Precure Tsunagaru Puzzlun

~ the obituary ~

Pretty Cure is a Japanese magical-girl television franchise that has produced a new series, with a new cast and a new title, nearly every year since 2004. It is aimed squarely at young girls and it sells an enormous quantity of toys. Almost nothing else on Japanese television renewed itself that reliably. What it did not have until 2017 was a serious phone game.

Bandai Namco Entertainment released Precure Tsunagaru Puzzlun on 16 March 2017, onto both the iPhone and Android storefronts, and the Japanese trade press called it the first full-scale Precure smartphone app. The game was a one-stroke drawing puzzle. You traced a single unbroken line through pieces of the same color to clear them, against enemies called the Tsunagarers who had taken over the world, with the Cures from across the franchise's many seasons as your roster.

It worked immediately. Half a million downloads had landed by the end of June 2017, fifteen weeks after release, which for a licensed puzzle game on a children's property is a strong opening. The crossover logic helped: a parent whose daughter was watching the current series could hand her a game containing the Cures from every previous one, including the ones that parent had watched.

Bandai Namco announced the closure on 26 March 2020 and set the date for 2 June. The service ended that day at 14:00, a Tuesday afternoon. Three years and two and a half months.

~ the case file ~

~ the puzzle ~

One-stroke drawing, ひと筆がき, is a puzzle form with real history in Japan, the kind of thing that appears in children's magazines and on the backs of restaurant placemats. Building a licensed game on it was a sensible decision for this audience, because the rule can be explained in one sentence to a six-year-old and the difficulty scales by making the board bigger rather than by making the rules more complicated.

That design choice also puts a ceiling on the thing, and the ceiling is where these games usually die. A puzzle a child masters in a week has to be refilled with new characters forever, and the franchise supplies exactly one new cast per year. I was thirty-three when it launched and have never seen a full episode of any Pretty Cure series, so what I can say about its feel is secondhand, taken from the screenshots and the Japanese coverage rather than from play.

~ selling stops first ~

The wind-down ran in the usual sequence and the sequence is worth laying out, because it is the clearest statement a Japanese publisher makes about what it owes its players. Sales of the paid currency, called hōseki, stopped on 28 April 2020, five weeks before the game did. Players then had until 2 June to spend whatever they had already bought.

After the game ended, the refunds opened. The window for claiming unused paid hōseki ran from noon on 3 June 2020 to noon on 1 September, three full months of a desk kept open on behalf of a game that had already stopped.

There is something clarifying about that calendar. A game for small children was closed with a consumer-protection process that assumes the person filing the claim can read a form and knows exactly what they spent. Which means the claims were filed by parents, for purchases they mostly did not make, on an app they mostly did not play.

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