ONE PIECE Bon! Bon! Journey!!

» see op-bbjp.bn-ent.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Bandai Namco gave the end of this one in UTC. Not in Japan Standard Time, which is what a Japanese publisher usually posts for a Japanese game, and not in local hours for each store. Seven in the morning, universal time, on 6 April 2022, which worked out to four in the afternoon in Tokyo and the middle of the night in New York. A shutdown hour quoted that way is a small piece of evidence about the thing being shut: there was one service and everyone was standing in it together, so when it went the whole planet lost it on the same tick.

What they lost was a match-three puzzler. You lined up three of the same character on a board and they attacked. The stage cleared when the enemy's hit points reached zero. Between stages you decorated an island with treasure you had picked up. The Straw Hats had been redrawn as bonbons, small round candy versions of themselves, Luffy and Zoro among them, proportions squashed down to something you could tap. Doflamingo and Buggy turned up as the things you were tapping at. Bandai Namco's own copy called them adorably petite, which is a phrase a marketing department writes about a pirate who eats people.

The schedule was slow for a licensed phone game. Japan heard about it in April 2019 and got an Android beta that October, then waited until 17 March 2020 for the game itself. The Western release was confirmed in February 2020 and landed later that year, which made this one of the rarer One Piece mobile titles: not a Japanese account-only product that the rest of us read about, but a thing you could actually install. Then it ran for two years and twenty days and was switched off without an explanation, which is the normal ending and not the interesting one.

~ the dossier ~

~ the biggest comic in the world ~

A license on One Piece is supposed to be a guarantee, and Bandai Namco has spent it dozens of times on phone games that arrive and then get taken down. This was the first puzzle game in the franchise. It was also, by the time it closed, competing with other One Piece titles from the same publisher on the same storefront.

Which is worth stating without the hedge. A property can be the biggest in the world and still not be able to hold a match-three board open for three years. The manga sells in the hundreds of millions. The game needed a fraction of that to open it on a Tuesday, and did not hold them.

~ the clock it died on ~

The notice came in the first week of February 2022. Sales of Rainbow Pearls, the paid currency, stopped on the 7th, which left two months of a game you could still play but could no longer pay into. Then on 6 April, at 07:00 UTC, every copy of it stopped at once. Nobody got a local ending. The player in Tokyo finishing an afternoon and the player in California still awake were cut off on the same second, which is the one thing a single worldwide service can offer that nothing else can, and the only moment anybody notices it.

I have never read One Piece. By 2020 it had already outsold every comic ever drawn by one person and I still had not read a page of it, which is a useful thing to know about scale. Reach that size and you stop being something people choose; you become weather that some people happen to live under and others do not. The game died at seven in the morning in a time zone nobody lives in, and I only found out about either four years late.

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