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Yo-kai Watch Jam - Yo-kai Academy Y: Close Encounters of the N Kind

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  • Accidental Innuendo: When asked about their relationship, Chiaki and Nozu give a Friendship Denial and explain their relationship is entirely professional. However, they word it as "We've agreed to be partners and use each other." It can really sound like they mean... something else.
  • Ass Pull: Elna Amami is stated to be an entirely different person from Elze, but flashbacks show the two are entirely identical, meaning that, after spending weeks if not months on the planet, she found, from her point of view, an alien that just happened to look exactly like her, have a similar personality to the persona she has, and was in the correct position to possess.
  • Base-Breaking Character: Elzemekia is rather divisive, mainly stemming from her Death Equals Redemption moment and the reveal that she's a Well-Intentioned Extremist operating on Evil Versus Oblivion. The problem is that the meat of this, while foreshadowed earlier, is only really delved into in the final two episodes before her death, and she had been previously characterized as someone unapologetically evil, especially reinforced by her Villain Song, who seemed to enjoy what she did quite a bit despite Shinobu's insistence that she was a Stepford Smiler. Also, while she claims to be doing the bare minimum to appease Mazera, this doesn't explain her attempting to torture Emma or her Bad Boss tendencies, as none of these were necessary for her goal. Furthermore, her attempts to communicate her true intentions in the final battle are very poor, and her explaining to Ranto why his parents were killed come off less like she's saying "I was forced to" and more like "Just in case" which Ranto gets understandably angry at. Not helping matters is that much of her backstory is explicitly a Shout-Out to Frozen, making it feel very shallow, and that the idea of the Aliens being tragic and Forced Into Villainy by Mazera's arrival was already done with Dober, who was not treated with nearly as much sympathy from the narrative. What makes her divisive rather than outright hated is just how entertaining she is, and how often she does extreme things and somehow manages to get away with it. How much you like her ultimately falls down to how much of a disservice you believe her final episodes were to the character.
  • Complete Monster: The leader of the N-Kind, Mazera is a powerful black hole who has devoured and enslaved countless worlds, forcing the survivors of his raids into his servitude. Setting his sights on Earth, he launches a genocide against the Yo-kai, utterly eradicating their dimension, has children experimented on, and orders a family murdered to prepare for his invasion. When his plot to destroy the planet by bathing it in lava fails, Mazera descends to wipe the populace out with his own hands as punishment for defying him.
  • Creepy Awesome: Mazera's Bizarre Alien Biology, mainly in his Bolt form, makes him look flat-out unnerving, like a skinned humanoid who seems to defy his own logic and biology just to screw with the people he's fighting. He manages to come across as strange, eerie and unknowable without going into extreme Eldritch Abomination territory like Overseer. In a sense, this grounded nature makes him seem even stranger, which has earned him praise.
  • Crosses the Line Twice: While the Yo-kai Watch franchise is no stranger to some particularly vile characters, just how over the top evil Mazera is compared to some of the series' earlier antagonists like McKraken and Dame Dedtime ends up being unintentionally hilarious, especially thanks to the comedic tone of the franchise. One minute you can have Jinpei rapping about pot noodles, and the next you'll have it be revealed the aliens sewed the heads of elementary schoolers onto animals and committed a genocide and enslaved the survivors.
  • Demographically Inappropriate Humor:
    • Episode 3 has Benimaru fight Clock Man in an endless loop since Clock Man can rewind time 5 seconds. The others know they have to somehow stop him from reversing time and realize real clocks can't move if you stop the pendulum. Makes sense, however, the pendulum is between Clock Man's legs and when Mataro grabs the pendulum, Clock Man blushes and has an awkward smile on his face.
    • Episode 4 has students acting obnoxiously gross when their names are written in a notebook. When the puppet culprit writes Jinpei's name, he takes off his clothes except his socks and boxers...which are on his head. Fortunately, Momo covers Jinpei's crotch.
    • Episode 5 has Jinpei dress as a turtle and bite a chocolate maker. He spins around to shake Jinpei off and Jinpei slips out of the turtle costume naked and hits Mataro in the face, sausage first.
    • Episode 13 has Principal Daiouji trying to get rid of a gravure magazine that kept coming back to him, which turns out was inspirited by his late pet frog whom he accidentally killed while hiding the magazine from his daughter in school. After the truth of the magazine gets out, he claims it's to support a graduate who's now a successful model, but not only do the pages show the model appearing not much older than his own daughter, his pleasure in reading the magazine suggests otherwise.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: Dober of all characters managed to gain quite a few fans for being one of the franchise's few antagonists to show consistent redeeming qualities but still be treated like a villain.
  • Evil Is Cool:
    • One of the reasons that Dober is well loved is because despite having redeeming qualities and a tragic past he's still a villain and is treated like one by the narrative.
    • Mazera is probably the most unrepentantly evil and most over the top heinous character in the Yo-kai Watch franchise, which has earned him a lot of fans for just how out of place he seems.
  • Fanfic Fuel: How's Elna's life going to be changed after Elzemekia used her face very publicly for the N-Kind's goals?
  • Fan Nickname:
    • My Yo-kai Academia for the series.
    • Jinpei is sometimes called "Jim Banyan" to mock some of the more clunky localized names.
  • Fanon Discontinuity: Many fans choose to treat it and Yo-kai Watch! as an alternate universe rather than sharing continuity with Yo-kai Watch: Shadowside due to the conflicting timeline.
  • Improved Second Attempt: Nozu was the second attempt after Micchy to adapt Slimamander into the anime. While Micchy was a Base-Breaking Character, Nozu was more universally well received thanks to being played seriously, contributing more and having interesting character interactions.
  • It Was His Sled:
    • This isn't a High School AU, rather the Yo-kai were all Killed Off for Real and reincarnated.
    • Elna Amami is the Alien Elzemekia. Didn't help that the opening and episode preview very blatantly spoil it. Given how she practically rules Yo-kai Watch: Wibble Wobble, it's likely anyone vaguely aware will at least know that this seemingly innocent girl is a major character.
  • Jerkass Woobie:
    • Ranto is abrasive and honestly just kind of a dick, but it largely stems from losing his family to the N-kind. As a small child, his parents were melted by a Grey Agent, and he later witnessed it happen to his younger sister right in front of his eyes. He almost had the same happen to him if it wasn't for Earth Walker saving him, which gave him the nice added bonus of seeing someone dismembered at a young age. Even with Mazera's defeat, it didn't bring back any of his victims, effectively meaning he's alone.
    • Similar to Ranto, Chiaki, has an outwardly unpleasant character, due to his rank in the school mafia, and is overall a very crude individual. Also like Ranto, he had a run in with the N-kind prior to the series' beginning, getting abducted along with his bandmates. The aliens modified his DNA, giving him snake-like skin on his back, and merged his friends with their chimeras, leaving him unable to save them. He choose to take his own life rather than be recaptured, attempting to jump to his death, but it didn't work due to his increased durability. Bear in mind, this all happened to him when he was in elementary school.
    • Out of all of Mazera's underlings, Elzemekia is by far the most sympathetic. She was blackmailed into serving Mazera in exchange for sparing her planet right after he murdered two of her friends.
    • While clearly not written that way, some people find Dober to be even more sympathetic than Elze. An inhabitant of the planet Doggie, he became a mighty fighter at a young age. However, his planet was assaulted by the N Kind. As the strongest one, his friends entrusted the future and legacy of their people to him, shortly before being blown apart by the Orbital Bombardment. Dober was then enslaved to become one of Mazera's top enforcers. As a result, he's a Proud Warrior Race Guy, The Perfectionist and a proponent of Animal Jingoism. Making it worse is that we only fully find out about this before he's eviscerated by a pre-Heel–Face Turn Mikettio before anyone else can learn of his circumstances. Then the Grey Agents put him back together as Dober Vader, something he clearly is not happy about, and starts to undergo Motive Decay, becoming obsessed with revenge on Mikettio. He never gets to see him again and is killed, for real this time, by Benimaru.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • Suspicious behavior. Explanation
    • Bald Mataro. Explanation
    • Jimmy Jiba. It has to be seen.
    • Encounter with N Explanation
    • During Chiaki's song, he sings about pandas being his bodypillow. As a result, it spawned a lot of fanart depicting him with panda plushies.
  • Narm: The warriors of Doggy emit a musk yellow aura, crouching and straining while they do so, when they power up, but it really just looks like they're farting really hard.
  • Stock Footage Failure: Whenever Kengo Benimaru activates his Finishing Move, his YSP Watch is worn in reverse, resulting in him somehow inserting the Skill Medal into the ejection slot of the Watch.
  • Trans Audience Interpretation: Chiaki, due to being voiced by Rinu of Strawberry Prince fame, who is a trans man, and their story of not being able to fit in among others, including their own parents, due to changes to their body.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: A lot of people prefer Kumako's original design rather than her change in appearance as it fits her bear theme far better and her newer design looks far more generic.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
    • Given Jinpei is Jibanyan reincarnated and his mother is Amy's daughter and died the same day he was born, it would've been interesting not to mention heartwarming to see Amy appear occasionally, alas she only appears during one of the opening songs.
    • Izuna is the only Onryo partner of a main character to essentially have no backstory at all.
    • Like the Yo-kai from previous instalments, defeated Onryo have medals allowing them to be summoned anytime, but it only happens in episode 50 where they're easily defeated by Mazera.
      • How Onryo are handled as a whole are rather contentious due to many feeling that they're effectively just Yo-kai with a new coat of paint. Despite initially being presented as specifically vengeful ghosts, they later evolve into something far more resembling Yo-kai with a variety of methods to be created, such as being born from negative emotions or extreme feelings. The idea of them being less permanent isn't really touched on either, as many of them remain for the rest of the show and can be summoned via medals, which only ends up being more egregious as summoning is very much not a major focus of the show. Any thing distinguishing them from Yo-kai is slowly lost over time, partially thanks to the defining mechanic of the franchise.
    • Lord Enma shows up and does... pretty much nothing, despite the fact he'd have a personal beef with the N-Kind after they destroyed the Yo-kai World. In the end, Salaryman Miyazawa ends up contributing more than he does.
      • By extension, Emma ends up being the least utilized member of the cast, despite some early appearances making it seem like she was going to be important. This is rather notable considering she's the reincarnation of the franchise's Big Good.
    • Kumako doesn't get it much better than Emma. While she does get a Yo-kai Hero form in Momonga Lady, she only gets one usage of her against Elzemekia before being stopped in her tracks and never transforming again. Despite being the creator of the watches, she gets barely any usage out of them.
    • Rigel gets about 4 chunks of dialogue across all his appearances before he's unceremoniously reduced to a stain on the Academy grounds. He's the only alien not even given the tiniest bit of backstory (even Pit Bull, who had similarly little, was at least explained to be a slave from the same planet as Dober), which is rather glaring considering he seemed to be the one who was closest to Mazera.
    • Elna never appears after getting separated from Elzemekia. We never get to see her reaction to having her body used by an alien invader for the majority of the show, and doesn't even get a cameo to make sure she's actually okay.
  • The Woobie: Pretty much all of the major students qualify to some extent:
    • Jinpei's mother died the same day he was born.
    • Koma was born to strict parents expecting him to follow in his father's footsteps of performing rakugo comedy, something he wasn't good at and had little interest in. He could also see Onryo and detect the other students only caring about filling their master's position.
    • Mataro for his butt monkey moments, sometimes deliberately caused by the other characters, albeit, not out of malice on their part. Its implied he was also bullied before middle school as a flashback had him asking his grandpa why he always loses fights and has bandages on his face.
    • Nozuchika couldn't have friends that didn't meet his father's high expectations and his first friend turned out to only play with him because his parents paid him.
    • Kumako/Kuka ended up getting falsely expelled from Y Academy, thanks to the aliens infiltrating the school's disciplinary committee, and was badmouthed by Ranto right to her face, albeit to keep her out of harm's way.

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