Weekly Shonen Jump: Jikkyou Janjan Stadium

» see konami.com/games/jumpstadium as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Konami released Jikkyou Janjan Stadium in Japan on 2 August 2018, on the App Store and on Google Play, with characters from thirty-nine Weekly Shonen Jump series in it. Pre-registration had opened three weeks earlier. The game was a brawler with one button. Every character had a special move taken from their own manga, and the win condition was knocking the other three players out of the ring.

Konami's art direction turned the whole cast into what the press materials called Janjan characters, small and round, which is how a hero from the magazine's first decade ends up the same height as one from its fifth. Fifteen more series arrived on 11 October 2018, taking the roster to fifty-four. In February 2019 the game added Heroes Carnival, an asynchronous mode where you fought somebody else's team without either of you being online at the same time. Nothing substantial came after that.

Konami was an odd name to find on a Jump license. Bandai Namco had carried the magazine's console crossovers for years and was building Jump Force while this one was still taking pre-registrations. Konami's own mark on the title was the word jikkyou, live commentary, a tag it had been putting on its baseball games since the 1990s.

~ the dossier ~

~ fifty-four series deep ~

Fifty-four series is a reading list. It means a specific thing to a reader who bought the magazine most Mondays for thirty years and then watched a character they had seen debut turn up again a decade later as a cameo in someone else's chapter. Weekly Shonen Jump has been publishing since 1968, and the roster was pulled from all of it.

Outside Japan the magazine arrives in pieces. You get the handful of titles that happened to get an anime, in whatever order a broadcaster or a fansub group delivered them, with years between one and the next. A one-button brawler plays the same either way. What does not survive the crossing is every joke that depends on knowing who these people already are.

~ the refund window was longer ~

The warning came on 3 July 2019, fifty-four days ahead of the stop. Unused paid gems were refundable from three in the afternoon on 27 August until three in the afternoon on 29 November, through a form inside the app that Konami said it would publish nearer the time.

That is ninety-four days of refunds against fifty-four days of warning. The ratio is ordinary for a Japanese mobile closure and it still reads strangely, because the window where you could get your money back stayed open three months after the thing you had spent it on had stopped existing.

~ the other two ~

Jumputi Heroes had opened in March 2018 and Jump Force shipped in February 2019, both of them built for the same fiftieth anniversary. Jump Force left the digital stores in February 2022 and its servers went quiet that August. Jumputi Heroes ran until March 2024. The iOS listing for Janjan Stadium returns nothing at all now, and konami.com/games/jumpstadium redirects to the company's game index. It went first.

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