On 31st July, Bandai Namco announced that the service for Jump Hero Battle: Ore Collection 2 will officially come to an end on 30th September. Jump Ore Collection was first released in July 2017, in celebration of Weekly Shonen Jump’s 50th Anniversary. In November 2018, Bandai Namco announced that they will rework Ore Collection, similar to what they did for My Hero Academia Smash Tap.
When the game was first released, Ore Collection sold nostalgia to WSJ fans. The gameplay was mediocre at best, with many flaws from the gameplay being incredibly slow and extremely grindy. But what made the game special was how the game presented the characters and their skills. The manga panel-style visuals captured the essence of everything we loved from WSJ, despite all the flaws in the gameplay, the original Ore Collection gave fans a commemorative game that celebrates all that they love from WSJ. Unfortunately, the game lacked content, and with no events to keep players engaged, the game quietly slipped out of the minds of players.
▍Original Ore Collection PV
A little over a year, in November 2018, Bandai Namco announced that they will rework Ore Collection, scraping the old gameplay and replacing it with a turn-based combat system with 3D characters. In doing so, the game had more depth, players could level up their favorite characters and use different rune sets to complement their skills but at the same time, the game lost all its originality and became just another gacha RPG with WSJ characters. The manga panel-style visuals were almost completely removed and replaced with unoriginal 3D models. So whilst the new version had more gameplay depth to it, it simply became “just another” mobile gacha game.
▍New Ore Collection PV
If we only looked at the PVs for the game, the new version isn’t actually that bad. With the game now coming to an end though, it does feel like a shame that the Ore Collection game is coming to an end. The original version was something that triggered a lot of nostalgia. If they didn’t scrap the original and released it as a separate game, we might still have the unique original to collect our favorite Jump characters… but as with most things in life, we must move on and stick with playing the superior Jump 20th Anniversary game, Jumputi Heroes.
