Level-5 CEO surprised by Youkai Watch’s success

Youkai Watch has been an unexpected success for Level-5. It started off slowly on the Japanese sales charts, but quickly picked up when the game’s anime debuted in January.

Level-5 president and CEO Akihiro Hino spoke with Famitsu about Youkai’s Watch surprising success in a recent interview. You can find his comments below, as translated by Siliconera.

“For something that was originally a cross-media project, I thought it would be something equal to Inazuma Eleven, but since beginning of the year, its popularity has gone much higher than I had expected.”

“The anime started in January, which was followed by the toys, and that’s when we got all the cross-media content together. From there, the Yo-kai Watch craze practically exploded, which was even surprising for us.”

“There’s already been plenty of orders for the game, and the number of shipments have already surpassed one million units. At this rate, it looks like we might actually pass a million copies in sales, in the near future.”

“Around January and February, [the game] was selling at a pace of about 30,000 copies a week, but lately it’s been 40,000 to 50,000 copies, so it seems like it continues to rise day by day. In a way, I believe that this is an abnormal situation, but at the same time, I feel ‘this is what it’s like to have something in a boom’.”

“We’ve had the folks from Bandai handle the toys, and they’re selling much more than we first expected. While on the subject, they say that it’s currently in the state where they’re selling so much, a lot of people can’t get their hands on them. So they would actually be selling much more. That’s how popular it is right now.”

“While I did believe that it would get its break, honestly, to have it come this far, where the children of Japan would get so hopped-up on youkai, to the point where all the goods would sell out, is something I didn’t expect.”