My Youkai Watch roll continues with the spin-off of the action-style diversion from the 2nd game. It's a mission-based class-focused 4-player action game with all the charm that Youkai Watch usually has. It's certainly not what I'd expected it'd be, but I still had a good deal of fun with it.

The story is all very light hearted and silly in normal Youkai Watch affair. To be honest, as far as narrative is concerned, this is probably the Youkai Watch game I've played that stays the most on focus with little mandatory filler. Given the title, there are a LOT of Ghost Busters references, as well as the Star Wars references and Terminator references they love so much. The persistant characters of Sgt. Burly, Fubuki Chan, and Koma San really make the interactions funny but varied. I enjoyed the story bits for the silliness that they are.

The core gameplay is going into a mission, completing the objective, and getting to the evac point. If you run out of time (missions always have very generous time limits, though) or die before getting to the evac, everything you did (XP collected, items found, Youkai befriended) will be GONE. The missions are split up into 3 types, with a 4th added in the free expansion. The first are story missions, where you have to follow a set of objectives in relation to the story and then get to the evac point. Next are Patrol missions, where you just wander around a location fighting Youkai with the main goal to befriend them. Then you have Big Boss missions, which are just re-fighting the bosses from the story mode outside of the missions in order to farm their dropped items. You also have Super and Hell difficulties to fight these bosses on, and you can get some seriously good rewards for the Super and Hell ones, like rare crafting materials, evolution items, and even befriending the bosses themselves as playable characters! Lastly, the expansion added "New Challenge" missions, which are basically just time-trials for boss rushes and patrol modes that focus on grinding money/XP. It's by far the best way to grind cash/XP.

Each of the Big Boss and Story missions have 2 sets of 3 different tiers of rewards you can get (rare, uncommon, common), with each version of the game having a higher chance of getting the items in a certain set. There are also very rare item and Youkai prizes that can ONLY be gotten by beating Hell-modes of bosses in a 4-player match, so I never got any of those :P . There is a gear system and a crafting system, but that just entails picking up items from fallen foes and combining them with money/XP to craft them. The best stuff requires a LOT of boss farming, of course. However, a nice change from Youkai Watch 2 is that instead of Youkai being able to hold one or two equipment items or one spirit orbs, they can ALL hold one of each, which is nice. It's worth mentioning that your cash IS your XP. You don't get XP just for defeating enemies. Enemies might drop crafting items or they might drop Oni Orbs, which function as both your money and XP. You spend Oni Orbs to level up characters, buy/craft items at the shop, and evolve your Youkai. It's interesting, and also means it's very easy to just PUMP levels into a new guy you wanna try using.

The gameplay itself is pretty fun. You have tanks, healers, attackers, and rangers. Tanks are very fat, have high defense, and taunt enemy fire. Healers have friendly buffs and heal the party. Attackers are DPS, and rangers focus on debuffing the enemy and laying traps. Playing by yourself, you're gonna be wanting to play the attacker most all the time, but you can switch between characters on the fly during the mission, so you can shift roles as you see fit. It's a bit fiddly to do with the touch screen, but if you have a NEW model 3DS, the ZR button handles it, and it's a lot lot faster. I really quite liked the actual combat. Having a DPS with dodge as my main (Jibanyan), I loved getting really up close and personal, and then dodging JUST at the right second to have him hit my invincibility frames. Especially the later bosses which you might fight underleveled, the bosses are certainly the highlight of the game for me. I can only imagine how fun they are with friends (whom I had none to play with ;A;).

A bit of a problem this game has is the controls, tbh. It's just built in the Youkai Watch 2 engine, so it has a lot of the control and camera hang-ups of that game, but this is an action game, so they're far more pronounced. R and L control the camera's rotation, but you more or less never need to do that because you can only rotate it slightly on the overworld (like in YW2), and during boss battles you have a boss-targeting feature you can activate by a touch screen button (or with ZL on a New model). Meanwhile, the buttons to change whom you're targeting are left and right on the D-pad for enemy targeting, and up and down for allies. You also have two consumable items you can bring into each mission which can ONLY be used by touching them on the touch screen. Making up and down each be a consumable, left and right being rotating the camera, and making R and L switch between allies and enemies targeting receptively would've made this game control far far better. In terms of performance, the game runs servicably. Oddly enough, it seems to have more trouble in earlier, easier missions, but the later ones all ran just fine, even on a non-New model 3DS.

This IS a Youkai Watch game, so it has a lot of the issues those games have in terms of how the content is laid out. There are quite a lot of Youkai, but because of that, it can be quite difficult to find the one you want, let alone actually get him to join you with the usual low chance the rarer guys have in Youkai Watch. Add to that how the patrol missions have rotating special Youkai in them and also have a 20 minute time limit, and it can be absolutely infuriating to get your favorite Youkai to join the group. There's a TON of VERY hard end-game content, especially with the Gettogumi downloadable expansion they released for free which you can import your Shiroinutai or Akanekodan save directly into. If you wanna spend an absolute eternity grinding for XP to do more crazy boss fights, you bet your sweet ass you can do that for HOURS on end. You can do bosses under the recommended level, but it's DAMN hard without human players to assist you. With human players, it's far more manageable.

Verdict: Recommended. It's a fun action game. If you like Youkai Watch and have friends who have Japanese 3DS's to play this with you on than this is a MUST buy. Of course, no one in the States actually has that qualifier list, so it's not so important. It's a competent budget action game. If you like action games on Japanese 3DS and can find it for like $20, it's a fun romp for sure :)