Yo-kai Watch Medal Wars

» see medalwars.netmarble.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Yo-kai Watch was Level-5 building for the slot Pokemon already occupied, and in Japan it worked for a few years. What traveled out of the country was the anime and the handheld games. This was the piece that stayed home: a yokai battle RPG for phones, published in Japan by a Korean company, built with Netmarble's own Netmarble Monster studio and never released anywhere else.

It opened on 30 July 2019 for iOS 10 and Android 4.4 upward, free with item billing, on the back of two million pre-registrations. You could register through five different doors, among them a LINE friend add and a YouTube subscription, and the reward bundle included a 500-coin float of the in-game currency, which the press release helpfully priced at fourteen gacha pulls. Netmarble had run an advance play test and then published a serial set of developer notes from 30 May, each one naming what the testers had complained about. The first one was about ranking battles and real-time player-versus-player, and it went as far down as naming the sound effects it had changed.

It was switched off on 3 December 2020, sixteen months in.

~ the case file ~

~ fourteen weeks unbuyable ~

The timetable is the interesting part of this one. Netmarble announced the ending on Friday 31 July 2020 and stopped selling paid items immediately. Both stores dropped the download on 27 August. The servers then ran on for ninety-eight more days, which is exactly fourteen weeks of a live multiplayer game that no new player could install.

The unspent paid currency stayed claimable until 23:59 on 5 February 2021, which is two months past the day the servers stopped. The official site has not answered for years. Look up the franchise on Japan's store today and two live Level-5 titles come back, with no trace of this one.

~ the medal it was named for ~

The hook was the avatar. You made your own and became a Yo-kai Watch holder yourself, rather than stepping into one of the characters from the show, which is the choice a licensed phone game makes when it is after the franchise's audience more than its plot. The plot it did carry was a hunt for one object: the Ouja Medal, which conferred power equal to Enma, the great king of the yokai, and which the bad ones had taken.

It drew a reader score of 55 out of 100 on 4Gamer, from exactly one submitted review. Forty-one news items sit on its page there in total, counting the one from 31 July 2020 that was about stopping. Yo-kai Watch World, the location game Gungho ran on the same franchise, got another two years and died for a different reason entirely.

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