(Didn't technically 100% the game, but I completed the medallium and did everything that isn't just miscellaneous item collection [and the gym club thing lol].)

Yo-kai Watch 3 is the ultimate monster catching RPG. It retains the loveable characters, whimsical world, and silly writing that made me fall in love with the series to begin with, while smoothing over the rough edges of the previous installments. The combat has much more strategy to it with the 3x3 grid system, which makes battles (and the phenomenal boss fights) feel more engaging than ever. There's also a map that's the same size as Springdale (if not bigger) since the game sees Nate moving to the USA. (or BBQ, in the english version. they really wrote themselves into a corner when changing a big chunk of the references to Japan but that's another topic entirely)
I was wondering how they would follow up the fantastic story of Yo-kai Watch 2, and it didn't disappoint! I'd say I prefer the story of 2 at the end of the day, as it hits me more emotionally, but the reutrn to a similar way of story-telling as the first game works well with it, especially with the switching back and forth between two characters. I really like Hailey, I'm glad we have a female protagonist that isn't essentially just female Nate lol. She makes a great pair with Usapyon (my favorite new character in the game), and the scenes of them bantering always made me smile. Buck is also really fun, and similarly works really well as Nate's partner.

The amount of content packed into this one game is insane, especially considering how a huge chunk of it is completely optional. It doesn't really force anything that isn't the main story on you, and instead leaves the choice of exploring the side content to the player. There's an entire side mode that is pretty much the length of an entire game on it's own that's entirely optional! It's nuts!

I'm a big fan of the new Yokai also the Merican ones are very silly and I like them a lot

bottom line: this is the best 3ds game

sorry if this review is all over the place i'm writing this at 5 AM after 100%ing the game

oh my GOD this game is so good

the best of the 3 mainline 3ds games, this game has:
- baller OST (massive improvement over the first 2)
- good battle system, much more intuitive than the first 2 games
- hundreds of hours of content making even the physical version worth your money IMO (fortunately there is a cheaper digital version making the bang for your buck immense)
- really big areas to explore
- 698 yokai to befriend
- surprisingly fun characters
- overall just a really fun time, a super good game with a mountain of content. easily one of the best games on the 3ds.

Okay this game marks the first time the yo kai watch series absolutely jumped the shark in terms of tone, with a plot revolving around america for some reason...? However, one thing this game has is CONTENT. You could play this game for hundreds of hours and still not see everything, theres SO MUCH to do here. Grinding to get new yokai has been minimized once again, and there are mini game modes that might as well be entire seperate games. This game basically has everything in the previous games, but tripled. Despite the huge amount of content, it doesn't feel bloated or padded, the areas are as dense as they always have been. This is the yo kai watch game to end all yo kai watch games. My only minor gripe is that like a lot of other creature collecting RPGs, this game truly begins with the post game when you have all the areas unlocked and you can just freely go about doing your thing, and this games main story is a bit long to the point that there were a lot of times in the game I just wished the credits could roll already and I can just get the S rank watch and post game quests. If you want a game you can sink hundreds of hours into, this is absolutely something to pick up. This game has literally everything I could ever want in a creature collecting game and is the best I've played in its entire genre. It's probably my favorite game in the entire 3DS library, honestly.

God what a masterpiece. Yo Kai Watch was never a Pokémon clone and in fact this was the game that made me realize I like it better than Pokémon. This game has so much content it’s shocking it all fits on the 3DS. Hours and hours and hours of wackiness throughout with creative abound. They never cut a single character from the previous games so this one has over 600 FUCKING YO KAI TO BEFRIEND ITS INSANE! Unfortunately a good chunk are locked behind the crank a kai which sucks but oh well there are so many it’s basically a drop in the bucket. You will literally never get bored with this game because there’s so much to do. The story is fun and I love all the characters. Steve Jobs is a god damn shark in this game… THIS IS A REAL THIRD PARTY OFFICIAL GAME FROM LEVEL 5AND IT HAS A STEVE JOBS PARODY AS A PART OF THE ACTUAL STORY. And the final boss is a pinstripe suited mobster. Ok maybe the best game ever made.

The Yo-kai Watch series has always been a big comfort game to me. And this game's no exception. The post-game really makes it for me. Just taking it slow, collecting all the yo-kai and enjoying the world and its visuals. This game especially has a great amount of post-game content to come back to. With that said though, the main story has an obnoxious amount of side quests that pad they game out to at least 60 hours. Could've been a short RPG without them and it really brings the game down.

The amount of content here is wild. You've got the main game with it's brand new 3x3 battle system, which adds even more strategy than the previous games; two storylines with separate maps (and more to unlock returning from older games); new yo-kai and yo-kai tribes; online battles and trading; basically a Busters sequel that lets you obtain items and yo-kai for the main game and vice versa; tons of anime fanservice in the postgame; a custom nyan creator, and more that gives the game great replayability.

Level-5's usual 4Kid's translation is still in full effect, which may turn off some. I reccomend downloading the undub for that. It'll at least fix the voice side of things. It doesn't bring back the Summoning app seen in the JP version and YKW2 though. Guess they didn't wanna localize the Dream songs.

I'm still happy this game actually released in America cause I think it's the best one yet. The music, the best visuals on 3DS, an extreme amount of content, and it's charm; there's so much to love about this game and wish it wasn't ruined by the main story missions. I'll definitely be playing this in the background completing the rest of the medallium and doing raids with my friends.

arguably one of the best games on the 3DS, and one of the best moncolle games of its generation.

but i still gotta dock a point for how awful the pacing is for the first several chapters.

story and cast are a bit weaker than YW2 and the revamped battle system is a point of contention (especially since everyone in online battles insists on using solar enma), but YW3 is by no means a bad game. hell, once you get over the hump halfway through the story, you'll discover plenty of things to do in the world of yokai watch 3 compared to its predecessors.

this is easily the most content-packed of the 3ds yokai watch games. two playable characters to swap between in a MASSIVE world, dozens of collectables and minigames to discover, and a recruitable roster of yokai that'd make alola's national dex blush. there's even a mystery-dungeon-like sidegame where you can explore dungeons with your recruited yokai in action-rpg style!

unfortunately, all this means the difficulty is a little bit skewed and after a certain point, it can become very easy to break the game in two. especially if you end up "accidentally" powerleveling your yokai in aforementioned mystery dungeon sidegame to the point where most of the story battles become trivial. like i did. oops.

there's also three postgame-level elite yokai you can easily recruit before the final story boss that are well over his recommended level.

y-yeah.

that aside, this is still a great time and it's easy to sink a lot of hours just exploring everything YW3 has to offer. i'd still recommend YW2 as a starting point especially since the gameplay changes, amount of content, and crappy early-game pacing might be daunting to some. that, and uh. good luck with finding a physical copy of this at an affordable price!

i'm kicking the rat kid into orbit for making me go through that mushroom sidequest.

I don't remember why I even bought this game. I didn't enjoy my time with the first Yo-Kai Watch and don't like RPG's that much, but I'm definitely not disappointed.
The combat system of Yo-Kai Watch 1 was always more an annoyance for me. Luckily this game doesn't have that combat system but an actually fun one. They didn't do away with three of your Yo-Kai being in battle at one time, but this time they are organized on a 3x3 grid and you can use any combination of Yo-Kai and put them anywhere you want on that grid. Some combinations are considered offensive some defensive making this system already more strategic than the old one. Some of the enemies attacks will also be telegraphed on the bottom screen making it so that you can actually avoid being hit instead of just tanking the hit.
The gameplay outside of the combat system was also really fun. This (for me) is one of those games I can play while doing something else, because this game isn't that hard. I had 2 E-Rank Yo-Kai in my team when I beat it, but I wouldn't consider that a bad thing.
The ost of this game is really good (just listen to the Rongo Swirll theme), the characters are fun and due to most of this game playing out in the USA there are lots of jokes about said country, which are always welcome. There were only a few minor gripes I had with this game.
1: While I don't really have that much of a problem with the key-quest system this game is built around, there were some that just didn't work for me. This could be because I can't update my game (for reasons I will get to later), or because of me having to play the german translation of the game.
2: There were a few occasions where you had to have befriended a certain kind of Yo-Kai to progress. There is a certain point where you are trapped in an enclosed space. The Yo-Kai you need are available there, but they could just not feel like befriending you. It took me around two hours until I could progress. There is an item that makes it so that Yo-Kai always befriend you, but do to the player character being trapped there you can not get that item.
3: You play most of the game as two characters at once. The problem I have with this comes when these characters stories inevitably collide. Until that point you should have two teams and two item bags. So what they do is that they just merge them together. The items being merged together isn't a problem, but you now have to decide between these two teams because the maximum team size isn't increased. Another implication of that is that there isn't really a reason to switch characters. They obviously make up excuses to make you switch characters, but some of them are just not good at all.
But as I said these are only minor gripes and didn't really destroy my enjoyment of the game and I would totally still recommend you to play this game, if you can get it.
The problem with buying this game is that it is one of the most expensive 3Ds games available. I got it digitally for 40€ but that came with it own problems.
This is a 27000 Block (Nintendo 3Ds storage unit) game. My New Nintendo 2Ds XL, with only one other game on it, barely had enough space to download this game, but I don't have enough space to download the update now.
But if you have 40€ worth of eshop gift cards and a basically unused 3Ds system I would totally recommend this game to you.

Nearly perfect game (except Terror Time, all my homies hate Terror Time). You can spend 100+ hours in Blasters and it's an optional side mode. Best monster collector since B2W2, best America parody since Earthbound. So many spontaneous little events, the multiple main character angle works really well and allows the world you get to explore be pretty damn big. Insane number of Yo-kai, revamped battle system, we can go on and on.

Side note, I own the cart. Bought it at launch so I didn't have to take out a loan either. You are all jealous.

My new go-to example of how badly padding can ruin a game, Yokai Watch 3 is a good 15-hour game stretched to about 35 hours.
The game at the start is split up between 2 protagonists; Hailey consisting of the old content from Yokai Watch 1 & 2, and Nate consisting of the new stuff. Nate's campaign starts off foreshadowing the main threat of the game while showing us how he's adapting to life in BBQ, a solid introduction for about 2 chapters. Hailey’s portion, however, has no story or foreshadowing to the main threat and consists of fetch quests that have you running around the map repeatedly. This isn’t helped by the fact that Hailey is a pretty unlikable character, compared to Nate who’s friendly and nice, Hailey is loud, annoying, and insensitive making the backtracking all the worse. Nate’s campaign begins to take a turn for the worse around chapter 3 when it takes a cue from Hailey’s campaign and turns into a mystery of the week type story. This wouldn’t be such a bad thing if the foreshadowing for the main story kept up, or if these mysteries tied into the main story, but they don’t. So, by now you’re about 25-35 hours in and all you’ve done are boring quests that contribute nothing to the overall narrative, now the actual story is about to begin.
After completing chapter 5 for both characters, the campaigns merge, the game opens up and the actual story begins. Yet you still solve these mysteries of the week quests that add nothing, only sometimes you’ll do something that actually matters to the overall story. And yeah, the story isn’t very good but I’d like the tasks I accomplish to mean something to the overall narrative rather than just being thrown away as a funny haha moment. So yeah the pacing is not great, but it gets so much worse.

The single biggest problem with this game is the side quests, or “key quests” as the game would call them. The game suddenly decides it’s not paced poorly enough, so multiple times throughout the adventure it halts story progression and asks you to complete a mandatory amount of side quests. This can happen multiple times within the same chapter and it keeps getting worse as the game progresses. It doesn’t help that as I mentioned earlier, your reward for doing these side quests is almost always a story event that doesn’t affect the narrative at all, complete these side quests to continue this side quest posing a story event essentially.
RNG is also something that this game reeks of, and sooner or later it’ll screw you over. The central mechanics of the battle system are built off RNG, when will your yokai attack? When it feels like it, will I befriend this yokai? If it feels like it, it takes away a lot of the depth this combat can have when a lot of it is entirely dependent on randomness. RNG also extends to world exploration, exploring at night? Hope a terror time portal doesn’t suck you up and wastes your time with awkward gameplay. The worst example of this has to be the final dungeon, essentially there are 24 floors, and what floor you arrive at is randomly spun on a wheel. The problem is that you have to land on specific floors to clear specific conditions and if you don’t land on those specific floors, you are stuck in a room and are forced to fight off the enemies to leave. And the amount of enemy filled floors vastly outnumbers the ones you need, awesome.

Level-5 are a developer who just keep on giving with everything they do, and YKW 3 is to date the finest example of this... that’s actually available in English.

There’s a new battle system that’s more directly interactive than the one in previous titles; multiple new categories, tribes and species of Yo-Kai; two protagonists each with their own storyline and world map and an entire sub-game called Blasters-T that plays like a top-down dungeon RPG.

And this is before we get into the endgame content, which is packed to the extent that my 80 hour plus save still hasn’t seen everything the title has to offer - let alone got to the point where I can show off a completed Medalium.

If you like your RPGs comfy, Level-5 always delivers in spades, and the charming nature of Yo-Kai watch as a series will likely grow on you if you’re a fan of their other RPGs, even their more standard traditional RPGs like Dragon Quest VIII.

absolutely incredible game filled to the brim with passion and content that i truly cannot recommend enough. seriously, this game is massive. there is an insane amount of stuff to do. its a very tender story that will leave you feeling like youre on summer vacation as a kid without a care in the world again. no worries if you didnt play the other yokai watch games, you can pick this up with no prior knowledge needed. if you love monster catching (or in this case, befriending) games and want a super fun and unique spin on the genre, check this out. also. yokai watch is not a pokemon ripoff thank you for your time......