Yo-Kai Watch

2025-09-07
At some point in Yokai Watch you receive a quest to retrieve a man's misplaced underwear. You investigate the local onsen, where the man thinks he left them, only to find a spirit has them. A big ass pig spirit named Sproink. And Sproink's wearing the underwear. You of course fight said pig during which in the background there are dancing--blushing--old men wearing only towels. And honestly if I could end the review there it'd be an easy 10/10, no notes, masterpiece, ship it, bravo, standing ovation.

That is to say the vibes are on point and the gameplay...well, we'll get to that. Vibes, then. Above all else, Yokai Watch is charming. You spend your time as a little kid wandering around a beautifully rendered little Japanese town in the summer, searching up in trees, under vending machines, in abandoned houses, closed schools, and outdoor shopping malls for spirits to collect. There's so much detail to the town and it all feels so real with the cacophony of cicadas and the little crosswalk signals you're supposed to obey that I couldn't help but be sucked in. Add to that the eponymous Yo-Kai and all their adorable designs. I mean, behind me is a little Jibanyan plushy sitting on my bookcase because how could I not love the little guy?

Surprisingly the funniest part of the writing to me isn't when you fight a pig wearing stolen underwear. No, it's because while ostensibly being a game for kids it espouses seemingly morally bankrupt wisdom. It's a game about a kid who can get spirits to help him solve problems, right? The problem is the solution for half the side quests are either "Everything bad that happens isn't your fault, it's the spirits!" or "Don't figure out how to solve this yourself, we'll just use a spirit to do it!" One quest has you investigating a child who's been shut inside for the whole summer. You find out he accidentally asked out the wrong girl and is hiding out to avoid dealing with the problem. The solution? Easy! We find a spirit that wipes his memory so he doesn't remember asking out the girl in the first place. Taking responsibility? Cringe! We'll just pretend it never happened! I love it.

As much as I adored the setting of Yokai Watch, the actual gameplay overstays its welcome incredibly quickly. What's on offer is basically Pokemon with 3v3 real-time battles. The problem is every part of it seems really cool and then lowkey sucks due to a mix of mechanics that really don't matter paired with an over-reliance on using the touch screen.

Let's start with catching a Yokai. First we must find the little bastard. We pull out our handy little radar thing which tells us if a Yokai is nearby. So we wander around, oh maybe it's in the tree, nope, okay under the car, nope, ah, here we go, it's under the vending machine. And only after interacting with the correct object in the world do we then get to see what Yokai it is. Wrong Yokai? We have to do this whole process but go somewhere else because this Yokai won't leave till we defeat it. Cue nervous laughter. Ok let's imagine we found the Yokai we want, now we have to catch it. This involves chasing a dot around on the touch screen with your finger until a random battle starts. This experience runs the gamut from quaint the first time you do it, to utterly infuriating when you've done it one hundred times and/or you are chasing one of the Yokai that is a meth-addicted spastic, dodging every move of your finger. Christ, okay we've pinned down the little fucker now how do we catch them? You hope. Yes, you hope they join you after the battle. I mean ok you can throw their favorite food at them (good luck figuring that out without a guide) which sometimes works. Or you ignore this whole thing and wait till you get a Shmoopie and then every Yokai on the planet wants to be a groupie. I was both relieved and extremely angry when I realized sweet, blessed Shmoopie was the key to this whole infernal process and I had wasted hours of my life praying to RNGesus.

But don't worry, we haven't had our fill of touch screen mini-games just yet, no sir. Battles involve a bunch of active participation. Want to change out party members? Rotate the team spinner thing. Want to use a Yokai's special move? Rotate a spinner...or pop some bubbles or--the fucking worst one--trace out some special bargain-bin hiragana symbol like you're playing fucking Black & White or Arx Fatalis. The first couple of times I was like "Wow this is so much more engaging than Pokemon." And then after the 10th time I was like "Oh my god, I'm going to have to do this for the rest of the game..." And yes, every single time you want to use a special move or uncurse a Yokai you have to do one of these touch screen minigames. I must have popped ten thousand bubbles in my 20 hours playing this game. What the fuck? It makes sense that there's so much interactivity because the facade of depth with various types associated with each Yokai and their moves and the different families of Yokai seemingly don't matter at all. I just fed Jibanyan every EXP item and my hulking, red, spirit cat was able to eviscerate every enemy we came across.

Despite all that frustration I stuck around because the charm is undeniable. It's certainly no Fantasy Life but it shares enough DNA that I kept coming back nonetheless. And, really, all my complaints are the exact sort of things easily sanded away in sequels. So, you know what? Yeah I'm in for Yokai Watch 2.