The Kabuki stage play based on Eiichiro Oda's One Piece manga, the Universal Studios Japan park, and Nintendo's Splatoon Wii U game won the Award of Excellence at Japan's Digital Content of the Year 2015/19th annual Association of Media in Digital (AMD) Awards on Tuesday.

Digital Content of the Year Award of Excellence is the highest award offered by the AMD and the Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications. To be eligible, the digital content or service had to have been published during 2015.

The following were also chosen for the Award of Excellence:

Softbank's humanoid robot Pepper

Mojang AB's Minecraft sandbox game

sandbox game Dance music festival Ultra Japan 2015

Mobile phone company au's "3tarō" commercials

Television streaming service TVer

The awards ceremony will be held on March 14.

Past winners of the Award of Excellence include Mamoru Hosoda's Summer Wars, Crunchyroll, the Nintendo 3DS, the film adaptation of Mitsurou Kubo's Moteki manga, and the Attack on Titan anime.

The One Piece Kabuki play ran from October 7 to November 25 at the Shinbashi Enbujō in Ginza, Tokyo. 100,000 tickets for the Tokyo run all sold out. The play opened in Osaka on March 1 and will run until March 25. It will then open in Fukuoka from April 2-26. The play's story adapts volumes 51-60 of the manga, a portion of the story known as the "Paramount War Saga," but is designed to be accessible to an audience unfamiliar with the source material.

In 2015 Universal Studios Japan hosted attractions based on Neon Genesis Evangelion, Attack on Titan, Monster Hunter, and Resident Evil as part of its "Universal Cool Japan" project. Universal Studios Japan will bring back all four brands in 2016, and add an attraction based on Kyary Pamyu Pamyu.

Splatoon is a third-person-shooter game that Nintendo released exclusively for the Wii U on May 28 in Japan and May 29 in the U.S. The game centers on "Inklings," who are beings who can transform between human and squid form.

Source: Anime! Anime!; Katsunori Takahashi