>>40279313It's cute and fun. I think it had a lot of hurdles coming to the west, though:
It's really esoteric. Its premise was very "Japanese", and I think that's why it did so well over there (for the time it did okay- now it's nothing like it was before- it faded fast) but not as great here in the US
A lot of the monsters were also pretty much just recolors of others, and so that was kind of lame. The designs are weird- not bad, but not all of them are great. Tying back to the first point, a lot of them I think didn't really work because in the west, we don't have the same connection to them as they did in Japan.
Pokemon's western fandom seemed more rabid and possessive of Pokemon as the one and only monster-collecting RPG out there, and before YW even came out, people were drawing comparisons to it, calling YW a cheap knockoff, etc. I don't think the Japanese side was like that, and they could see a game based off collecting Yokai was different than a game about collecting pocket monsters, but we lacked that context here in the west.
Also, it's a Level-5 property. So it was mismanaged to hell. It boomed HARD for a couple of years, but quickly retracted as those crazy motherfuckers put out game after game after game.
YW definitely influenced some of the choices made in Gen 7- YW scared the hell out of gamefreak, if only for a short time. For better or for worse, they felt that they had to experiment and tweak things, or they'd lose ground.
I recommend getting YW2 over YW1, because 2 tweaked a lot of little minor issues 1 had.
