3/5 ★ – hunkypet's review of Yo-Kai Watch.

A fresh take on the tried and tested turn based RPG genre. Yo Kai Watch is a breath of fresh air, it looks absolutely amazing, period. Add in the 3D effect and I think it’s one of the best looking games on 3DS. It has a wonderful charm to it, easy going, with a whimsical flow to it all. The music is irritatingly catchy, I would be whistling and humming many of the tunes long after I had put the game down. The story is really unique aswell, well not in the typical sense. You have your usual JRPG fare of evil wanting to take over the world blah, blah, blah but it’s the way the game uses real world situations to pass across its message. Parents arguing, friendships on the rocks and becoming isolated or falling into depression. Heavy themes, handled expertly within the confines of the games reality and mechanics. Think of Yo-Kai like Pokemon, you collect little monsters and use them to battle. Except they auto battle, you control up to 6 and it’s up to you how you use them. You need to manage their stats and when to unleash their special abilities. It sounds bizarre and it is, it took me a long time to get my head around it, by the end I really enjoyed the battling system. With these games, you get out of it what you put in. I decided to create a well balanced squad by levelling up my early game Yo-Kai’s, I didn’t bother searching and trying to capture better and stronger ones as I didn’t enjoy the games mechanics for capturing (befriending) them, I thoroughly enjoyed the main story and I did all the side missions. There was some decent side content here but the majority boiled down to fetch quests and I wish I skipped a lot of it as I felt burnt out by the end. There was a huge amount of post game content that would have involved me either grinding to ungodly levels or searching out the strongest Yo-Kais and I didn’t feel up to the task. A fresh take on a tired genre, it has many strong points and packed to the brim with stuff to do but a lot of it is filler with minimal reward. Your mileage will vary, I had a good time, and at a different stage in my life, say being a kid, I may have fell in love with this series and it become what Pokemon was to me. Played on 3DS