Level-5 have been sitting on a western release for their Yo-Kai Watch franchise for some time. There were a lot of reasons for this, chief among them being just how steeped in Japanese culture the series is – indeed, Yo-Kai Watch has achieved the same kind of towering popularity in its homeland that the now-waning Pokemon did on release. Nintendo got on board with Level-5 to localise the first game in the franchise, no small task. The result is something that, while still very Japanese, is actual pretty special.
Yo-Kai Watch’s central hook is very similar to that of Pokemon: collect a bunch of weird monsters and make them fight one another. These monsters are called yokai which, in Japanese culture are considered to be naturally occurring spirits. They’re prone to mischief rather than mayhem or terror – the Japanese believe that’s the business of Oni, or demons. Your story begins with your avatar (girl or boy, depending on which you choose) discovering that they have the enviable ability to not only communicate with yokai but influence them to do what he or she wants. With that, you’re on your way to achieving your one true goal – whiling away the summer months while school. You’ll do this by bombing around and using your yokai to start fights with the more aggressive wild yokai out in the world.
Where Yo-Kai Watch differs from Pokemon is that it doesn’t stick like glue to the JRPG formula the way the latter does. Pokemon sends you around entire countries, cleaning out whole towns in your quest to subdue everyone who ever picked up a Pokeball. Yo-Kai Watch plays out in a single Japanese city full of Dungeons, grimy alleys hidden behind storefronts and homes. Some of the quests you’re given revolve around fairly mundane tasks like “find your dad’s business papers so he doesn’t get fired,” which will see you tracking down a yokai that eats short-term memory, making him forget where he put them, but you’re a kid so the stakes feel sky-high.
This mundanity is one of the reasons Level-5 were worried about bringing the series to the west. For Japanese kids, it’s a fantastic versions of their actual summers – they’re much more independent than western kids, often encouraged to venture out into the world and find things to entertain them on their own. Take the yokai out of the equation, and you’ve got yourself a fairly standard summer for a Japanese kid and that’s a big part of what makes these games so engaging to them. For a kid in the west, used to being constantly supervised and having to drag their parents around to do anything, it might not make much sense but I doubt they’ll care very much. They certainly won’t connect with the game in the same way their Japanese counterparts can.
Similarly, the yokai are another area where Yo-Kai Watch might go right over the heads of western kids in terms of context. This is another area where it’s easy to compare the series to Pokemon – remember Farfetch’d? That duck thing that carries a damn spring onion under its wing for no readily apparent reason? That’s a solid visual joke in Japan that just doesn’t translate for western audiences, but he’s interesting and weird enough that it’s funny, just in a different way. Many of the yokai follow a similar strain of “inside” Japanese references, as in most kids would know what a kappa is if you showed them one. Half the fun of fighting and capturing these things is knowing exactly what it is you’re getting into. All western kids are going to see is a frog-looking thing. They’re not all like that, of course, like Jibanyan which is a red cat with fire tails. That’s cool, right? Western kids can get behind that.
Level-5 and Nintendo have done an incredible job with the game’s localisation. Pulling from Square-Enix’s similarly excellent Dragon Quest translations, a lot of the original names are crafty word jokes and puns. In a feat that the Asterix comics translators would be proud of, the translated names for English-speaking audiences are extremely clever and often very funny.
One last point and then I promise I’ll stop harping on the culture barrier thing. Yo-Kai Watch has a sense of humour that is extremely Japanese. This means you’ll find your character encountering all sorts of strange content that may cause a few raised eyebrows among parents of younger players. There was one mission early on that sent my very young female character to find the underwear of an old man she’d only just met. To recover them, she had to venture into a bathhouse and fight a half-naked, gross-looking yokai while a group of fully-grown men wearing towels and that’s it perform the weirdest damned dance in the background. You see what I’m saying, right? It’s hilarious to Japanese people but to my Australian brain, there’s a lot wrong with that picture considering it’s in a kid’s game.
These weird language and culture quirks aside, there is a lot to like about Yo-Kai Watch. It’s by turns funny, very cute and will remind you of being a kid and playing make believe. It’s also quietly educational – I found out very quickly that ignoring the pedestrian lights at street crossings would get me into trouble and cause an overpowered Oni demon to turn up, challenge me to battle and make short work of me as penance for my crime.
The story, too, will charm the pants off of you by keeping the narrative at ground level. In seeing the game from a child’s point of view, you’re opened up to the kind of stakes – real or imagined – that kids put value on. One mission has you trying to help a boy find a ring that belongs to his mother. He foolishly tried to use it as a fishing lure and ended up dropping it in a lake and is now worried that his mother won’t want to stay with his father anymore as a result. Upon turning the quest in, you discover that his mum was simply heading out of town for a reunion and didn’t really care about losing the ring at all. Little moments like these take a game that’s aimed squarely at children and provide a little something for the adults to think about too.
As monster-collector games go, Yo-Kai Watch is far simpler than its contemporaries like Persona 4 or Dragon Quest Monsters. You can field three monsters at a time in battle, but you don’t actually have any direct control over them. They can handle the attack on their own, your role is to pick a target and keep them alive. You can throw them food if their health is getting low, or feed it to an enemy to try and placate them a bit. You can also play a couple of quick mini games on the touch screen to activate super abilities for big damage or enemy stat debuffs. You’ll need to stay on top of what’s happening, though, because leaving any enemy unattended for even a few moments opens your yokai up to huge damage. This hands-off approach took me quite a while to wrap my head around but once I got it, I started to perform much more effectively in combat.
A lot of the strategising actually occurs while you’re out of battle, giving your yokai items that offer stat buffs or debuffs and where you want your yokai to be placed in battle. You’ll get the best performance out of your yokai if you stack them up with others of a similar kind. In some cases, you can also fuse a pair of yokai together to create a bigger, badder, stronger monster (which will be very familiar to anyone who’s played Persona or DQM).
Simple combat also means simple level design. Dungeons are pretty interesting with a few puzzles here and there keep things from getting too linear. You’ve also got a rather large open world to explore in the game’s city. There’s sidequests aplenty and there’s also a bit of replayability in the dungeons due to some doors not being openable until you hit a particular level of strength. These rooms frequently have better loot and harder enemies waiting inside.
In short, Yo-Kai Watch is aimed directly at kids but, as a 31-year-old man, I found it to be cheeky, smart, surprisingly engrossing and really quite long. While I can’t see it having the same impact in the west that it has in its homeland, and I certainly can’t see the hardcore Pokemon scene getting swept up in it, there’s a lot to like here. There’s an emphasis on character and setting that isn’t present many other games of this kind. There aren’t many games that can appeal as easily to kids and adults at once, but Yo-Kai Watch pulls it off.
Review Score: 8.0 out of 10
Highlights: Charming; Different; There’s a lot of game here
Lowlights: The cultural divide may make it difficult for some to get into it
Developer: Level-5
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: December 14, 2015
Platform: Nintendo 3DS
Reviewed on Nintendo 3DS
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