic, especially in comparison to other surreal, more coherent representations of personal liberation such as the car sequence in the tear-jerking finale of Kunihiko Ikuhara's "Adolescence of Utena", whose use of metaphors fits into creating a succinct visual reference of bursting out of the inner childhood to face the adult world.

The proliferation of works that pretend to deal with mental health and depression has risen in the 2010s, but this has apparently let developers utilize them to create a facade of artistic merit, of supposedly daring works that load themselves with conservative mechanics without understanding what made them work in the first place. Flesser's "Sayonara Wild Hearts" joins the group of this ignominious circle.

[1] https://www.dualshockers.com/wild-hearts-never-die-an-interview-with-sayonara-wild-hearts-developer-simogo/
"When asked what they hope players take away from the game, Flesser said “I want the game to make people feel that they are awesome.”"