There aren’t many big-name competitors to the Pokemon series, however, Yo-Kai Watch stands as one of the few. The series has seen success on the Nintendo 3DS for a while, with the most recent game also making the jump to PlayStation 4. Now Level 5’s CEO, Akihiro Hino, has taken to Twitter to announce a new spin-off game for the series. The game is called Yo-Kai Academy Y and it’s set to take place after both the animated movie Yo-Kai Watch Jam the Movie: Yo-Kai Academy Y – Can a Cat Be the Hero?, which released on December 17th, 2019, in Japan, and its anime series sequel Yo-Kai Academy Y: Encounter With N, which saw its first episode launch today.
There’s still very little known about the game, other than that it’s part of the “Academy Y” spin-off series and the single screenshot shown above. Normally the Yo-Kai Watch series would be assumed to be exclusive to Nintendo consoles, but earlier this year developer Level 5 released an expanded version of Yo-Kai Watch 4 on the PlayStation 4 under the title Yo-Kai Watch 4++. While the game is still exclusive to Japan, Level 5 did say they were planning to bring it West. They also want to localize the two Yo-Kai Watch movies that Yo-Kai Watch 4 references and builds off of. Since each game in the series has taken some time to localize, you can probably expect Yo-Kai Watch 4 in late 2020 at the earliest.
The Yo-Kai Watch series is a popular series of monster collection games that have seen quite a bit of success in Japan. The first three games were all released on the Nintendo 3DS, and are turn-based monster collection JRPGs. The twist is that you have a special watch that lets you rotate your party in the middle of a fight. The fourth game instead saw its initial release on the Nintendo Switch, with PlayStation 4 following later. It is a real-time combat game where you could play as both Yo-Kai monsters and as humans. It’s not yet known under what genre Yo-Kai Academy Y will fall.
[Source: Twitter]
