Why Yo-kai Watch is crucial for Nintendo’s future

Get used to that two-tailed orange cat (just look above), because you’re going to be seeing a lot of it come next year.

Yo-kai Watch is Japanese studio Level-5’s answer to Pokémon. Just like Nintendo and Game Freak’s mega-franchise (which has sold over 245 million games to date), Yokai Watch’s main audience is children, and it features monsters and collection-based gameplay. The franchise also launched with a cross-media approach — just like Pokémon —  with graphic novels and a television animation series. While it doesn’t have the decades of history that Pokémon has (the first game was only released in 2013), Yokai Watch is already a cultural phenomenon in Japan. The 3DS games alone have sold over 7 million copies in Japan, and the greater franchise has made over $1 billion at retail on toys and related merchandise — and that’s not counting publishing or music.