Jujutsu Kaisen is collaborating with Bandai's Tamagotchi for a new line of Cursed virtual pets.
Bandai will release a new set of Tamagotchi toys themed after Gege Akutami's incredibly popular dark-fantasy shonen manga in December. The virtual pets will be available in four varieties, each themed after one of the main characters from the show: central protagonist Yuji Itadori, the calculating Megumi Fushiguro, the hammer wielding Nobara Kugisaki, and the ever-popular Satoru Gojo. While the four virtual pets are themed after specific characters, players can raise additional characters from the series on the devices, including Panda and Maki Zenin. The virtual pets will also be available in bundles that package them with a matching Hugmy figure, which are chibi-versions of the series' cast that are designed to hold and display your Tamagotchi.
This is not the first time that Tamagotchi has collaborated with a popular anime and manga franchise: Bandai has leveraged its numerous licensing deals to create virtual pet lines themed after numerous other anime series, most notably Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba and Neon Genesis Evangelion. The company has even produced Tamagotchis modeled after live-action series, such as the long-running Kamen Rider tokusatsu franchise.
The new JJK virtual pets will be released this December to coincide with the premiere of the Jujutsu Kaisen 0 prequel movie in Japan. The new movie is set before Yuji Itadori consumed Sukuna's finger and instead focuses on the character of Yuta Okkotsu, a young man who is haunted by the soul of his childhood sweetheart Rika, whose spirit has been transformed into a Curse, a malevolent apparition that now violently attacks anyone who gets too close to Yuta. The film is based on the manga Tokyo Metropolitan Curse Technical School, which creator Gege Akutami created a year before Jujutsu Kaisen's premiere. The manga takes place in the same world and continuity as JJK and introduces many of the characters and concepts that would be explored further in Akutami's later series. The movie will premiere in Japan on Dec. 24, while details about the film's international release have yet to be announced.
December will be an eventful month for the series, as that's also when the Jujutsu Kaisen manga is projected to surpass the 60 million copies in circulation. Despite only debuting about three years ago in 2018, Akutami's manga has already outsold many other beloved hit manga series, including Yu Yu Hakusho, Berserk, and My Hero Academia, and is well on its way to becoming only the 19th manga series in history to break the 100 million circulation milestone.
Source: Bandai
