If you had to explain Yo-kai Watch in a nutshell to someone who`s never heard of or played it, you might boil it down to `Pokemon but with Japanese ghosts` or `Baby`s first Shin Megami Tensei.` Anything grim or distressing about a kid who can talk to ghosts goes by the wayside when the ghosts are comical entities like a missing left sock or a possessed police car. In this third expansive and quirky outing for the Yo-kai Watch series, our hero Nate has to take on a quest far more daunting than anything he´s faced so far: moving to America.Specifically, Nate`s family ends up moving to BBQ, an over-the-top caricature of Texas, for his dad`s job, and finds that the U.S. has supernatural problems all its own that he and his best yokai buddies, a cat named Jibanyan and an uber-effete ghost butler named Whisper, have to handle. Meanwhile, back in Nate`s hometown of Springdale (which is located in Japan), a bubbly ball of nerdy energy named Hailey-Anne is enticed into buying a Yo-kai Watch of her own, which ties her to Usapyon, a ghost astronaut rabbit. Stuck with each other, they form a detective agency.That`s really over-the-top as far as a game aimed squarely at a younger audience goes, and that`s largely a result of how it`s been localized. Yo-kai Watch 3 was originally two games in Japan, with Nate and Hailey-Anne`s stories comprising a game each. The version released in the West has combined the two, allowing players to switch to the other campaign at will, before the two stories converge in the later hours. It`s a daring choice that allows you a ton of control over how you experience the sprawling narrative, but it also highlights just how much the narrative didn`t need to sprawl to begin with. The first major plot points of both stories--Nate meeting a boy in BBQ who can see yokai as well, and Hailey-Anne starting the detective agency--are a good five or six hours in. Having both stories in the same package is a positive, but having to manually thread together t ...
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