Yo-kai Watch is not Pokémon. Yo-kai Watch never was or will be Pokémon. Level-5 is going for the exact same target audience as Pokémon, there are collectible creatures, and that’s it. Establishing this immediately feels necessary, as any expectations of this being just like Pokémon will be met with disappointment. It’s a different kind of game. However, if you can keep an open mind and look at this cross-mediafranchise- clearly-going-after-the-same-audience as its own video game, you can appreciate Yo-kai Watch 2: Bony Spirits for what it is: a fun, playable Saturday morning cartoon.

Yo-kai Watch is an adventure game with JRPG elements, rather than being a JRPG proper. You befriend creatures (I like to call them ‘not-ghosts’), referred to as Yo-kai, with your watch. Then, you fight other not-ghosts, befriend some of those not-ghosts, make your not-ghosts stronger, and repeat. But rather than taking you on a journey from town to town, most of the game is centered around three main hub areas: Springdale, Harrisville, and San Fantastico. In true Level-5 nature, Yo-kai Watch does a good job of packing a lot of content and a lot of nooks into what would otherwise be relatively small maps. It’s not big, but it’s dense.

It’s good the maps are small too, because a significant chunk of your time playing the game is spent on fetch quests. Bring this here, bring that there. In fact, for the most part, it’s fair to call this game a series of fetch quests packaged alongside a light RPG battle system, monster collecting, and a story about stopping an evil threat. It’s all super addictive in that grindy way all Level-5 RPGs are, and training video game monsters to fight other video game monsters is still a blast. In other words, it’s another Yo-kai Watch game.

But unlike the original Yo-kai Watch, which I played for all of one hour before giving up, the second game does all of this much better. The world you’re exploring is far bigger than the first game, and a time travel plot makes it so you can also see versions of some of these areas from 60 years in the past. The new Yo-kai designs are much better, and the battle system has more options now, feeling more active in the process.

Battling is done via teams of six on a rotating wheel, with three members fighting at the same time. You can trigger Soultimate moves, your ultimates, you can focus attacks on one enemy (or one part of an enemy in the case of large-scale boss battles), you can “purify” team members who have been inspirited and can no longer use certain abilities, and you can use items. The rest of the fighting is done automatically, giving you more of a passive role.

In 2, you now get access to M Skills that are powered-up moves that take soul meter from the monster using the attack and both monsters next to it. There’s another mechanic that acts as a more advanced targeting move. It’s surprisingly more active than it sounds; after a few hours with the game, you’ll start juggling more complex battles and you’ll be given some pretty tough adversaries. I liked the Yo-kai Watch battle system far more than I thought I would.

The reason why I think it’s so much better here, despite so few changes, is the excellent tutorial phase the game introduces to you. In a clever move to ease in players starting their Yo-kai adventure on the second game, the protagonist gets amnesia and quickly goes through a lot of the early story beats of the first game, but in the context of the second game’s story. Things like the watch, Jibanyan, Whisper the ghost butler, and so on are explained quickly.

From then on, the game gently feeds the game mechanics to you, explains how the story and side quests work, and keeps the difficulty relatively low for the first few hours while you figure stuff out. The first game didn’t allow you to take your time getting to know it, dropping you into a tough minor boss fight an hour in, and I think that’s why I beat Bony Spirits and not the first game. It still gets pretty tough, but it does so gradually. And without giving spoilers, I’m happy to say that following the 20-hour story campaign, there is a very substantial post-game to look forward to as well.

I very much enjoyed the story in Bony Sprits, which surprises me because of how cheeseball the voice acting was in the first game and how cookie-cutter the plot appeared. The voice acting is still really cheesy, but because the story is more fun and engaging, it comes across as cheesy in that Kids’ WB Saturday morning cartoon kind of way. The characters and good vs. evil plot are generic, but a well-written comfy kind of generic that reminds you of the shows you might have been watching ten or fifteen years ago. The time travel plot, as well as the warring factions side plot, were both very well done, and more importantly, fun.

The presentation is tremendous. Tons of voice acting and music, smooth cel-shaded visuals that put the best models in Pokémon X and Y to shame, and a (mostly) stable frame rate. In some ways, these games feel like the technical peak of 3DS.

I had a lot of fun with Yo-kai Watch 2. If you can deal with fetch quests and a passive battle system that requires a bit of patience, Bony Spirits is a great sequel with a fun story that feels refreshingly nostalgic to experience. This is the game you wanted the first Yo-kai Watch to be.