Pokemon won't be replaced. Decades of building a massive audience won't allow it. Youkai Watch is aimed at a very young audience, an audience that, nowadays, prefer mobile devices over handhelds. I think Youkai Watch will do well over the West, but it definitively won't be as big a hit as in Japan.

Yeah... no.

Nah, YW isn't strong enough to overtake Pokemon WW.

As far as I know nintendo is working with Disney on the anime and it's coming this year, but no other specifics yet. :/

They also have a merchandising deal with Hasbro, I think.

Pokemon is too huge to be replaced anyways. Generations of gamers have grown up with it. It's babys first RPG. It's an institution. Heck there's probably parents out there that (even if they don't game anymore now) remember having a fun time with Pokemon and buy the game for their kids because of that.

That is 100% false. Competitive battlers make up a tiny percentage of the overall fanbase. It's not even correct to say that a large part of the adult Pokemon fanbase is made up of hardcore competitive types.

Well, it makes sense. Maybe not for the metagame, but the Pokemon audience, even if it has grown or shrunk depending on the gen, has always preserved a really big portion of that original 90's buyers. Those people are the ones that are helping the franchise breaking the generational barrier, maybe buying or convincing their small cousins, or even children to try it out. Sure, the anime, the brandname and Nintendo pushing it helps, but I'm sure that the fanbase is the best (or one of the best) reasons for the survival of the series.

That original fanbase gradually grew up and wanted more out of the games, and the metagame and the stories evolved with them. Even the anti-stress measures GameFreak has implemented help more the metagame than the story (it's faster and easier to raise Pokemon for combat).The games have always been easy, but the story is a giant tutorial for the multiplayer. Although I would admit I really want difficulty options.

Youkai Watch is different. It wants to attract an audience that, on the West, it's mostly on tablets and other mobile devices. I'm sure the 3DS has a bigger percentage of core gamers than the DS or the Wii, because a big chunk of that non-core audience has gone mobile. Youkai Watch will probably evolve its gameplay if it survives more than a decade. And if it doesn't, that franchise is condemned to extinction.

Eh, no.

It didn't make Pokémon irrelevant in Japan, don't see why it would here, these games can certainly coexist.

I see zero appeal in this series.

Those things are pretty fucking weird looking, one of them even looks a bit like a bin