Yo-kai Watch
文A 2 languages
This article is an todo. It will be expanded only with confirmed details.
Yo-kai Watch is a game and media franchise by Level-5 and one of the game series Ko Yamasaki remembers strongly from elementary school.
This article records it not as a full franchise history, but as part of early-2010s childhood culture and Yamasaki's game experience.
Relation to Ko Yamasaki[edit]
Yamasaki played the Yo-kai Watch series on Nintendo 3DS.
He especially remembers Yo-kai Watch 2: Bony Spirits and Yo-kai Watch 2: Psychic Specters.
At the time, Yo-kai Watch extended across games, anime, toys, music, and characters, making it a shared culture among elementary-school students.
For the main biographical article, see Ko Yamasaki.
Nintendo 3DS[edit]
Nintendo DS and Nintendo 3DS formed a large part of Yamasaki's childhood gaming environment.
Yo-kai Watch belongs to the period before smartphone-centered gaming became dominant in his life.
Exchange and school culture[edit]
Yo-kai Watch was not only a single-player game. Rare Yo-kai, acquisition methods, capsule machines, passwords, and walkthrough videos became topics of conversation among friends.
For Yamasaki, the series is tied to school culture and peer communication as much as to game content.
Position in memory[edit]
The encyclopedia treats Yo-kai Watch as an object located near the boundary between offline handheld gaming and online information culture.
The game existed on a console, but its strategies, videos, rumors, and conversations connected online information with school life.
Relation to the internet[edit]
Yamasaki often watched YouTube videos and looked up information about games.
Game walkthroughs were one of the ordinary reasons he began using the internet as a place to search for things he did not know.
Legacy[edit]
There is no evidence that Yo-kai Watch directly influenced Yamasaki's research or career.
It has an article because this encyclopedia aims to reconstruct a person through childhood play, media, school conversation, and memory as well as education and work.