Sapphic Sonic the Hedgehog with rhythm game elements that also features motorcycles, anime battles between women that use both martial arts AND sword-fighting, AND it has robots AND lasers AND skeletons; as a one-and-done aesthetic experience Sayonara Wild Hearts is pretty fucking awesome. It's got cute themes going on too, but it is pretty lucky it's such a short game cuz otherwise it'd be kinda frustrating that it takes so long to get to its specific thesis. And I'll be honest here: I don't think the gameplay is very good, as an action game nor as a rhythm game. The controls and camera were especially aggravating during certain sequences; it's really only saved by the game's rather generous checkpointing system. I don't know if it was just the Switch version or what, but the controls would also just hang up a lot for me causing a lot of unavoidable deaths, mostly happening when the player character model gets caught up against a wall/boundary.

That said, I do love how confident it is in its storytelling and diversity of gameplay stylings, and the best chunk of the game was probably towards the middle where the game mixed up the gameplay almost on a level-by-level basis (and also where I think the best song in the game happens). Relying on the player to form their own interpretations of the events unfolding was smart and I think pretty effective, but sometimes the visual homogeneity/repetition feels like it's potentially undermining the distinct narratives they're portraying, alongside muddying the visual clarity in a game that's already extremely difficult to parse in the moment-to-moment.

But I suppose a lot of that just doesn't really matter in the end though, huh? It's definitely been designed to be an aesthetic experience first, a narrative experience second, and a gameplay experience third (emphasized in how the game really doesn't want you to die and how performing perfectly seems overall deemphasized as there's only three possible achievable ranks on top of there being seemingly no possible fail-state). I dunno if I'll ever revisit this one, but I'm glad I finally picked it up on a whim. Also Queen Latifah sounds like she's having a lot of fun yelling the title of the game, and that kinda rules lol