The easy line to draw from Wild Hearts--the upcoming hunting game from publishers EA and Koei Tecmo and developer Omega Force is Capcom's Monster Hunter. Wild Hearts is a game about exploring large open areas, alone or with two other players, to take down gigantic monsters that move around the map as you fight them. And the developers don't entirely shy away from that comparison--but they're aspiring to do something much more than replicate Monster Hunter.

Speaking with Koei Tecmo's directors, Kotaro Hirata and Takuto Edagawa through a translator, they acknowledged the relationship, saying, "When you're making a hunting game, Monster Hunter is a huge presence in the genre, so we can't say we drew on it for a strong inspiration, but it's not like we didn't know it was there while we were making our game."

The comparison is appropriate as the games share many similarities, but developer Omega Force has explored the genre before with a few games in the Toukiden series. In those games, like in Monster Hunter and Wild Hearts, you hunt giant monsters to harvest them for material which can be used to upgrade your equipment. Despite that lineage in the genre, Omega Force is quick to say that Wild Hearts is not an extension of that world. "Unfortunately, there is no overlap. This is a completely new IP for us. We know that some of our fans were hoping it would have some overlap with Toukiden, but it doesn't," Hirata and Edagawa said. Wild Hearts and Toukiden exist in two separate universes, but Wild Hearts has allowed Omega Force to pick up where it left off in the genre in a big, well-funded way, while exploring an impressive crafting system called Karakuri that makes it stand apart.