I know nothing about Blasters besides that I'm buying them and they're an enhanced version of the mini game in 2.
Is there trading? Will the digital folks be able to trade us their exclusives?
Yes and yes.
I know nothing about Blasters besides that I'm buying them and they're an enhanced version of the mini game in 2.
Is there trading? Will the digital folks be able to trade us their exclusives?
I have the original and Fleshy Souls.
I loved the original game. The soundtrack was great, and the boss fights were really fun.
The second game was a huge improvement, and I loved having your favorite Yo-Kai follow you Pokemon style (and it doesn't even have to be in your party), but I kind of lost motivation to play beyond the story. There's a lot to do, but I just didn't feel like it. Don't know if I'll continue to play this series, but I do greatly appreciate it. Is it possible to continue in Psychic Specters where I left off in Fleshy Souls? If so, what are the pros and cons if any?
Are the blaster games any fun without people to play with? I remember the mode in YW2 being kinda meh if it was just on your own.
The handling of the toys was the absolute worst, and I'd wager a big part of the reason the franchise wasn't as big in the West. I gave up trying to collect any of it in Australia because we just stopped getting anything despite assurances more of it would be sold here.I'd love to read a post-mortem on what happened with the Hasbro toyline. For those that don't know, here's a gist of it from what I recall..
Big write up on the Toys:
Bandai holds the license for YKW toys in Japan, making the medals, electronic watches, and other various toys. These toys were localized elsewhere, notably in Korea (where they seemingly exclusively got slotted medalliums like in the show, Japan only got one for vol 1 then switched to the plastic pages we got IIRC), and inexplicably, even in Singapore with the Asian English dub, and romanized names printed on each medal.
For some reason in the West, we got stuck with Hasbro instead, which opened up some interesting crossover potential (including YKW themed Monopoly Jr and Game of Life, but unfortunately are both awful).
The toys themselves were molded after the Bandai versions, but with strange alterations. The grooves on the bottom of each medal that the watch reads to detect what Yo-kai it is where shifted slightly askew, of which I can only assume was a scheme to prevent importing Japanese medals to use on your US watch, as they'd no longer fit, even though the grooves themselves were copied 1:1. This necessitated shifting the scanner on the watch itself, which destroyed the symmetry and made it way harder to use. Worse yet, apart from small changes like a bad watchface redesign, the LED was removed from the US version, and the volume was made significantly, downright obscenely louder than its Japanese counterpart. As if they were overcompensating for the muffling that would occur when it was worn on your wrist, but I imagine very few use it like that and even covered, it's painfully loud.
(And on the topic of anti-importation, which was a frustrating topic as someone who wanted to buy US medals to use on an imported watch: Through some hard modding I was able to make watches that could bypass this restriction by opening up the side of the medal opening. Starting with the Yo-Motion series of medals, Hasbro started to break with the established groove patterns, so medals no longer correspond to the same Yo-Kai between regions. Incredibly frustrating.)
For the medals themselves, the main collectible, it was a nightmare. With the original gray medals Hasbro made the decision to not bother printing the names of each Yo-Kai on the medals (like all Bandai versions). But instead of giving us cleaner art, the name space was just printed over with a generic pattern instead. To Hasbro's credit, they did move the copyright info to the bottom of the medal which was a good change.
Medals were also non-randomized within each 'booster box'. This was good in that every box had the same distribution of medals, so if you purchased a sealed box you guaranteed yourself a full set. The bad was that they didn't bother to at least scramble the packs, which meant that once someone discovered which pack in a box contained the Legendary (1 per box) medal, they could find it in every other box. Which meant if you bought from an opened box at retail, you'd pretty much be guaranteed not to get the Legendary. An absolute joke.
And that was just the start of headaches for collectors. Hasbro treated us to a really nice SDCC bundle of the 'Jewelnyan' set of medals, but apart from that, it was chaos.
IIRC, the medal booster boxes themselves did not have unique barcodes, which meant that retailers had no way to distinguish between a box of Series 1 medals, or series 2, 3, or 4. This meant that buying medals online was impossible, as was checking a stores stock. All you'd ever see was Series 1 listings.
To make matters worse, the way Hasbro handed sending stock to stores was abysmal. You could go to your local Walmart from the day the product line released to the day it disappeared and never see anything besides Series 1 (which was true for me, apart from the later Yo-Motion). You could never find Series 2/3/4 stocked in any store, and they made it near impossible to buy online.
Hasbro started to send their stock of products that you'd never even gotten the chance to buy directly to Dollar Stores, which was the fate of the plushes and figurines for most people, the obvious sign of the toyline's impending death.
All of this was navigable, still. But the worst came with promos. The first was prior to the toyline being released, NYCC Jibanyan medal, which as that (fan) name implies, was only released at NYCC. There was the Toys R Us exclusive 'Paws of Fury' medal for online preorders, then there was the Slush and Rattelle medals, exclusively given away for a limited time at GameStop for spending $10 and $20 respectively on YKW merch. And lastly was the Flumpy medal, same deal, except for spending $10 at Barnes & Noble. For some context, there are ~7,000 GameStops in the US, and there are ~<650 B&Ns. This made Flumpy significantly harder to find, and worse, I'd read a lot of people having trouble getting them even when they went, due to either bad distribution or bad communication at Hasbro's end. A frustrating time for those in the US, but for those in Canada/EU, some of those promos weren't even released. But the final kicker was the last US promo medal, a legendary: Gilgaros. Presumably. It was never announced, or clarified, but rather, was just silently included in shipments of YKW merch in orders made from GameStop over a short period of time. Isn't that insane? The Netherlands got it in a Nick magazine, apparently.
But US fans had the tables turned on them when YKW had more success elsewhere. Some of these might have seen wider distribution, but tmk: 'Gush' was an exclusive medal in France, 'Betterfly' and 'Coughkoff', and 'Jibanyan S' in Spain, 'Komasan S' for spending 30 Euros at GameStop and 'NyaKB Jibanyan' in Italy, and most annoyingly, Enefly and Flengu being exclusive to re-releases of YKW1 in Germany, IIRC? Among a bunch of others. Collectors needed to bend over backwards to import difficult to find medals overseas, or wait in hopes that Hasbro would distribute them everywhere..eventually. They never did.
As a final laugh, and the last slap in the face I can recall, with the release of Yo-Motion medals (where Hasbro took a unique divergence from Bandai's toys in that they added a couple of animation frames in each medal at the expense of the artwork, and a projection unit to the watch), Hasbro decided to inexplicably re-use artwork from the original series of medals for their Yo-Motion counterpart medals, in spite of the Japanese versions all having unique artwork to use already. Presumably in an attempt to double-charge us, once for the re-used art medal, and then for the original, new art medal. This, combined with their import crackdown, and asinine promo medal handling was where I gave up on the toy line, myself.
Unfortunately, it was later discovered that some of the Yo-Kai watch names spoken in the voicework when scanning unreleased medals in the watch were the original prototype names, giving us the reason for why some medals in the original base series were never released, and why they never will be, collectors can never have a complete set.
And worst of all, Hasbro still holds the license I guess. They've released the Prototype U watch as 'Model U', only in France from what I'd seen. And they doubled down on 'Yo-Motion', literally, by sticking another three holes in the artwork for 6 frames of animation.
But it's dead in the US.
Confirmation that Whismellowman has been changed to Whisped Cream.
Interesting to note is that in WibWob, that was his intended name but was kept as Whismellowman and they kept his Japanese design.
Same, it's anti-consumer as hell and it's already hard enough jumping through all the hoops needed to get all the Yo-kai
Not a fan of the Ghostbusters references being toned down so much :<
I get it, it's just a bummer :( It's pretty funny that the game is loaded with gags that aren't lost to Western audiences for once and they have to go out of their way to remove them.Yeah, but Sony would have flipped if they saw all those Ghostbusters references. Parody is easier in Japan for stuff like that, but in the Western world it's way harder.
Yup, window is closing fast on 3DS releases. I imagine next year is the last year where 3DS releases will be remotely viable; kind of like this year is for Vita.They REALLY need to push it out if they want anything resembling acceptable sales numbers.
Yup, window is closing fast on 3DS releases. I imagine next year is the last year where 3DS releases will be remotely viable; kind of like this year is for Vita.
Which means I highly doubt we are getting Sangokushi. Shame too, cause it looks good.
Confirmed to have the original Japanese openings dubbed in English instead of another remix of the terrible Jeff Swampy Marsh original song.
I grabbed both versions. Maining Dog. I love it so far! The multiplayer is a lot of fun.You guys enjoying Yo-kai Watch Blasters? Assuming you picked it up.
I'm surprised at how fun it is. It's clear there's so much to do once you beat the main story.
Much to my surprise, they kept the final boss theme. Mostly, they removed the part where they yell "GO BUSTERS!". But otherwise it's the same song. Gives me hope that the final boss theme of YW3 will be kept (it's a parody of the Godfather theme)
I can see that. Gameplay never really evolves much beyond mashing A and popping buffs occasionally but endgame does require more positional strategy, strong equipment, and probably actual people as team members.So, I picked up Blasters and ........ it's incredibly shallow. I just don't see myself putting much time into it. I think I'd rather play YW2 some more than spend effort with the game. The charm is there, but the game is perhaps a bit too basic for me.
(Note: With kids, etc., my gaming time is incredibly limited and that absolutely is playing into this.)
Still breaks my heart that the game got shut down in the West. One of the few mobile games I played daily.Been a while since anyone posted.
Lucky EU getting YW3 in three weeks. Albeit the same day as Smash Bros (dumb dumb move).
Over in Japan, Puni Puni is having a crossover event with Final Fantasy (specifically, Dissidia NT). That includes several FF characters as Yo-kai, including Cloud (both in S-Rank and Z-Rank form), Sephiroth, Bartz, Terra, Golbez, Kefka, Lightning, Cecil, Jecht, Exdeath, Y'shtola, Cloud of Darkness, Garland, and Yuna. As well as the return of Chocobonyan and Mooglenyan (they were in the game before).
Still breaks my heart that the game got shut down in the West. One of the few mobile games I played daily.
I put 50 hours into Blasters. Loved it but the endgame is too grindy for very little reward besides completionist satisfaction.
I wonder when more news will come out regarding 4. Not feeling 3 that much for whatever reason.
Is it quite different from 2?
Yeah, I watched 101leafy's video on it!At least they updated the game to fix the oversight made when they removed the connectivity to Iron Oni Force (the Japan only arcade game that no longer gets support even there). But boy those parts are expensive.
Blame it on the Yokai I just made up; Soondead and Gunnabyteit
Never played YW, but i watched some gameplay of 4 and that got me really interested, which in turn is making me watch the season 1 of the original anime on Netflix. Im reallly enjoing it, very jolly and i love the Yo-kais designs. Hyped for 4 since i dont have a 3ds.
The anime's a really fun Monster of the Week show.Never played YW, but i watched some gameplay of 4 and that got me really interested, which in turn is making me watch the season 1 of the original anime on Netflix. Im reallly enjoing it, very jolly and i love the Yo-kais designs. Hyped for 4 since i dont have a 3ds.