Jumputi Heroes

» see jumputi.game.line.me as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

If you were outside Japan when this one closed, the refund notice would still pay you. LINE Yahoo would wire your unused ruby balance to a foreign bank account, in yen, and it would cover the transfer fee at both ends. What it would not cover was the intermediary bank's cut or the receiving bank's cut, which on a small balance is most of the balance. A company only writes that paragraph when it knows some of its players are abroad, and only writes it that way when the sums involved are small.

Jumputi Heroes was a puzzle RPG built by WonderPlanet and published by LINE, launched on 28 March 2018. Twenty-nine Weekly Shonen Jump titles were in it at release. The hook was range instead of depth: the magazine itself, not any one serial inside it, with characters from series that had finished decades earlier sitting in a party next to characters running that week. By mid-2023 more than a hundred titles had been implemented. The last one added was Shaman King, on 24 November 2023.

LINE announced the shutdown on 20 December 2023, through an in-game notice, with a post on the game's account telling players to go read it. GAME Watch reported the reasoning: after consulting Shueisha and the other parties involved, the operators had judged that the game had sufficiently fulfilled its role as a commemoration of the magazine's fiftieth anniversary. The game's own copyright line had been saying so all along. It opened with the words JUMP 50th Anniversary, ahead of either company's name.

~ the dossier ~

~ the number went up ~

On 2 December 2019 Guinness World Records certified Jumputi Heroes for the most licensed manga characters in a mobile game. The figure was 476. LINE announced it the following February. Then, on 2 May 2022, Guinness certified the same category again for the same game at 1010, and LINE announced that in July.

Nobody at Guinness measured the puzzle mechanic or the battle math. What the category counts is how many separate rights-holders have signed, which makes it a record held by a licensing department. The two certificates are 882 days apart and the count more than doubled between them.

~ the other game built for the same birthday ~

Weekly Shonen Jump turned fifty in 2018 and more than one publisher made something for it. Bandai Namco's Jump Force shipped in February 2019 with forty characters from sixteen manga in an arena fighter, and it was dead by August 2022. Jumputi Heroes outlived it by nineteen months, and the two endings read differently: Bandai Namco gave no explanation for killing Jump Force, while LINE gave one that came down to the party being over.

The download curve does not support a story about decline. A million in the first week, two million inside two months, ten million in under three years, and a Guinness recertification in its fifth year.

~ how it was put away ~

At 15:00 on 20 February 2024 the game stopped accepting new downloads and stopped selling ruby, so for its last thirty-six days it existed only for people who already had it. At 15:00 on 27 March the service ended.

What came next was a procedure under Japan's Payment Services Act, which treats prepaid in-game currency as a financial instrument and not as a toy. Article 20, paragraph 1 obliged LINE Yahoo to refund the paid ruby balance. The application window opened at 15:00 on 10 April 2024 and shut at 15:00 on 8 July, and anybody who missed those eighty-nine days was excluded by the terms. Payments went out from 30 August onward.

Players who had only ever used guest login, with no linked account, had to write to a contact form and quote their user ID from memory. A game you can start without making an account asks you for the account back at the very end.

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