Yo-Kai Watch has some pretty fantastic Pokmon-style pun names

Publish date: 2024-06-26

There are a lot of exciting things about Yo-Kai Watch finally coming to the West, but one of our favorites has been seeing how the localization team has handled the characters' names. In the original game, many of the Yokai names are Pokémon-style Japanese puns that don't translate directly into English, meaning it's up to the team bringing the game overseas to come up with 200+ brand new pun (or pun-adjacent) names for each of the game's creatures.

While Nintendo may be publishing Yo-Kai Watch in North America, developer Level-5 is handling the localization themselves. This should be exciting news to anyone who played the criminally underrated Layton Brothers: Mystery Room, a game whose cast had some of the most eye-rollingly punny names in the history of video games.

We got a chance to go hands-on with an English build of Yo-Kai Watch, and immediately took that opportunity to scroll through the game's Pokédex equivalent to uncover as many puns as possible – a few of which has never been seen before. Above, see the names, models and descriptions for all the Yokai available in the demo we played build, or simply read them below.

Yo-Kai Watch is out Nov. 6, 2015 on Nintendo 3DS. The Yo-Kai Watch animated series is set to launch next week on Disney XD.

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