Yo-kai Watch: Wibble Wobble (Yo-kai Watch: PuniPuni in Japan) is a puzzle game created by Level-5, and its a loose adaption of the video game series of the same name.
After two years, the International version was shut down on May 31st 2018. Puni Puni is still going.
This game uses these tropes:
- Ad Reward: One of the ways to get points is through these, although they can also reward the player with Genki Drinks or Yokodori Tickets depending on the event type currently going.
- Allegedly Free Game: The game is free to play, but some bonuses, like very high-class Yo-kai, cost money to own.
- Alternate Continuity: The story of the base game is similar to the first game and anime, but the player (not Nate or Katie) is inserted in the role. This is noticeable as you see Nate without the watch, and doesn't talk about Yo-kai.
- Auto-Revive: A skill that some Yo-kai have is to give the player a set amount of HP after an attack that would otherwise KO them once per battle. A recent version is having the effect recover the HP and also the soul meter of the Yo-kai who has the skill.
- Background Music Override: Putting certain characters, like Elzemekia, into your middle team slot can change the Battle Theme Music into a tune associated with them. In her case, it changes to a version of Invading Magical Girl Elzemekia.
- Begin with a Finisher: Some Yo-kai have a skill to begin with their Soul meter partially filled at the start of battle, allowing them to almost immediately use their Soultimate.
- Boss-Altering Consequence: Clearing seal stages and doing other challenges (usually finishing boxes in Yokodori events or beating X amount of super Ohajiki battles) weakens the throne stage and makes them go from Hopeless Boss Fight to a more standard Superboss.
- Bragging Rights Reward: Some events have profile cards, profile pictures, and profile effects as rewards for beating difficult minigame levels or completing difficult objectives. They do not alter gameplay in any shape or form, but they can be put on the player's profile.
- Calling Your Attacks: The Soultimate moves have the same flash screen as the original games.
- Combos: You need to make a lot of combos by matching all the blobs.
- Crossover: The game has featured multiple crossovers with various works, integrating their cast as playable characters. These included: Attack on Titan, Detective Conan, Final Fantasy, Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Hello Kitty, hololive, Inuyasha, Kamen Rider, KonoSuba, Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic, Monster Strike, Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation, Nijisanji, Puyo Puyo, The Quintessential Quintuplets, Ranma ½, Shaman King, the Ultra Series and more.
- Damage-Increasing Debuff: Some seal stages can inflict an inspirit on the player which massively boosts their damage output until the player gets rid of it or the timer runs out.
- Damage Reduction: Certain Yo-kai like Robonyan and Mimikin can help reduce the damage taken from enemies for a set amount of time. Some Yo-kai also have a skill that allows them to reduce incoming damage by a lot, but triggers randomly.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: On normal stages, getting KOed usually only penalizes the player with a 500 Y money fee to continue. Averted in endgame content stages such as later base game bosses and seal/throne stages of events, where getting KOed forces you out of the level and resets your progress.
- Defeat Means Friendship: Like the game and anime, you become friends with the certain Yo-kai once you defeat them. However, some of the more despicable characters clearly only do so either because they see you as a powerful potential minion or to cause further destruction with abandon. Some of the crazier characters don't even seem to process they're aligning themselves with you. Unlike the game where you can choose, they become your friends automatically. Unlike the original game, having more than one of the same Yo-kai is impossible, as getting a duplicate will just fill the Soultimate level of the original.
- Demographic-Dissonant Crossover: Has had crossovers with works for much older audiences, like Attack on Titan.
- Early-Bird Cameo: Wibble Wobble features Yo-kai from the second and third games for the overseas audience.
- Eating Optional: In Neon Genesis Evangelion, the Angels didn't eat at all. For the befriending mechanic to work, however, they've been given the ability to eat food, and apparently even have preferences.
- Fanservice: As per gacha game standard, though this is mainly limited to the newer designs. A good chunk of them are humanoid in shape and reveal either their legs, chests, midriffs, or a combination of all three. Just about half the male characters are basically a Walking Shirtless Scene.
- Fantasy Pantheon: Adds new Yo-kai gods, namely those embodying the concepts of stiffness and squishiness.
- Full Health Bonus: Some Yo-kai have a skill that increases their damage output depending on how much HP is remaining, with a maximum boost of 80% at full HP. Some Yo-kai also have the opposite, where they instead do more damage the less health the player has.
- Fusion Dance: Like the original game, there is a Fusion section, where two Yo-kai, or a Yo-kai and an item can be fused together to create a new one.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation:
- You can befriend antagonistic, and in some cases even canonically deceased, characters to join your roster even though they want nothing to do with you other than to see you dead, and you can even pit them against themselves in fights.
- As with all other games in the franchise, the befriending mechanic involves tossing food at enemy Yo-kai. This includes characters who can't or don't eat, like the Angels from Neon Genesis Evangelion.
- Herd-Hitting Attack: Some Soultimates have an effect where they target all enemies on the screen, but each individual hit is weaker.
- Inconsistent Dub: Whispocrates' profile calls his boss by his Japanese name, "Mitsunari Ishida". The other games and anime renamed him "Shogun Waitington".
- Make My Monster Grow: Characters like Ray O' Light and Lady Longnek can make certain blobs grow bigger.
- The Medic: Yo-kai like Tattletell, Skranny, and Goldenyan can help heal your team.
- Money Grinding: If you can't pass a certain level due to a Yo-kai that is weak, you can go back to a previous level and earn more points and money. You can still get some experience and money if you don't want to continue the stage.
- Multi-Slot Character: Even by the standards of the franchise, this game makes it an Exaggerated Trope. Want a new character? Give him a suit or a popcorn bucket to hold. Congrats, new character. It's ridiculously easy to make teams comprised of nothing but the same character in different forms and outfits.
- Non-Damaging Status Infliction Attack: A Soultimate type that a Yo-kai can have is to simply stun the enemy for a fixed time while not doing damage to them.
- Powerful, but Inaccurate: Certain high rank Yo-kai have a Soultimate that has a "critical attack" effect, allowing them to do hundreds of thousands of damage if they land but only do a tenth of that if they miss.
- Premium Currency:
- Y Points are used for the majority of activities with events, being needed to spin the event Crank-a-kai which has Yo-kai up to rank Uz+ in them and to buy resources such as Genki Drinks or Yokodori Tickets from the shop. Naturally, the only way to obtain them is by playing the event and racking them up slowly via beating levels or playing a minigame depending on the event type.
- Nyanbo Coins can be obtained once per event and are used to spin the Nyanbo Crank-a-kai, which has a variety of high ranking characters, with some of them being exclusive to it.
- Super Youma Coins are basically just Nyanbo Coins but are completely paywalled with their exclusives usually being even stronger than the average Nyanbo exclusives while also being Yo-kai from the first three games or the Blasters spinoffs who are Promoted to Playable.
- Promoted to Playable:
- The game features a wide variety of characters as unlockable Yo-kai, even if they weren't playable in the mainline games, or were even Adapted Out of them.
- Inverted with Emperor Mode Usapyon. Usapyon's even received an upgraded version in Ginga Emperor and King Usapyon, but Emperor Mode itself still lies out of reach.
- Puni Plush: This is the game's main deal, made more obvious by it's Japanese title being Puni Puni. Yo-kai are depicted as "Wib Wobs" or "Punis," curved blobs representing the character's face. They're actually created by Punigami, a Physical God who looks like a giant floating Wib Wob who embodies the very concept of soft and squishy... ness. She's able to take Yo-kai from their usual artstyle to a cuter, smoother one. The Puni faction are contrasted with the Kachi Kachi faction, a group who embody stiffness and hardness, and thus use a wide array of sharp edges and straight lines.
- Rank Inflation: While Yo-kai Watch was no stranger to this idea, this was the game where it got, quite frankly, ridiculous. While the core games simply run from E to S, and Kunitori Wars had a rank equivalent to SS, Wibble Wobble not only introduced SS, it also had: SSS, Z, ZZ, ZZZ, Uz and then Uz+, and that's just as of writing.
- Set Bonus: The player gets a boost in HP and damage when having more Yo-kai of the same tribe by default, increasing by 5% for every added one. There is also a skill certain Yo-kai have that increases said boost even further and can also be stacked. Certain Yo-kai also have another skill to increase stats by character type rather than tribe, such as Soukaryuuou boosting the stats of other Yo-kai from the 100 Tales series.
- Shielded Core Boss: Some boss and throne stages implemented have a barrier mechanic, where the player must take out the 2 surrounding enemies first before being able to damage the main boss.
- Status Buff: Some Yo-kai have this as their Soultimate, increasing damage output of all other Yo-kai for a duration of 10 seconds. A rarer variant is a Yo-kai that only boosts for 5 seconds but has a higher multiplier. Also comes in the form of a skill where the buff happens under specific conditions like popping large Puni of the Yo-kai or entering fever.
- Superboss: The game has these in the form of seal and throne stages found in events. Seal stages generally boast around 500.000 to over 1.000.000 HP with attacks that do somewhere from 500 to over 1000 damage, while throne stages at their weakest have 2.000.000 HP and do usually over 1500 damage per attack. A completely unsealed throne stage is basically a Hopeless Boss Fight, with them usually having over 60 million HP and attacks that do more damage than any HP players could hope to achieve while also recovering 500.000 HP every 3 seconds.
- Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: Tribes in this game have this system, where Brave and Tough beat Mysterious and Slippery, Mysterious and Slippery beat Charming and Heartful, Charming and Heartful beat Shady and Eerie, Shady and Eerie beat Brave and Tough, and Enma; Wicked; and Wandroid tribes are neutral against everything.
- Temporary Online Content:
- Events run for 15 or 16 days (or 14 if the month is February) and each one features at least 8 new obtainable Yo-kai and sometimes cosmetics and other items. If the player fails to obtain these Yo-kai during their debut events, there may be a chance they get rerun in another event's Crank-a-kai in the future, but without getting a specific rate up.
- Events are also the main source of story content in the game, sometimes with multiple events making up a full coherent story.
- Timed Mission:
- Not exactly timed, but you need to beat the stage before the opponents beat you up.
- Some missions state you need to beat the level under a certain time to get the star.
- Underground Monkey: Balancing out the large number of original characters that appear in the events are an equally large number of pre-existing character with a few additional traits slapped on to fit the theme.
- Warp Whistle: Like in the game, Mirapo helps you warp to different sections after befriending him.
- What If?: Some events explore what would have happened had certain scenarios occurred differently, sometimes reconciling Early Instalment Weirdness with the greater lore. An example of this is the "10th Anniversary Event～Lord Enma and X of Friendship Nyan", which explores a version of Yo-kai Watch 1 where Chairman McKraken conquered the Yo-kai World, forcing Lord Enma to become an assassin to overthrow him.
