- Base-Breaking Character: Elzemekia, big time. A lot of people loathe her for the sheer number of variants she gets, having obtained a whopping six in the span of just 5 years. The only one who comes close from Y Academy is Jinpei, which makes sense since he's the protagonist. People feel her constant appearances take up spots that could be used by others, especially since Y Academy isn't very well represented. What makes her divisive, however, is that a lot of people really do like her variants a lot, even if they are rather numerous.
- Broken Base:
- The US version and its lack of events in comparison to the Japanese version. Some players are sick of it and dropped it in favor of Puni Puni, while others are annoyed but understand that Yo-kai Watch in the US is far behind Japan (getting the Yo-kai Watch games way later).
- The introduction of the Lucky Crank-a-Kai into the US version is either seen as an Author's Saving Throw to people that wanted the game to be more like the Japanese version, or rigged nonsense that's impossible to get the really awesome new stuff.
- The number of Hu Mons, who really just seem more like people rather than the stylized critters the franchise began with. Defenders point out that there is a justification, given how they are a sapient species, many of whom used to be people themselves, several of these designs were created for plotlines whose whole gimmick was humanizing the Yo-kai, and that Hu Mons have existed since Yo-kai Watch Blasters. Detractors point out how the most overt of the Hu Mons were already somewhat divisive, rather than this being an unheard of Double Standard, and those that weren't were far less human looking, like Venoct. Furthermore, some find the designs to try a bit too hard and be too detailed compared to the far simpler designs present in the mainline games.
- Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: Many agree that the gameplay is lacking and the economy is horrible, but the new Yo-kai introduce some very interesting concepts, such as What If? events like "What if McKraken won and conquered the Yo-kai World?" and some of the event plots were so unique they spawned their own manga adaptations.
- Fandom-Specific Plot: There's a lot of fanart depicting Enma and Ananta acting as doting, worried parents towards Jaen, which is made funnier given they look young enough to be her brothers.
- Game-Breaker: Hoo boy.
- Across both versions, generally any Yo-kai with a tribe unity skill is this, as tribe unity can be stacked and having multiple yo-kais of the same tribe with this exact skill massively boosts the team's HP and damage output.
- US
- Yo-kai that directly attack all. Including Komashura, Sproink S, Kyryn, Libertynyan S, and Swelterrier. Amazing for earning money.
- Yo-kai that directly attack a single target. Including Demuncher, Chymera, Uber Geeko, Ogralus, Nul, and Faux Kappa. Amazing for Score Attack.
- Attack Boosters. Including Blazion Awoken, Mass Mutterer (both also heal), Unikirin, Komajiro S, Beelzebold, and Gargaros. Helps with both.
- Score Boosters. Including Elder Bloom, Unpleasent, Arachnevil, and Sgt. Burly. Helps with both.
- Slurpent! The best inflater by far. Where every other inflater is limited to two, Slurpent can grow around 7-8 Wib Wobs at a time.
- Tracer Yo-kai, which allow you to trace your finger over the board and pop lots of Wib Wobs for extremely high scores and money growth. Only Libertynyan SS has this in The US, but the Japanese version has several others.
- Japan
- Goku Orochi famously broke the game so badly that it irreparably damaged the game's economy. It has yet to recover over five years later. This was due to his Soultimate being able to do massive amounts of damage thanks to a bug, which resulted in extremely high scores, which gave you the ability to earn over 32 thousand Y-Money in one battle, around 30 dollars worth, with it only costing 4,500 Y-Money to use the event crank. The bug was eventually fixed, but the damage had been done, and was so bad, the new currency Y-Points had to be introduced to replace Y-Money.
- Goku Tsuchinoko is the ONLY Yo-kai in the game whose skill is to increase Y-points gotten at the end of any event level/minigame, with the maximum being an addition of 5 points. He became essential for grinding during events such as budokai and point balls due to simply increasing the amount of the currency earned per battle, of which the player would be doing extremely frequently during those events.
- LB Cloud was considered the best unit of his time in 2018, having the same Soultimate type as Goku Orochi while being a rank higher and having a soul meter refill skill that combos with his Soultimate better.
- Gunshin Susanoo, the very first Nyanbo exclusive Yo-kai, was considered the strongest unit overall for 2019. Having both a unity boosting skill that boosts both hp and attack and having a select pop Soultimate that is incredibly easy to chain made him a very popular choice for clearing levels and competing in score attack alike.
- Komami overtook Gunshin Susanoo almost a year after he debuted as most popular choice for score attack, having a select pop Soultimate just like him but with a large puni redrop skill that makes chaining her and getting her g Soultimate up even easier.
- Any Yo-kai with a skill combination of fast fever meter filling when linking their puni and linking through other punis is this. examples include Lord McKraken, Gunshin, and Great King's Knight Shutendoji. They allow the player to infinitely loop from one fever into the next given careful planning, practically making them invincible and able to overcome any stage as long as they can defeat the enemy before they get a chance to attack.
- Arle. Her Soultimate stops in-game time and allows you to link as much Punis as possible in a time frame before popping all of the linked Punis and filling the soul meters Yo-kai(s) whose Punis are linked. She is supposed to remove her own Punis from the board when using her Soultimate to avoid her being able to refill herself, but with the use of an all pop Soultimate she is able to bypass this and refill herself basically infinitely. She was so incredibly broken for Score Attack that the entire Score Attack ranking system had to be changed to a league system to accommodate for the players who don't have her.
- The Uz rank version of Megumin and Halloween Jaen are infamously known for being the characters capable of dealing the highest amount of damage per Soultimate, doing at least a whopping 300k per use at the cost of having to wait 20-40 seconds from the initial press. Megumin's initial inclusion into the game was so game-breaking for Gates of Whimsy event types that the developers had to raise the regular gate bosses HP to over a million and boss gates HP to over 15 million just so Megumin users wouldn't trounce them.
- Also from Konosuba is the Uz rank version of Aqua, a fever extender who effectively has four skills being fast Soultimate recovery during fever, heal whenever entering fever, faster fever gauge filling when linking her Puni, and further boost to damage during fever.
- Rem has been hailed as one of the most broken units of all time from the moment players understood what she does. Her main mechanic is that her oni powers activate after the first usage of her Soultimate in battle, buffing any subsequent Soultimates by how much of her puni make up the percentage of punis popped by the soultimate with the maximum being around a 68% increase in damage. This means that it is possible for players to make the board only a single size 2 of her puni by linking right before activating her Soultimate, then following up immediately with another all-pop soultimate which gets its damage massively boosted due to her single puni being 100% of punis popped by the following Soultimate. This, combined with her having a revive skill as one of her potential 2nd skills, makes her incredibly powerful and sometimes borderline necessary to exploit during events.
- Generally any Nyanbo or Super Youma Crank exclusives count as this, even the ones that don't come with tribe unity.
- Blue Sky Helmet Suzaku and Fudou Myouou Boy GOLD, the only two Yo-kai in the game with a skill that allows any team member have their Soultimate be a Critical Hit that does around double the original damage, with Suzaku having an extreme popper Soultimate and damage reduction chance skill and Fudou having a Soultimate-filling all pop with a secondary skill of having random punis of every character start the battle large.
- Yo-kai that make the board start arranged are also usually considered this, with Raikou Shogunyan and Beachside Setsuna, Beachside Natsuyomi, and Golden Claws being prime examples as they can make going into fever time at the start of battle a breeze if they are accompanied by another Yo-kai with a skill that makes going into fever faster when linking their punis.
- Hina Princess Fukuri Yuu is basically Begin with a Finisher: the Yo-kai. Her Soultimate type is an extreme popper, which when combined with her skills that makes her have a nearly full Soultimate meter at the start of battle and makes large punis of every character drop after activating her Soultimate (making them drop large as her popping effect is ative), allows her to effectively get all 4 other team member's Soultimates up just by using hers.
- Low-Tier Letdown: In a game where many a high rank Yo-kai get to be hailed as powerful and useful, there are some who are... less than fortunate.
- Any unit with a critical attack Soultimate is considered this, due to the Powerful, but Inaccurate nature of their main attack. The general consensus is that they are an objectively worse version of 100 combo Soultimates because those can do the same amount of damage more consistently for the cost of only keeping up combos above 100. It gets worse if they are a damage bonus for event content, because counters from the bosses effectively turns using them into a Death or Glory Attack in a level where every Soultimate usage is crucial.
- Units with a stun effect Soultimate are also considered bad due to them only being able to be used once per fever.
- Dark Witch Fumi le Fay is a ZZZ rank Shady tribe trace popper whose skills are to start with her Soultimate meter partially filled and drop large punis naturally. She would otherwise have a decent kit if not for two glaring issues: first being any endgame content (seal stages and throne stages) always nullify Soultimates that have a buff effect, including trace poppers due to having a secondary effect of increasing the soultimate meter filling of other units. Second being that her damage output is incredibly lackluster for a ZZZ rank, being barely unable to break 70k damage with a G Soultimate with maximum tribe unity while other units of the same or sometimes even lower ranks can easily break 100k under those same conditions.
- Spooklunk from the first game is here and he comes with... quite possibly the worst kit in the entire game. For starters, his Soultimate is to pop a horizontal line on the board and stun the target, which is the worst possible Soultimate type to have as the stun does nothing against seal stages and throne stages, getting instantly nullified. Second is his skill: he can reduce the damage of incoming attacks by 100% of their damage, completly nullifying them. The catch? The maximum chance of his skill activating is 1 percent, effectively making him have no skill to begin with.
- Maten Soranaki Boy is a nyanbo exclusive ZZZ rank of the Eerie tribe whose kit is extremely lacking for all his rarity and premium status. For starters, his Soultimate is a pop the center of the board + ball making one, meaning that it takes a size 18 to get up a regular one and a size 21 for a G Soultimate for damage that is equal if not less than other Soultimates such as pop all + fever extend which require only size 13 for a regular one and a size 18 for a G version. Second are his 2 skills, starting the battle with a partially filled Soultimate meter and a 45% chance of stunning enemies for 2 seconds when a size 6 or larger puni of his is popped, neither of which help with getting his Soultimate off multiple times faster and the stun skill barely having an effect of enemies anyways due to how long it would take to set up a size 6 to begin with.
- Great King's Silver General Rinne is regarded as one of the worst headliners of all time, with the same Soultimate as the above mentioned Maten Soranaki Boy and having the same issues that come with it. His skills are somehow even worse than Maten Soranaki Boy's, being any large puni having a 70% chance of filling a small bit of his Soultimate gauge and redropping large puni after they are popped. Adding salt in the wound is the fact that due to being a headliner in the Shogi event series, his second skill needs a condition that needs to be fulfilled to make it active (in his case it's popping 10 of size 2 or larger of his punis) rather than being active from the start of the battle.
- Memetic Badass: Units with high ranks are treated by the fandom as genuinely as powerful as their rank, rather than it being dismissed as a case of Gameplay/Story Segregation due to Rank Inflation and Power Creep.
- Memetic Loser: Unfortunately for characters introduced earlier into the game's life span, the inverse of the above is true, such as Sephiroth being mocked relentlessly for only being a Rank SSS Yo-kai.
- Memetic Mutation:
- The diverse cast has spawned a lot of memes, since not a lot of games can say they've got everyone from Sephiroth to Eren Yeager to Inugami Korone.
- Powerscaling/[X innocuous character] is stronger than [Y stereotypically powerful character] Explanation
- Given how bad the economy is, some joking compare it to less well off countries.
- Though Jaen is explicitly a distant descendant of Enma and Ananta, fans tend to refer to her as their daughter with all that implies.
- The diverse cast has spawned a lot of memes, since not a lot of games can say they've got everyone from Sephiroth to Eren Yeager to Inugami Korone.
- Scrappy Mechanic:
- Punitto Shot events are generally widely hated for being a version of slingshot/ohajiki events where missing the target means the player will do 0 damage. Not helped by the fact that Y Point income is also slower than slingshot events due to the damage not having a multiplier by default based on the player's performance and the mission system being streak-based instead of a fixed multiplier per mission.
- Some players don't like the addition of second skills that can be 2 (or in Hell Arachnus' case, 3) potential options, as it means sometimes they would need to put in more effort to obtain a Mikakunin Book item in case they got a skill they did not want. Hell Arachnus in particular is infamous because he has three potential skills instead of two, leaving some players spending more resources than they want to just to be able to reroll his skill to become the more desirable tribe unity instead of Soultimate meter filled at the start of battle or bonus ball drops.
- Surprise Difficulty: Non-fans of the series will think its cute aesthetic is indicative of an easy game. Well, it gets pretty difficult as it goes on. Event stages after the 3rd map's boss are particularly difficult, generally with the main "throne stage" where a powerful Yo-kai, that can be befriended, boasts over 1 million HP and does over 1000 damage per attack.
- That One Boss:
- Sproink, as his attack spot is not revealed until you pop the belly button blobs. This doesn't sound hard, but he can attack you repeatedly until you lose.
- McKraken also counts after the game was updated with more levels.
- Toadal Dude and Arachnus. The former will shake the board and pop big Wib Wobs, while the latter will prevent you from using your Soultimate moves.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Ymmv/YokaiWatchWibbleWobble
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