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Yo-kai Watch 3 was recently released in Western countries and, like other Yo-kai Watch media,
there are some interesting differences between the original Japanese versions and the versions
released overseas.
For those out of the loop, Yo-kai Watch is quite similar to the Pokémon franchise, with
the numerous games, anime and other media revolving around catching lots of different
types of creatures and battling with them.
Also comparable to Pokémon, the third mainline entry in the series was actually released
in multiple versions in Japan.
First there was Yo-kai Watch 3: Sushi and Yo-kai Watch 3: Tempura, which were both released
for Nintendo 3DS July 16th 2016.
Whilst largely being the same game, the different versions, for instance, allowed players to
collect some unique Yo-kai depending on which versions you're playing - similar to Pokémon's
multiple releases.
Following this came Yo-kai Watch 3: Sukiyaki on December 15th 2016 - which combined both
games together and added various improvements.
Over in the West though, Nintendo decided to take a different route and instead just
released one version overseas.
This version was based on the final Japan release but with even more improvements.
Now, as mentioned, the Yo-kai Watch franchise is known to have quite a few changes for its
English releases and one of these is that it is no longer set in the fictional Japanese
town of Sakura but instead a fictional location based in the United States called Springdale.
Replacing Japanese themes with more English ones can be found throughout the franchise
and this practise is something that is in no way new when bringing Japanese media to
Western shores and is said to be due to the publishers trying to better appeal to Western
audiences.
The franchise' star character for example, instead goes by the name of Amano Kēta in
Japan, rather than the English name Nathan Adams.
The game Yo-kai Watch 3 also introduced another main character called Hailey Anne Thomas.
Over in Japan on the other hand she is known as Misora Inaho.
This changing locations from Japan to the United States however, ended up causing some
problems with the release of the third game.
You see, in the Japanese version of Yo-kai Watch 3, the game is based around the characters
travelling from Japan to the United States - something that they clearly can't do if
they are already located in the country.
Thus the translators made some interesting tweaks to get around this - with the first
being changing travelling to the USA to travelling to a new fictional country called BBQ.
You can find quite a few differences in the game due to this country change.
For instance, in the Japanese version of the game, Sakura's currency is yen like real life
Japan and USA uses dollars like in real life America.
For the English versions, this was changed so that Springdale uses dollars and BBQ uses
a new fictional currency called BBQ Bucks, with a new symbol representing it.
The cutscenes that plays when swapping between characters was also changed due to the original
version showing a globe which rotates between the United States and Japan.
In the English versions, this was altered to a much more stylised and less realistic
globe to go with the location changes.
Another interesting change was also made to Lionguist, who teaches the player how to understand
BBQ's local accent.
In the English versions, BBQ's population speak in a very southern US accent and, at
first, the player can't understand anything that is said by anybody due to this.
That's until he meets up with Lionguist that is, who is said to know every language in
the world, and teaches the player to understand and speak the accent too.
In the Japanese version however, this was very different.
Here, the location's population instead spoke in regular English - complete with English
subtitles.
This means that non-English speakers would have definitely not been able to understand
what was being said in the Japanese version of the game and it also keeps with the setting
of the game being based in the USA.
Then, when taught the language by Lionguist in the Japanese version, the subtitles revert
back to Japanese to signify learning the language.
It's interesting to note how these same changes weren't made to the non-English European translations
however.
Due to the non-English translations never being set in the United States and instead
somewhere in central Europe, these versions kept the setting of moving to USA.
This means that things like USA's population speaking a different language was, like the
Japanese version, kept as them speaking in English, rather than the European languages
like French.
Again if you're interested in regional differences then you may be interested in checking out
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But - what do think about changing these elements for the English versions?
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to see more videos on how media is changed around the world.
Until next time, thank you for watching!