Sayonara Wild Hearts

Sayonara Wild Hearts is a music-based arcade game created by Simogo and published by Annapurna Interactive. Described as a "pop album video game", Sayonara Wild Hearts follows the story of a heartbroken young woman through a surrealistic landscape. Each level of the game is tied to a song. The protagonist must collect fragments of her broken heart, while avoiding obstacles and fighting enemies.

Mythology and History
In an alternate universe watched over by three divine arcana of the Tarot (The High Priestess, The Hierophant, and The Empress), a cursed arcanum named Little Death (Death), and her allies, the Dancing Devils (The Devil), the Howling Moons (The Moon), the Stereo Lovers (The Lovers), and Hermit64 (The Hermit), stole all harmony, and hid it in their hearts.

In our universe, there is a young woman whose heart has been violently broken. The fragments of her heart travel all the way to the alternate universe where, before the divine arcana began to fade, they create a heroine from the shards of her broken heart. The woman, while resting in her bed, sees a curious butterfly that transports her to the alternate universe. Riding her longboard along an ethereal highway, she chases the butterfly, and upon capturing it, she transforms into a masked heroine (The Fool).

This heroine then travels the alternate universe, battling the five arcanas that stole its harmony.

During her adventure, she uses several powers corresponding to other arcanas of the Tarot: a motorcycle (Wheel of Fortune), a white stag (The Emperor), two automatic guns attached to her motorcycle (Justice and Judgement), a sword (Strength), a car (The Chariot), a ship (The Star) and a bow (Temperance).

She then defeats Little Death, but the foe's heart fragments reassemble into a gigantic final monster. After defeating it, the heroine transforms back into her former self, the young woman. She then imagines herself as each of her former foes, and proceeds to fight each in turn. Instead of defeating them however, she forgives them with a brief kiss. The divine arcana then tell the young woman that she has restored harmony to their world, and wish her farewell. She rides back to her world on her skateboard and arrives slightly older, but having overcome her heartbreak and playing music.

All the other tarot cards make an appearance as well.

Geography and Places
Places are usually surreal versions of everyday landscapes. Most environments are cities, some more surreal than others (one of them is composed of floating buildings), though there is also a forest, a desert and a digital world, in addition to the void that allows the heroine to travel from one enemy to the other.

Major elements
Sayonara Wild Hearts is centered around moving around (by either using a vehicle, or flying), fighting enemies either in close quarter battles (unarmed or sword, choreographed like dance performances), or with ranged weapons (bike-mounted machine guns and bow, looking like rail shooter segments), and gathering heart fragments.

Recurring themes
The enemies fought by the heroine can be interpreted as either flaws in her personality, or hardships that broke her hearts that she must endure to recover. In any case, the parallelism between the alternate universe and the woman's universe is obvious, though the precise metaphor is left to interpretation.

Aesthetics
The aesthetics is extremely surreal, saturated with neon colors, especially pink and purple. Pop music is present in every level, and most actions like attacks and jumps seem to follow its rhythms. The architecture and character design are somewhat reminiscent of the 80's.

The chain of events is extremely fluid, as the character can go from driving to flying to fighting seamlessly.