This summer I decided to revisit my favorite childhood game with my best friend just to see if it still held up. I was fully expecting to be bored out of my skull just moments after opening my Nintendo 3DS or, even worse, disappointed by the trickery of nostalgia, losing magic and sentiment compared to the dog days of elementary school; however, I am so happy to share that this was not at all the case. Thank you Jesus Christ, Abraham, Allah, Buddha, literally every major religious figure in history for joining forces just so I could experience Yo-kai Watch like a kid on Christmas morning again.
Yo-kai Watch is a Japanese multimedia franchise released by Level-5, the same company behind games like Professor Layton and Ni no Kuni. Debuting as a creature-catching RPG on the Nintendo 3DS on July 11, 2013, it quickly expanded into an anime series, manga, toys and movies, becoming a home run hit in Japan for several years and even surpassing the success of Pokémon for a hot minute while at the peak of its powers.
Yo-kai are mischievous beings from Japanese folklore who love meddling in human affairs; you may have heard of kappa, oni, tanuki or tengu referenced in some of your favorite media. In the world of Yo-kai Watch they are cartoonish and somewhat punny caricatures of these beings: ghosts, golems and suburban legends with more of a psychological influence on humans. They’re the reason you started crying dramatically over that one hemorrhoid cream commercial, forgot what you stepped into the kitchen for or why you always feel like someone’s peeking at you while you’re on the toilet. There is a specific yo-kai responsible for each and every abnormal behavior; it’s like discovering that every weird mood swing or cringey moment might have a cheeky supernatural explanation. With the help of a mystical watch, our protagonist Nate (Keita in Japan) can see and befriend these quirky spirits, bringing normalcy to the once terrorized neighborhood. Like Nate, players explore a town full of hidden yo-kai, battle and befriend them using the watch, build teams to combat others and use medals to summon them during battles.
Children are reckless and wildly emotional creatures. I didn’t have the words for it at the time, but there’s a reassurance in the idea that the spirit of the world, the psychology of our most irrational emotions and social behaviors, are architected by external forces and on a plane that’s invisible but parallel to ours. This life perspective is cut from the same creative cloth that invigorates real civilizations with tales of gods, tricksters and avatars. This narrative feels not like an exorcism of our inner phantoms but a whimsical celebration of what makes us human.
Its unapologetically Japanese nature was sadly why it didn’t translate so well for Western consumers. For instance, the anime and videogame soundtrack compiled by the bands King Cream Soda and Dream5 brought a delicious yet aggressive blend of J-pop and jazz that is objectively overstimulating and not the most internationally friendly. The franchise consequently developed more of a cult following rather than a mass-market appeal. At its peak performance, Yo-kai Watch 2: Bony Spirits and Fleshy Souls sold under 70,000 units in its first year, with things going significantly downhill in the twilight between this magnum opus era and the experimental era.
Beginning in July of 2015 with the release of Yo-kai Watch Blasters, Level-5 began its reign of terror with console spin-offs, followed by Yo-kai Watch 3: Sushi and Tempura on July 16, 2016, introducing the United States as an in-universe location and bringing about some mildly racist interpretations of American culture. In the span of one year, the company released the Yo-kai Watch Wibble Wobble (Puni Puni) mobile game, arcade adaptations of Blasters, crossover games with Koei Tecmo’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Ubisoft’s Just Dance. The identity of Yo-kai Watch was losing focus at an exponential rate.
There’s no sugarcoating it — this thing bombed in the States; every viper with a computer deemed it an inferior copy of Pokémon and called it a day. I do hope, however, that after grossly condensing this franchise and my love for it before your very eyes, you’ve at least found an appreciation for what it offered to introverted kids like me. The game and series were timeless creations that used humor and symbolism to explore social behavior in a surprisingly impactful way. In revisiting this memory over the summer, I bonded with my best friend just as much as when we were in sixth grade gabbing so annoyingly about which yo-kai tribes our friends would be in, how to defeat that boss in that one level and which one we thought had the coolest backstory. I don't care what anybody else says, this is the greatest franchise the world has never known.
Marc Staiano is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at mcs382@cornell.edu.
