Hoshi no Shima no Nyanko

» see colopl.co.jp/hoshinyan as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

You landed on an undeveloped island with three cats and cleared it. That was the whole game. You planted crops and put up buildings that took real hours to finish, and the island slowly filled in. It launched on 10 March 2014 and hit a million downloads inside six weeks, which tells you the audience was waiting for exactly this and that the category was wide open at the time.

What makes it worth a page is the label it shipped under. Colopl had set up a brand called Kumabea for apps aimed at small children, and this was the first thing to come out of it. That is a different commitment from a farm sim with a cute coat of paint. It means someone at the company signed off on a product whose player could not read well and could not be sold anything by a mechanic that depended on frustration. The island fills in because you come back, not because you are punished for leaving.

The ambition kept widening. Gachapin and Mook, the two mascots Japanese children have known since the seventies, turned up as a collaboration in August 2015. An Android build reached Taiwanese stores in August 2016. Then in October 2018 it got a television anime, twenty-six Saturday mornings on TOKYO MX, with its three cats given voices and the island's native mole and crab written in as neighbors who start out suspicious and come around. Plenty of phone games got an anime that decade. Very few of them were aimed at children this small.

~ the case file ~

~ eleven years and five months ~

Colopl marked the tenth anniversary on 10 March 2024 with an in-game campaign and quoted nine million cumulative downloads across the series. Seventeen months later it was over. For a free phone game, eleven years and five months is a tenure rather than a run: most of the titles that launched alongside it in 2014 were gone before this one got its anime.

~ one notice, two islands ~

On 26 May 2025 Colopl published a single page titled with two game names. Hoshi no Shima no Nyanko and Toraberu Shima no Nyanko, the travel-themed sequel announced in 2023, would both stop on Wednesday 20 August 2025 at 16:00. Ruby sales stopped on the day of the notice, at 16:00. New registrations closed on 23 June. Everything already bought stayed usable until the lights went out.

Reading the two schedules side by side is the uncomfortable part. The eleven-year-old game and the two-year-old game got identical dates and identical wording, with only the currency name swapped from ruby to star ruby. That is one decision about a brand, taken above the level of either product, and then applied twice.

~ Saturday mornings on TOKYO MX ~

The anime ran from 6 October 2018 to 30 March 2019. The 3DCG was produced in Dalian, and the production committee was a joint venture of three companies none of which were Colopl. Of everything here, only the broadcast survives in findable form, because television leaves episode lists and credits behind and a phone game leaves a dead domain.

Kids' software gets written about less than anything else on this site, and it is the category that disappears most completely. Nobody archives the island they built when they were six.

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