Yo-kai Watch
Yo-kai Watch (妖怪ウォッチ Yōkai Wotchi, literally meaning; "Spirit Watch"), sometimes misspelled as Yo-Kai Watch, is a cross-media franchise owned by Level-5, with the manga being the first released medium of the franchise since December 15, 2012 in the monthly magazine CoroCoro Comic. Ever since then, the franchise released its planned and long-awaited first titled game for the Nintendo 3DS and has since inspired an array of media which includes an anime, merchandise, a card game, movies, collaborations, own store, numerous manga, and various spin-off games.
The series focuses on Yo-kai that are causing mischief in the realm of living. Ones who have the Yo-kai Watch are able to see the Yo-kai. The Yo-kai can attack the player when discovered, but mostly inspiriting people. The Yo-kai can be befriended and aid the player in their battle and confrontation with Yo-kai who have serious bad intention in the realm of living. The known main character of the franchise is Nathan Adams, who is the series overall protagonist.
History
After the success of their three major IPs, Professor Layton, Inazuma Eleven, and Danball Senki let Level-5 to create a new IP that is meant to stay for a very long time. They took a popular anime and manga series Doraemon as their influence and decided to create the IP Yo-kai Watch. Their first step into the development was to make the player explore freely and walking around in an open-world environment.
Before the franchise was released as a video game, the series was first released as a manga on December 15, 2012. Afterwards, Level-5 released a game trailer that was released on the E3 in 2011, which first shown the game running on the Playstation 3. The Playstation 3 version showed a much larger world, but Level-5 changed the platform from Playstation 3 to Nintendo 3DS.
Popularity in Japan
Their first video game released in Japan and became a major success. It debuted with 53,000 sold copies in its first week and sold in total 1.29 million in 2014, which became one of the best-selling games on the Nintendo 3DS.
The sequels of the game became extremely popular and the demands in other countries than Japan were extremely high. The animation series that is based on the game became one of the most-watched animated series in Japan, mostly ending in the top ten of the rates alongside with other popular animation series such as: Detective Conan, One Piece, Pokémon and Doraemon.
The franchise gained as well numerous of cross-overs in Japan with popular characters from popular series or franchises. The popularity in Japan leads Yo-kai Watch to become a phenomenal creation, as it became quickly a multi-billion franchise.
The franchise sold exact 10,438,903 copies in Japan alone, which excludes digital sales.[1]
Release in the west
The western audience were interested in the game, which plannings were revealed to release the first game worldwide. However, the game was released seperately in the west.
In 2015, the first game was released in North America, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. In 2016, Europe received the first game during the Spring. The animation of the series aired as well in west, with only one season and as well a second season. The anime is revealed to be very popular in the west.
The game has proven, not to be so popular in the west other than Japan and Europe. The first Yo-kai Watch game sold in North America very low, with 360,000 copies since 2017. This led Level-5 to change their plans for North America to make the franchise popular, bringing events in North America ahead of Japan. The first Yo-kai Watch game, sold much better in Europe than North America and even Japan with ony 650,000 copies. The game are very popular in France and Spain, which the game even received high demands from the customers. The situation in Europe has led that Yo-kai Watch 2, will be debuting in Russia, which also the European marketing of the franchise has different plans than the North American markets and promoting the franchise in different countries.