Gotta haunt ‘em all: Is America ready for Yo-Kai Watch? | Technobubble

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A plethora of cartoony creatures filled a wall at a store in Tokyo, a common sight in a country that’s no stranger to product tie-ins from anime and manga characters.

This particular case, however, was different from the Pokemon-dominated displays that have been a staple around Japan for years.

Instead of Nintendo’s familiar yellow electric mouse and its cute cohorts, this charge was led by an orange ghost cat named Jibanyan, the flagship mascot of a franchise that spread across the Land of the Rising with the ferocity of a viral meme.

It was during a visit to Japan in the summer of 2014 when I first witnessed the phenomenon that is Yo-Kai Watch. Based on a Nintendo 3DS game that chronicles the tale of a boy who can see and interact with supernatural spectres known as “yokai,” the franchise has since expanded to include a hit TV anime and branding on all sorts of merchandise from toys and plushies to lunch boxes and umbrellas.

“This thing is so huge right now,” a Japanese friend told me as she carried her son at a Chiba gift shop overflowing with Yo-Kai Watch goods at the time. “It’s everywhere.”

By the end of the year, various versions of the game’s follow up Yo-Kai Watch 2 surpassed 5 million units while causing some parents to line up in droves to secure a copy for their kids. Fast forward to my next visit in 2015 and Yo-Kai Watch remained prevalent even with reports of merchandise sales cooling down from its heady boom period. The franchise’s merchandise dotted stores from the mountains of Yamanashi to the old capital of Kyoto.

It’s an amazing accomplishment for an intellectual property that has been out just a little over two years. When I visited Japan for New Year’s three years ago, Pokemon remained the king of merchandise tie-ins for children. Since then, Yo-Kai Watch has elbowed its way into the national consciousness of kids and families in a way that has not really been seen since, well, Pokemon in the 1990s.

It’s a development that surprised even creator LEVEL-5, Inc., a Japanese game developer that is no stranger to launching hit multimedia brands that include anime, manga, toys and other forms of entertainment. The company used a similar “cross-media approach” with its Inazuma Eleven and LBX franchises, which resulted in franchise gold for the company.

Yo-Kai Watch, however, is on a totally different level.

“We’ve learned a lot from Inazuma Eleven and LBX and used those lessons when making Yo-Kai Watch, so I was confident that we’d see at least some success,” said Akihiro Hino, founder, president and CEO of LEVEL-5, Inc. “I didn’t think it’d become quite this big a hit, but it makes me very happy that it’s been such a success — not just for Level-5, but for all of our other partners producing content alongside us.”

A SPOOKY IDEA

Sporting cute looks, a bright reddish-orange mane, a traditional Japanese “haramaki” belly band and a goofy personality, Jibanyan has all the qualities of a bonafide mascot character.

Then again, Jibanyan isn’t your average cartoony cat. In addition to having two tails, both also sport the eerie glow of blue spectral flames that are typically associated with Japanese apparitions known as “yokai.”

The yokai theme is integral to the unique flavor and ensuing success of Yo-Kai watch among its target audience. While mulling ideas that would eventually lead to LEVEL-5’s new franchise, Hino noted that the kind of content that’s popular with kids really hasn’t changed much over the past few decades. Monsters certainly had more than their fair share of exposure thanks to franchises such as Pokemon, Digimon and Yu-Gi-Oh! Hoping to produce something different from the norm while adding elements that modern kids familiar with new devices and apps can relate to, Hino eventually had an epiphany.

“Yo-kai are spooky beings which often appear in Japanese folklore, mostly related to either humans or objects we were once attached to,” Hino said. “Though they are somewhat monster-like, I realized they had never been featured in video games.”

Once Hino had his theme, he started dreaming up characters for it. This includes his favorite of the ghastly bunch, Jibanyan, whose wackiness and almost Don Quixote-like penchant for picking losing fights with trucks hides a tragic backstory that also has a personal connection to the LEVEL-5 CEO. While going home one day, Hino saw an abandoned kitten on the side of the street.

“I passed it by at first, thinking that I probably couldn’t keep a cat at home, but it was just so cute, I thought to myself ‘I gotta do this!’” Hino said. “So I came back a few minutes later, but by that time, it had already been hit by a car.”

The incident shows a different side to Yo-Kai watch, which, for all its charm and cuteness still deals with a topic that can have serious undertones. Although many kids’ franchises try not to tackle certain serious topics, Japan’s yokai folklore is typically tied to themes such as death and regret. At the same time, its decision to address such issues is one of the things that make Yo-Kai Watch stand out. It also allows the show to have a more powerful connection with its audience. After all, any child who has ever raised a pet can relate to the emotion of losing one.

“In order to write a story which can be relatable to kids, we conducted robust kids research to understand them,” Hino said. “We tried hard to capture what they are most concerned about — it was interesting to find concerns which I can relate to my childhood days, and the ones which were unique to kids today.”

NEW HAUNTING GROUNDS

Having established its dominance in Japan, Yo-Kai Watch is now setting its sights on territory where it has yet to equal Pokemon’s success: the West.

So far, the franchise has a lot of help. In addition to the big launch of the first game in North America through major partner Nintendo, LEVEL-5 also has inked deals Disney XD for its localized cartoon as well as Hasbro for Yo-Kai Watch toys.

At the same time, Hino says he’s fully aware of the challenges involved in replicating Yo-Kai Watch’s success in its home territory to other markets.

“We’re working in a market packed with both Pokémon and all kinds of other attractive content, so for a new entry like ours, it was going to be challenging no matter what.” Hino said.

Part of the challenge is also cultural. Although the West is no stranger to supernatural lore and creatures, the concept of “yokai” is inherently Japanese and doesn’t have a quick and direct equivalent in places such as the United States.

“To Japanese people, yokai aren’t monsters precisely — they’re a more special kind of thing,” Hino said. “In the past, we used the term to refer to the personified souls of people, animals, or things that made contact with and grew attached to people.”

Such a concept doesn’t exist in that exact form in countries such as the U.S., so one major concern for LEVEL-5 and its partners was figuring out “how to explain what these ‘Yo-Kai things’ are” to this new audience, according to Hino. For now, the team has deliberately shied away from any long-winded explanations, opting instead to simply convey them as mischievous invisible creatures. LEVEL-5 also “innovated a bit” when it came to localized names in case people have a hard time figuring out what a certain Yo-Kai is at first glance.

At the same time, Yo-Kai Watch’s Japanese aesthetic is also proving to be a strength as the franchise attempts to court a Western audience.

“It was surprising to me, but when we did the research, people’s reactions to the more Japanese-looking Yo-Kai were better than we expected,” Hino said. “I felt that kids, in particular, have an admiration for Oriental-style things.”

The flagship game, meanwhile, gives players a high-degree of freedom, allowing them to either follow the main storyline, branch off on other side adventures or initiate adventures of their own by exploring the game’s world and tracking down all its Yo-Kai. The game design is purposefully done in a way that makes it feel like the Yo-Kai are “actually there,” according to Hino. The theme of making Yo-Kai friends and treating them as partners is also a big focus and a key reason why the game uses an auto-battle system for the spectres instead of Pokemon’s more direct controls.

“You don’t become the Yo-Kai, you make friends with them and they fight for you,” Hino said. “It helps bring across the idea that you’re taking the director role in the game.”

Even as Yo-Kai Watch continues to be a juggernaut in Japan, Hino’s company is already hard at work on a new project. Its next project, Snack World, is getting the same cross-media treatment, including a game on 3DS and mobile platforms such as iOS and Android, as well as an anime, manga and toy line with Japanese company Takara Tomy.

Prior to the all-out blitz with Snack World, however, there’s still the matter of LEVEL-5’s Pokemon dreams for Yo-Kai Watch in the West. According to Hino, the franchise’s success in countries such as the U.S. depends on how well it can grab the imaginations of a target audience with plenty of competing choices to pick from.

“Even though there’s lots of great content in Japan as well, kids are always looking for new content that matches up with their generation, and Yo-Kai Watch slotted in perfectly with that,” Hino said. “I think that our ability to connect to kids in modern-day America will greatly affect the fate of this franchise.“