Yo kai Watch (video game)

Plot

Players can either choose to play as a boy (Nate) or a girl (Katie). While exploring the forest with friends, the player comes across a mysterious capsule machine. Upon opening one of its capsules, the player is greeted by a Yo-kai named Whisper, who bestows onto them the Yo-kai Watch, a device that allows its wearer to see all the various Yo-kai that are responsible for all sorts of mischievous happenings in daily life. Using the Yo-kai Watch, the player befriends various Yo-kai that can be used to battle against more fiendish Yo-kai.

Gameplay

Yo-kai Watch is a role-playing video game where the player searches around Springdale for Yo-kai using the 3DS' touchscreen. Players befriend Yo-kai by giving them a food that they like before beginning battle, and after defeating the Yo-kai it approaches the player character and gives them its Yo-kai Medal, allowing it to be summoned at will. Yo-kai can also be acquired through an in game Gasha Machine by collecting in-game coins or using Play Coins. Certain Yo-kai are necessary for completing the game's main quest, and special rare Yo-kai are acquired through various subquests. Yo-kai have the capability to evolve into more powerful versions of themselves if they reach a certain level, or they can evolve by combining with particular items or other Yo-kai. The Yo-kai are divided amongst eight different tribes, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. There are also Legendary Yo-kai that can only be obtained by collecting a particular set of Yo-kai listed in the Yo-kai Medallium, a compendium of the different Yo-kai the player has encountered or befriended.

When the player encounters a Yo-kai, they enter into battle with it using six Yo-kai that the player has befriended previously. The touchscreen is used during battles to rotate amongst the player's Yo-kai in battle at will. It is also used either to clear up status effects on the player's Yo-kai or to charge up the Yo-kai's special abilities. A common in-game event is "Oni Time" (Terror Time), where the player character enters a nightmare realm where he or she looks for treasure chests with special items in them all while trying to avoid being seen by other Yo-kai. If spotted, the player is chased by a powerful Oni Yo-kai that can easily wipe out the player's party unless they can escape. It is possible to defeat the Oni, but only if the player's Yo-kai are particularly powerful. The player can also encounter similarly powerful Namahage Yo-kai if the player crosses the street on a red light, but the encounter may be beneficial if the player follows the rules.

Development

Yo-kai Watch was developed by Level-5, a Japanese video game developer based in Fukuoka, Japan. Before Yo-kai Watch, Level-5 were best known for their Professor Layton series of puzzle adventure games for the Nintendo DS, one of the best selling game series on the platform, with 15 million units sold across six titles. At a time where Level-5 were already successful with resonating with younger gamers with multiple IPs such as Inazuma Eleven and Ni no Kuni, many of the Level-5 staff expressed interest in creating, in Level-5 CEO Akihiro Hino's words, the new Doraemon; a title that would "be loved by many people over a long period of time". The team agreed that such a title would be an open world role-playing game.

Marketing and release

Yo-kai Watch was officially unveiled to the public by Level-5 at the 2011 Tokyo Game Show, where it was announced during the company's annual Level-5 Vision press conference. It was planned from the start that Yo-kai Watch would be a franchise that consisted of a manga and anime series. A shōnen manga series by Noriyuki Konishi began serialization in CoroCoro Comic from December 15, 2012. This series has been licensed by Viz Media under its Perfect Square imprint. The series went on to earn awards for best Children's Manga at the 2014 Kodansha Manga Awards and at the 2015 Shogakukan Manga Awards. Prior to the release of Yo-kai Watch in Japan, a game demo was made available to download from the Nintendo eShop on July 3, 2013.

After the success of the game and its sequel, Yo-kai Watch 2, a localization of the franchise in territories outside Japan was seriously considered. After registering a trademark for the Yo-kai Watch brand in the United States in January 2014, and inviting public opinion on an international release of the game, Level-5 formally announced in April 2015 that the game would indeed be released in the United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America, and Korea, with Nintendo helping to publish the game outside Japan. At E3 2015, a trailer for the game was showcased during Nintendo's Digital Event presentation, and demos of the game were available to play on the show floor during the convention. A release window of Holiday 2015 was also announced at the convention, with the date being further clarified to a November 6 release in North America by the time the game was showcased at the EB Games Expo 2015. A demo for the game was released on the Nintendo eShop in North America on October 22, 2015. The game was also sold as a bundle with the Nintendo 2DS in North America, selling under $100.

An anime series based on the video game premiered on the TX Network, owned by TV Tokyo, on January 8, 2014, six months after the Japanese release of the game. The series has run continuously on TV Tokyo since then, including a rebranding as a "Second Season" featuring new characters from the upcoming Yo-kai Watch 3 game. As part of efforts to localize Yo-kai Watch in western countries, the series was broadcast in the United States; dubbed in English and premiered on Disney XD on October 5, 2015, a month before the release of the game in North America. The series will also be broadcast in Australia on GO! in 2016.

Critical reception

Japanese video game magazine Famitsu scored the game a 36 out of 40, with all of the four judges of the review giving the game 9 out of 10. Editor Reona Ebihara wrote that "the game gradually expands its feature set as you go, opening up this very unique world that's easy to melt into." She also commented positively of the game's use of the Nintendo 3DS' stereoscopic features and its "simple and deeply strategic" battle system. Fellow reviewer Urara Honma corroborated Ebihara's remarks, stating that the battle system felt "really great to control". She further wrote, "You won't run into much frustration playing this game, and while it does feel like one big fetch quest at times, the charms of the story more than make up for that." IGN awarded it a score of 7.2 out of 10, saying "Yo-kai Watch's gameplay is inconsistent, but its world is compelling."

Commercial performance

Yo-kai Watch debuted with a strong opening week, selling over 53,000 units in its first week of availability; the best selling handheld game in Japan and second-best selling game in Japan for that week, beaten only by Nintendo's 92,000 unit sales for Pikmin 3. In a list published at the end of the year, Japanese video game magazine Famitsu named Yo-kai Watch as the 23rd best selling game in Japan, with just over 280,000 units sold. After the debut of the Yo-kai Watch anime in January 2014, Level-5, a month later, reported that the sales numbers for the game had spiked to over 500,000 physical copies of the game sold alone, without including digital download sales. The number was brought up to over 800,000, including digital sales, after sales tracker Media Create reported the game had sold as much by May 2015, though, Famitsu reported a more conservative estimate of 650,000 in the same time frame. The month earlier, however, Level-5 reported that they had, in fact, shipped 1 million units, with Level-5 CEO Akihiro Hino stating, in an interview with Famitsu, that he believed that the game would reach the million sales mark soon. By June, a month before the release of the game's sequel, Yo-kai Watch 2, the game had crossed the million sales milestone, according to Media Create, after a steady increase of weekly sales since January 2014. By November 2014, the game had sold a total of just under 1,294,000 units sold in Japan. As of June 10, 2016, the game has reportedly sold around 400,000 units in North America.

Sequels

A sequel to Yo-kai Watch was released in July 2014 for the Nintendo 3DS in two versions: Yo-kai Watch 2: Ganso (妖怪ウォッチ2 元祖, Yōkai Wotchi 2 Ganso) and Yo-kai Watch 2: Honke (妖怪ウォッチ2 本家, Yōkai Wotchi 2 Honke). Borrowing near-identical gameplay elements from the original Yo-kai Watch, the games featured an expanded setting, additional game modes, and a broadly expanded roster of Yo-kai. The games were released to positive critical reception, and an overwhelmingly successful commercial performance boosted by the popularity of the anime and the preceding game. Both versions of the game accumulated pre-order sales of over 800,000, with the games selling over 1.28 million units in their first week of sale. The games would go on to become the best selling games in Japan for 2014, selling over 3 million copies by December and outperforming Nintendo's Pokémon franchise with Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire and Capcom's Monster Hunter franchise, with Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate. The games join Yo-kai Watch as two of the best selling games on the Nintendo 3DS. A third version of the game, Yo-kai Watch 2: Shinuchi (妖怪ウォッチ2 真打, Yōkai Wotchi 2 Shin'uchi), was released in December 2014, adding enhancements to the original Ganso and Honke versions of the game. In addition, a second sequel, Yo-kai Watch 3, is also planned, slated for a 2016 release in Japan.