If you had to explain Yo-kai Watch in a nutshell to someone who’s never heard of or played it, you might boil it down to “Pokemon but with Japanese ghosts” or “Baby’s first Shin Megami Tensei.” Anything grim or distressing about a kid who can talk to ghosts goes by the wayside when the ghosts are comical entities like a missing left sock or a possessed police car. In this third expansive and quirky outing for the Yo-kai Watch series, our hero Nate has to take on a quest far more daunting than anything he’s faced so far: moving to America.
Specifically, Nate’s family ends up moving to BBQ, an over-the-top caricature of Texas, for his dad’s job, and finds that the U.S. has supernatural problems all its own that he and his best yokai buddies, a cat named Jibanyan and an uber-effete ghost butler named Whisper, have to handle. Meanwhile, back in Nate’s hometown of Springdale (which is located in Japan), a bubbly ball of nerdy energy named Hailey-Anne is enticed into buying a Yo-kai Watch of her own, which ties her to Usapyon, a ghost astronaut rabbit. Stuck with each other, they form a detective agency.
That’s really over-the-top as far as …