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.
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.