371
Greetings, fellow blog traveler! I am the Dungeon Master, your guide to- wait. Wrong introduction. It's Eli, lighting up your day with not just fireworks on Fourth of July, but another blog for you guys to read! Last year, I wasn't able to do a Fourth of July blog because production of my Beauty and the Beast Parody blog took longer than expected. This year, however, there's most likely going to be no giant blog productions to ruin the fun, so grab your grilled-up cow meat and light up some fireworks, because we're going to talk about an essential war of our past. No, I'm not talking about the Revolutionary War. I'm talking about a war of your childhood: Pokemon vs. Digimon vs. The Newcomer: Yokai Watch.
Now, before we start, I'm going to give you a little history of how I discovered these franchises, bring up pros and cons about each series, and what franchise is the very best that no one ever was. First off, let's talk about the franchise that started it all: Pokemon.
For those of you Magikarps who are living under a rock thinking, "What's a Pokey-man!?" it's a popular cultural phenomenon where you catch certain monsters with these catching devices called Pokeballs and use them to, you guessed it, be the very best that no one ever was and train them like it's your cause. To me, obviously, I loved Pokemon as a child and I still love it to this very day. Heck, my first Pokemon game was Pokemon Soul Silver and I played the crap out of it! Pokemon Diamond was technically my first game, but I was a massive idiot back then and couldn't even find the stairs to start the game because it's design was so new to me. I did replay Pokemon Diamond, but I was forced to start over because I had a rental copy of it, even though I went as far as the rock gym leader with no issues. After I gained enough knowledge from Pokemon Silver, I went onto playing games like Pokemon White, Pokemon Y, Pokemon Omega Ruby, and Pokemon Sun. I didn't want to get any of the Ultra or "add-on" games like Pokemon White² because to me (especially as a child), they were just the same games with something only a little different like a new story or new Pokemon. Regarding their spin-offs, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon was my favorite of all time because, who wouldn't like to become a Pokemon and save the world from evil legendaries?
Sure, discovering these games as a child was fun, but the uncovering of the Action Replay made my world flip upside down in a good way. One day at a baseball game I was forced to attend because of my obnoxious brother, I was sitting in the back near a woods-like area until another person came across and saw me playing Pokemon White. He got out his DS to play with me, only for little me to find out he had unobtainable Pokemon that were shinies. At this moment, my younger 11 year-old self was flabbergasted. This kid had shiny Pokemon at his disposal with no problems at all! I asked the kid with great curiousity, "How the heck did you get all of those Pokemon!?" He told me that it was because of his Action Replay, a device you could stick in your DS to cheat, change your player character sprite, or even re-encounter legendaries. For a while, I borrowed his Action Replay to play as a Lugia on Soul Silver and even complete the Pokedex with it. After the long borrowing session ended, I bought my own rental Action Replay, but it glitched up my DS with a colored screen after entering a cheat code, thus I never got another DS cheating device again until I found another one on eBay. This one thankfully worked, but after many years, it became all broken and worn down. Although the Action Replay was a great cheating device to screw around in already beaten games, it's dirtiness screwed itself over, but it will always remain a fond memory of mine.
Games aside, Pokemon also made loads of merchandise, including plushies, figurines, Pokemon Cards, movies, a TV show, and other nonsense. As a kid, I loved collecting the figurines, cards, and even plushies to make dumb YouTube videos with. I even watched the TV show from time to time and got myself a DvD pack of the original Pokemon series to catch up on. I even had a VHS system back then to watch movies like Mewtwo Strikes Back and The Power of One! Man, those were the good old days... Nowadays, I just collect the plushies so that I can get all 800 Pokemon in plush form, especially so that I can get on the Guinness Book of World Records and cuddle in a blanket of all the plushies I collected over the years. Man, that would feel so satisfying!
As you can see, Pokemon was a very big part of my childhood, so it's very hard to find cons of the series. If I had to pick some sort of con, one example would be that the formula can get boring after a while. The only "story" this game possesses is the generational evil team's spice they bring to the specific version. For example, Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire has two evil teams (Aqua and Magma) who want to either get rid of oceans entirely or flood the world in sea water. Otherwise, you have a basic plot of "Get your Pokemon, beat up the gym leaders, defeat the evil team, battle the elite four, become the Pokemon League champion, do some after-game nonsense, the end." However, the only game to switch this around a little is Pokemon Sun and Moon with it's island trials.
Anyways, I'll list most of Pokemon's (as well as the other monster catcher's pros and cons) at the end since there are so many things to talk about, but without further ado, let's get into Pokemon's little cousin, Digimon. Now, if you don't even know what this series is, that's understandable. Even I don't have a full grasp of all the Digimon that they placed out for me to memorize! Now, unlike Pokemon, Digimon is a series where instead of having these monsters exist in our reality, they live in an alternate universe called the "Digiverse" which was created from the invention of the internet. Four kids are chosen by the digivice to become the "Digi-Destined" and get sucked into the digital world. From there, the kids meet their talking (yes, talking!) Digimon partners, and the rest from there is a journey to save the digital world and their world too from destruction. It's basically Pokemon but with an actual storyline and danger involved, especially with the temporary evolutions.
When I discovered this series, I was in 7th grade at the time. The crappy grade where I was lonely because beyblades weren't popular anymore and shoes were the main trend. During this year of hopelessness, I found a gold mine of shows I could watch anytime on my iPod Touch known as, you guessed it, Netflix. Yes, this was before the entire craze of "Netflix and Chilling..." Ugh, it pains me to type that out. "But Eli!" I hear you Magikarps crying out in the distance. "Don't you hate Netflix? If you like it, go watch Buddy Thunderstruck with me!" Okay, that's admittingly a great show, and a lot of Netflix's content is filled to the brim with good stuff like Voltron and Aggretsuko. Unfortunately, Netflix grew too popular to the point where it had expensive monthly pay, and you also had to waste time to... *gasp!* Get an account! Digressing aside, I found Digimon after I was binging everybody's favorite frog alien, Keroro Gunso (or in America, Sgt. Frog). It turned out to be a series that hooked me, but after the second episode, I wanted to know if they ever saved the world (since I was lazy to watch the entire series at the time), and I'm not going to spoil it from here on out.
Soon after I watched the show, I found that Digimon were based off of these keychain creatures called Tamagotchi, where you feed it and clean it's poop to evolve it into many forms depending on your care. The only difference with the Tamagotchi keychains, however was that you could have the added feature of battling other Digimon. I got a downloadable virtual pet Digimon for my pleasure, and played with it for hours on my super old Windows XP computer until it eventually died. Most recently, I found myself a 20th anniversary Tamagotchi, and I still have it currently as a Nyororatchi. I mean, it used to be Kutchipatchi, but then it turned into an old man (Oyijatchi) and died. But thankfully, it lived for it's whole life span, so that's proof that I'm a good Tamagotchi parent!
Okay, so if Digimon got me through 7th grade with no issues, what are it's flaws? What made it fail against Pokemon, even though it had a decent following? Well, it's because of one simple thing: The Channels. At the time, Pokemon aired on the ever-so popular Kids WB, while Digimon aired on the now dinky used-to-be-good Fox Kids. Only a few kids were able to see Digimon in full force, and it didn't help that it was marketed like Pokemon. Just like it's big brother, it made plushies, figurines, a few mediocre to good games, and other nonsense that I probably forgot about because I was super young at the time. In the end, Digimon was still able to stay alive, but it was meant for a smaller audience only, and treated it's newer series for smaller audiences and big veteran fans of the show like Digimon TRI. Never again did Pokemon have to deal with another foe, but when 2014 came around, a new monster emerged and almost kicked Pokemon off it's high horse for good...
Actually, this series didn't get released in America until 2016, but 2014 was the year it got super popular in Japan, and it's called (you guessed it!) Yokai Watch. I've talked about it before in my Peridot XJ9 origin story blog, but if you're too lazy to click the link, Yokai Watch is a series where these invisible spirits called Yokai inhabit people's daily lives by making someone behave strangely like suddenly becoming hyperactive or pulling off an all-nighter. One day, a boy named Keita comes across a magical watch that lets him see these "ghosts" and help them solve their problems with either non-violent solutions or summoning another Yokai to help deal with it. Again, it's kind of like if Ben 10 meets Ghostbusters and problem solves like how Steven Universe would.
Unlike the other two monster shows, I discovered this in a fairly recent time period through one of my favorite toy reviewer, Kohdok's, review on this new fangled Japanese series. Even though I was skeptical on the series because of one odd-looking Yokai, I didn't let it stop me and I gave it a shot. And woah, boy, was this a rush of fun! It was comedic in it's dialogue, the battle system was refreshingly complex, catching bugs (Yes, actual bugs) was a blast, every location felt unique, the Yokai had very creative twists on the ones based on Japanese mythology, and many, many more things to explore within the game. For someone who was interested in Japanese culture, this was a beauty. Unfortunately, someone who wouldn't get Japanese mythology, prepare to be weirded out. This is one of the cons with the series: It's too unfamiliar for international audiences besides Japan. I mean, there are a few references you could get if you played Pokemon (Kyubi and Ninetails, both are Kitsune foxes), but if not, you're in for an entire while of Wikipedia searches to get an idea of what any of these jokes are. A second flaw is that some of the designs can be off for people, like Jinmenken/Manjimutt for example (Just look it up for yourself. It's weird). There's even a literal butt Yokai in the game to befriend named... Cheeksqueek. Okay, I'm done! This game is going to be the end of me!
I'm just kidding. I'm not actually done with the blog. Now, the marketing flaws with this sucker are a little different than Digimon's. Instead of a tiny fanbase push for the series, Yokai Watch had an obnoxiously huge marketing push with commercials out the wa-zoo, interrupted Nintendo Directs, loads of medals, a horribly dubbed anime series, a Yokai Watch without a flashlight, a Yokai Watch with a microglyph animator, a crappy theme song (plus one okay theme song by Swampy Marsh), weird figures for use as only medal holders, and a terribly executed care game. I'm not saying any of these marketing strategies were a bad thing. I bought myself a Noko figure, a few plushies, the original "non-microglyphed" watch, the original 3DS game, and an okay amount of medals. I'm just saying some of these strategies didn't go as well as the companies hoped. Unless Nintendo can make money off of Psychic Specters, there is no hope in seeing the Yokai Watch U or the third game, which is a shame because the third generation of Yokai Watch was one of my favorites, especially with the introduction of an otter dressed up as a space bunny named USApyon.
The Verdict: Which Monster Catcher Series is The Best of Them All?
Unfortunately, for those of you expecting a score-based system, I'm not doing that because it wouldn't be fair. I'm going to grade these based of how they changed my life as a whole. Pokemon, obviously, would be a massive winner, so I'm kicking that out in favor of Digimon vs Yokai Watch. Just give me a second so that I can calculate the winner.
And the winner is... *drumroll please!*
...Everybody!
"What!?" I hear a Magikarp object. "That's not fair, always picking the middle ground and making everybody win! Pick a side, gosh dangit! I want refunds!!" Woah there, calm down and hold the fireworks! The reason why I picked everybody is because... Every monster genre changed my life in some way. Pokemon made me the layedback friendly person I am, Digimon helped me through 7th grade when times were tough, and Yokai Watch gave me a reason to look at Japanese Mythology and create complex original characters instead of flat simple ones built off of clichés. These monster catching franchises are pieces of me, and if I were to take one away, I would never be the same person I would be today. Maybe that's what the Fourth of July is all about. We should look at one another not as enemies, but friends with goals and struggles. Sure, on the Forth of July, the British may feel awkward in this boastful holiday, but just know that they are still welcome for contributing to this hodge-podge of many cultures, all in one small space. Sure, times are a little tough, but we can get through this. All we need in life is not war, but peace. So this Fourth of Canada Day's July, let everybody feel welcome on this special day, even those who don't fit in. Before I go, make sure to leave a comment down below that I will instantly reply to, no matter how old or ridiculous it is, because in reality, your support through loads of comments I get is the motivation I need to make more of these amazing blogs for everyone here on PMC or not. Until next time, have a happy Fourth of July and Canada Day, and don't forget to live life the porpoiseful way!
Now, before we start, I'm going to give you a little history of how I discovered these franchises, bring up pros and cons about each series, and what franchise is the very best that no one ever was. First off, let's talk about the franchise that started it all: Pokemon.
For those of you Magikarps who are living under a rock thinking, "What's a Pokey-man!?" it's a popular cultural phenomenon where you catch certain monsters with these catching devices called Pokeballs and use them to, you guessed it, be the very best that no one ever was and train them like it's your cause. To me, obviously, I loved Pokemon as a child and I still love it to this very day. Heck, my first Pokemon game was Pokemon Soul Silver and I played the crap out of it! Pokemon Diamond was technically my first game, but I was a massive idiot back then and couldn't even find the stairs to start the game because it's design was so new to me. I did replay Pokemon Diamond, but I was forced to start over because I had a rental copy of it, even though I went as far as the rock gym leader with no issues. After I gained enough knowledge from Pokemon Silver, I went onto playing games like Pokemon White, Pokemon Y, Pokemon Omega Ruby, and Pokemon Sun. I didn't want to get any of the Ultra or "add-on" games like Pokemon White² because to me (especially as a child), they were just the same games with something only a little different like a new story or new Pokemon. Regarding their spin-offs, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon was my favorite of all time because, who wouldn't like to become a Pokemon and save the world from evil legendaries?
Sure, discovering these games as a child was fun, but the uncovering of the Action Replay made my world flip upside down in a good way. One day at a baseball game I was forced to attend because of my obnoxious brother, I was sitting in the back near a woods-like area until another person came across and saw me playing Pokemon White. He got out his DS to play with me, only for little me to find out he had unobtainable Pokemon that were shinies. At this moment, my younger 11 year-old self was flabbergasted. This kid had shiny Pokemon at his disposal with no problems at all! I asked the kid with great curiousity, "How the heck did you get all of those Pokemon!?" He told me that it was because of his Action Replay, a device you could stick in your DS to cheat, change your player character sprite, or even re-encounter legendaries. For a while, I borrowed his Action Replay to play as a Lugia on Soul Silver and even complete the Pokedex with it. After the long borrowing session ended, I bought my own rental Action Replay, but it glitched up my DS with a colored screen after entering a cheat code, thus I never got another DS cheating device again until I found another one on eBay. This one thankfully worked, but after many years, it became all broken and worn down. Although the Action Replay was a great cheating device to screw around in already beaten games, it's dirtiness screwed itself over, but it will always remain a fond memory of mine.
Games aside, Pokemon also made loads of merchandise, including plushies, figurines, Pokemon Cards, movies, a TV show, and other nonsense. As a kid, I loved collecting the figurines, cards, and even plushies to make dumb YouTube videos with. I even watched the TV show from time to time and got myself a DvD pack of the original Pokemon series to catch up on. I even had a VHS system back then to watch movies like Mewtwo Strikes Back and The Power of One! Man, those were the good old days... Nowadays, I just collect the plushies so that I can get all 800 Pokemon in plush form, especially so that I can get on the Guinness Book of World Records and cuddle in a blanket of all the plushies I collected over the years. Man, that would feel so satisfying!
As you can see, Pokemon was a very big part of my childhood, so it's very hard to find cons of the series. If I had to pick some sort of con, one example would be that the formula can get boring after a while. The only "story" this game possesses is the generational evil team's spice they bring to the specific version. For example, Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire has two evil teams (Aqua and Magma) who want to either get rid of oceans entirely or flood the world in sea water. Otherwise, you have a basic plot of "Get your Pokemon, beat up the gym leaders, defeat the evil team, battle the elite four, become the Pokemon League champion, do some after-game nonsense, the end." However, the only game to switch this around a little is Pokemon Sun and Moon with it's island trials.
Anyways, I'll list most of Pokemon's (as well as the other monster catcher's pros and cons) at the end since there are so many things to talk about, but without further ado, let's get into Pokemon's little cousin, Digimon. Now, if you don't even know what this series is, that's understandable. Even I don't have a full grasp of all the Digimon that they placed out for me to memorize! Now, unlike Pokemon, Digimon is a series where instead of having these monsters exist in our reality, they live in an alternate universe called the "Digiverse" which was created from the invention of the internet. Four kids are chosen by the digivice to become the "Digi-Destined" and get sucked into the digital world. From there, the kids meet their talking (yes, talking!) Digimon partners, and the rest from there is a journey to save the digital world and their world too from destruction. It's basically Pokemon but with an actual storyline and danger involved, especially with the temporary evolutions.
When I discovered this series, I was in 7th grade at the time. The crappy grade where I was lonely because beyblades weren't popular anymore and shoes were the main trend. During this year of hopelessness, I found a gold mine of shows I could watch anytime on my iPod Touch known as, you guessed it, Netflix. Yes, this was before the entire craze of "Netflix and Chilling..." Ugh, it pains me to type that out. "But Eli!" I hear you Magikarps crying out in the distance. "Don't you hate Netflix? If you like it, go watch Buddy Thunderstruck with me!" Okay, that's admittingly a great show, and a lot of Netflix's content is filled to the brim with good stuff like Voltron and Aggretsuko. Unfortunately, Netflix grew too popular to the point where it had expensive monthly pay, and you also had to waste time to... *gasp!* Get an account! Digressing aside, I found Digimon after I was binging everybody's favorite frog alien, Keroro Gunso (or in America, Sgt. Frog). It turned out to be a series that hooked me, but after the second episode, I wanted to know if they ever saved the world (since I was lazy to watch the entire series at the time), and I'm not going to spoil it from here on out.
Soon after I watched the show, I found that Digimon were based off of these keychain creatures called Tamagotchi, where you feed it and clean it's poop to evolve it into many forms depending on your care. The only difference with the Tamagotchi keychains, however was that you could have the added feature of battling other Digimon. I got a downloadable virtual pet Digimon for my pleasure, and played with it for hours on my super old Windows XP computer until it eventually died. Most recently, I found myself a 20th anniversary Tamagotchi, and I still have it currently as a Nyororatchi. I mean, it used to be Kutchipatchi, but then it turned into an old man (Oyijatchi) and died. But thankfully, it lived for it's whole life span, so that's proof that I'm a good Tamagotchi parent!
Okay, so if Digimon got me through 7th grade with no issues, what are it's flaws? What made it fail against Pokemon, even though it had a decent following? Well, it's because of one simple thing: The Channels. At the time, Pokemon aired on the ever-so popular Kids WB, while Digimon aired on the now dinky used-to-be-good Fox Kids. Only a few kids were able to see Digimon in full force, and it didn't help that it was marketed like Pokemon. Just like it's big brother, it made plushies, figurines, a few mediocre to good games, and other nonsense that I probably forgot about because I was super young at the time. In the end, Digimon was still able to stay alive, but it was meant for a smaller audience only, and treated it's newer series for smaller audiences and big veteran fans of the show like Digimon TRI. Never again did Pokemon have to deal with another foe, but when 2014 came around, a new monster emerged and almost kicked Pokemon off it's high horse for good...
Actually, this series didn't get released in America until 2016, but 2014 was the year it got super popular in Japan, and it's called (you guessed it!) Yokai Watch. I've talked about it before in my Peridot XJ9 origin story blog, but if you're too lazy to click the link, Yokai Watch is a series where these invisible spirits called Yokai inhabit people's daily lives by making someone behave strangely like suddenly becoming hyperactive or pulling off an all-nighter. One day, a boy named Keita comes across a magical watch that lets him see these "ghosts" and help them solve their problems with either non-violent solutions or summoning another Yokai to help deal with it. Again, it's kind of like if Ben 10 meets Ghostbusters and problem solves like how Steven Universe would.
Unlike the other two monster shows, I discovered this in a fairly recent time period through one of my favorite toy reviewer, Kohdok's, review on this new fangled Japanese series. Even though I was skeptical on the series because of one odd-looking Yokai, I didn't let it stop me and I gave it a shot. And woah, boy, was this a rush of fun! It was comedic in it's dialogue, the battle system was refreshingly complex, catching bugs (Yes, actual bugs) was a blast, every location felt unique, the Yokai had very creative twists on the ones based on Japanese mythology, and many, many more things to explore within the game. For someone who was interested in Japanese culture, this was a beauty. Unfortunately, someone who wouldn't get Japanese mythology, prepare to be weirded out. This is one of the cons with the series: It's too unfamiliar for international audiences besides Japan. I mean, there are a few references you could get if you played Pokemon (Kyubi and Ninetails, both are Kitsune foxes), but if not, you're in for an entire while of Wikipedia searches to get an idea of what any of these jokes are. A second flaw is that some of the designs can be off for people, like Jinmenken/Manjimutt for example (Just look it up for yourself. It's weird). There's even a literal butt Yokai in the game to befriend named... Cheeksqueek. Okay, I'm done! This game is going to be the end of me!
I'm just kidding. I'm not actually done with the blog. Now, the marketing flaws with this sucker are a little different than Digimon's. Instead of a tiny fanbase push for the series, Yokai Watch had an obnoxiously huge marketing push with commercials out the wa-zoo, interrupted Nintendo Directs, loads of medals, a horribly dubbed anime series, a Yokai Watch without a flashlight, a Yokai Watch with a microglyph animator, a crappy theme song (plus one okay theme song by Swampy Marsh), weird figures for use as only medal holders, and a terribly executed care game. I'm not saying any of these marketing strategies were a bad thing. I bought myself a Noko figure, a few plushies, the original "non-microglyphed" watch, the original 3DS game, and an okay amount of medals. I'm just saying some of these strategies didn't go as well as the companies hoped. Unless Nintendo can make money off of Psychic Specters, there is no hope in seeing the Yokai Watch U or the third game, which is a shame because the third generation of Yokai Watch was one of my favorites, especially with the introduction of an otter dressed up as a space bunny named USApyon.
The Verdict: Which Monster Catcher Series is The Best of Them All?
Unfortunately, for those of you expecting a score-based system, I'm not doing that because it wouldn't be fair. I'm going to grade these based of how they changed my life as a whole. Pokemon, obviously, would be a massive winner, so I'm kicking that out in favor of Digimon vs Yokai Watch. Just give me a second so that I can calculate the winner.
And the winner is... *drumroll please!*
...Everybody!
"What!?" I hear a Magikarp object. "That's not fair, always picking the middle ground and making everybody win! Pick a side, gosh dangit! I want refunds!!" Woah there, calm down and hold the fireworks! The reason why I picked everybody is because... Every monster genre changed my life in some way. Pokemon made me the layedback friendly person I am, Digimon helped me through 7th grade when times were tough, and Yokai Watch gave me a reason to look at Japanese Mythology and create complex original characters instead of flat simple ones built off of clichés. These monster catching franchises are pieces of me, and if I were to take one away, I would never be the same person I would be today. Maybe that's what the Fourth of July is all about. We should look at one another not as enemies, but friends with goals and struggles. Sure, on the Forth of July, the British may feel awkward in this boastful holiday, but just know that they are still welcome for contributing to this hodge-podge of many cultures, all in one small space. Sure, times are a little tough, but we can get through this. All we need in life is not war, but peace. So this Fourth of Canada Day's July, let everybody feel welcome on this special day, even those who don't fit in. Before I go, make sure to leave a comment down below that I will instantly reply to, no matter how old or ridiculous it is, because in reality, your support through loads of comments I get is the motivation I need to make more of these amazing blogs for everyone here on PMC or not. Until next time, have a happy Fourth of July and Canada Day, and don't forget to live life the porpoiseful way!
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great blog btw! :D
Also, thanks for the compliment! There will be plenty more blogs to come in the future! :D
Fabastic used Rain Dance! It started to rain diamonds.
"That's not enough!"
The diamond rain has intensified.
"Now that's good."
Peridot XJ9 was buffeted by the intensified diamond rain!
It's super effective!
Peridot XJ9 fainted from happiness!
Fabastic gained 9001 experience points!
Fabastic gained 5640954 XP. Points!
I do agree, I watched all of them and liked all of them so...
I've got yo back
Cute gif by the way. :3