Ruby Rawlins

When I was in first grade I played my brother’s Pokemon Blue. On my birthday I pleaded with my dad to get Silver (because Lugia is cool) and I can still remember the smell of the box. My obsession with Pokemon continued on into adulthood. I have plushes of Marill, Scraggy, and Piplup and I still get a copy of one game for each core-game release. Needless to say I have an appreciation for the Pokemon series so when I say that I was ready to throw down the towel and put my bid in with Yokai Watch it wasn’t for no reason.

Yokai Watch (Yo-Kai officially, but then it’s Pokémon as well) is not unlike Pokemon in that it has been described as a multimedia campaign. Games, anime, toys, and card games are the foundation of both franchises. Pokemon has had a 15 year head-start but that also means Pokemon is about 15 years set in its way.

Yokai Watch has been a hit in Japan since 2013. It was developed by Level 5 (Ni No Kuni, Layton, Fantasy Life) and while it started as a niche title, the anime created a huge boon in sales and it has since become somewhat of a phenomenon. There have been plenty of articles about Yokai Watch being the “Pokemon Killer” and plenty of arguments for it being too culturally disparate to sell in the west. Ultimately I am optimistic about the open-mindedness of children and most Yokai are pretty cute outside of their cultural history so I don’t think that’s the problem.

I lost some faith in Pokemon since X and Y. I don’t think the 3D looks very charming, the Pokemon models don’t animate a whole lot, which was totally fine in Stadium but hasn’t aged well. It was also the generation with the least number of new Pokemon, Mega evolution just doesn’t appeal to me, and battles play out slowly. Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire were anticipated remakes of Ruby and Sapphire but apart from a map on the bottom screen it didn’t feel much better than X and Y. I will probably still play the next iteration from the series and as I mentioned before I have started a new Nuzlocke of Y because there is a small flame inside me that still burns.

So what is the problem? Why has it taken me so many paragraphs to just say that Yokai Watch will probably do fine? Because I experienced a lot of pessimistic design in my experience with Yokai Watch 1 and 2. I say pessimistic because I believe they come from a place of the modern free-to-play models of mobile games and from mimicking known strategies to make money in the same way PUAs think that saying “just the right words” will get women to sleep with them. Understanding how we as humans think is neat but then going to try and exploit those ways of thinking is gross.

The Pokeball design reflects another way that Yokai Watch and Pokemon are similar. The ball designs are modeled after the balls that pop out of gasha machines; coin-operated machines usually found in malls which usually have cheap toys in them.

You never know what you’ll get!

Yokai Watch also has connections to gasha machines but in a more pessimistic sense. Not only does a magical gasha machine kick start the adventure of the protagonist but it also acts as a mechanic during the game to get random Yokai and items. Some Yokai in the game are exclusive to the gasha machine and oftentimes they’re much more powerful than any Yokai you can find for yourself.

You never know what you’ll get!

So with that in mind I actually feel bad for even mentioning the similarities between Pokemon and gasha machines. The Pokemon franchise is not perfect when it comes to monetising children but it has the good sense to make its core game experience as free from themes of gambling and other pessimism as possible (sidenote: the free-to-play Pokemon Shuffle on iOS is full of pessimistic design). In places where Pokemon acts poorly in its multimedia pursuits (card games, toys, non-core games), Yokai Watch does just as poorly or worse.

In third grade I had a Digimon. I loved raising that tiny baby dinosaur and even set up a “hacking shop” in my school where I would just shove paper in my friends’ digimon to mess with the data. I eventually got a digivice, and it was okay, but it already had all the digimon in it and was less fun than the basic digimon as a result.

Yokai Watch’s main sales approach apart from the videogame is selling its iconic watch and matching medallions. The medals themselves are totally neat. They have cool art showing the personality of the Yokai and I’m sure it would be nice to have a medal of your favourite Yokai.

Outside of a few cases, Yokai Medals are sold in blind-boxes. This type of sales practice is incredibly pessimistic. Watching a video of a young girl explain Yokai Medals was probably meant to be endearing (and it is somewhat) but every time she said “Oh I’ve got that one” all I could think about is what a waste of money blind-boxes are and how gross it is to sell glorified gambling to children. Again Pokemon is not innocent in this either, but trading card games (Yokai has this as well) which are often sold in blind Boosters are a tertiary market and don’t wholly reflect the practices of a franchise. On another note I have feelings about trading and collectible card games compared to living card games but that’s the subject of another writeup.

My favourite Pokemon varies by the time of day but it's either Scraggy or Slowbro. I can find the positive values in almost every Pokemon and each Pokemon is welcome in my party. Pokemon that start off weak often evolve into Pokemon that can hold their weight. Pokemon that don’t evolve usually learn cool moves or have unique abilities that make them fun to have.

In Yokai I also have favourites. Fuumin is adorable and probably makes number 1, although if I wanted to consider her for a post-game party I would almost certainly have to hope for the gasha-only rare equivalent. This brings me to the next point. Yokai are sorted not only by their types and elements, but also by their rank and rarity. Types and elements categorise Yokai in fairly benign ways. Rank determines a Yokai’s value as a party member and gives an estimate of its stat growth. Rarity is basically a modifier on rank in that it just tells you if the Yokai is a sub-type of a common version (Rare and Legendary).

In my first game of Yokai Watch I loved the design of Cadin (Semimaru) so I kept him in my party. I knew from spoilers that there were two other Cadin-Yokai so I figured I was cool to keep him in my party. I named him Cicadad. At about level 20 he evolved into Kagemaru and I was in love with him. He stayed in my party while I caught higher rank Yokai, becoming more and more obsolete after each level. At level 45 I decided to see what was up. It turned out he didn’t evolve into the third form and that it was just a “rare” subspecies. So my buddy from the start of the game got canned.

In other words the game disincentivises using your favourites. In that example not only does your buddy from the start of the game get ditched for a rarer, shinier version of itself, but even that version is going to be a chore to use in any kind of post-story adventure. On the other hand while Pokemon like Sentret might start out pretty weak, once evolved they can usually get a diverse enough moveset to stay useful for the entire game.

The final issue I have with what I consider a misuse of the Yokaipedia is that very few Yokai evolve. On its own that might be fine. I get that Yokai Watch isn’t a clone of Pokemon but several Yokai you can find at the start of the game never evolve and never get better. The second Yokai in YW1 is Buhu (Tohohogiisu) and it never evolves and only has subspecies of slightly higher ranks. I didn’t even bother keeping Buhu in my party once I filled my party because I knew ahead of time that he would never evolve. Yokai Watch made me pessimistic because of design choices that Level 5 made.

There is so much I can say about Yokai Watch and Pokemon. I wrote this in a way that makes it sound like I hate Yokai Watch but I spent tens of hours in each game and I liked my experience with both games. The ways in which Yokai Watch builds its world is vastly different to Pokemon and it’s worth examining as well. I was so on board with Yokai Watch for a while but its pessimistic design pushes me away. No, I don’t want to come back to the gasha machine every day to get a chance at finding an exclusive Yokai. No, I don’t want my Yokai to become obsolete because the game scales rankings in such a way that my low rank Yokai are barely useful later on. No, I don’t appreciate being sold blind-box medallions so I have a chance at a Fuumin medal. But kids will probably eat that stuff up right now, so good luck with that.