Tokyo 4.3: introducing Novaplay
Tokyo 4.3 is here and it’s one of the biggest updates we’ve released for the theme so far.
This release introduces the brand new “Novaplay” preset, 6 new sections, major product page improvements, expanded layout flexibility, and dozens of refinements focused on performance, consistency, and merchant control.
Whether you’re building a playful toy store, a modern electronics brand, or a large catalog storefront, Tokyo 4.3 gives you more ways to shape the shopping experience exactly the way you want.
Introducing “Novaplay”
Tokyo 4.3 ships with a brand new preset called “Novaplay”, designed specifically for modern toy and hobby stores.
From colorful merchandising layouts to playful promotional sections and richer visual storytelling, Novaplay demonstrates how flexible Tokyo has become as a storefront platform.
It combines bold typography, layered content blocks, promotional banners, video integration, and modern product presentation into a polished shopping experience that feels vibrant without becoming overwhelming.
6 brand new sections
This update adds 6 completely new sections to Tokyo.
Flexible features
A highly adaptable feature-focused section that allows merchants to showcase benefits, categories, services, or promotional content in a much more dynamic way.
Flexible banner mosaic
Build more advanced editorial-style layouts with mixed banners, promotional content, imagery, and calls to action.
Perfect for stores that want a more modern visual merchandising approach.
Key figures
Highlight statistics, milestones, trust indicators, or important business metrics in a clean and highly readable format.
Offers
Create promotional campaigns and special offers with dedicated layouts built specifically for conversions.
Color swatches
A dedicated section for showcasing colors, palettes, materials, or product variations visually.
Video gallery
Display multiple videos in a clean gallery layout to better showcase products, tutorials, campaigns, or brand storytelling.
Better product experience and variant handling
Tokyo 4.3 includes major improvements to how product variants behave across the theme.
One of the most important additions is the ability to disable automatic variant preselection in both the Main product and Featured product sections.
This gives merchants more control over the buying experience, especially for stores where customers should intentionally choose product configurations before adding items to the cart.
Variant handling has also been significantly improved for edge cases and high-variant products.
You can now separately control the visibility of invalid variant combinations, making the product experience clearer and more predictable for customers.
We also removed older handling methods that were causing compatibility issues with products containing very large variant sets.
More flexible navigation and header options
The Header section receives several meaningful upgrades in this release.
You can now enable inline submenu expansion, giving merchants more flexibility in how navigation behaves across storefronts.
Additional improvements include:
- Custom action icons
- Shopify account custom element support
- Improved contact details positioning
- Better typography controls for Header features
These changes make the header system significantly more adaptable across different store styles and layouts.
Better layouts and visual consistency
Tokyo 4.3 continues our ongoing effort to improve spacing, consistency, and overall storefront polish throughout the theme.
This release includes:
- Improved button sizing and paddings
- Better heading layouts
- Improved media spacing
- Simplified gallery borders and paddings
- Optional borders in Features sections
- Badge color customization in Featured banners
- Compact rows layout for Collection product grids
A large amount of CSS cleanup and consistency work also took place behind the scenes.
Faster and smarter maps
The Map section now optionally supports manually entering Latitude and Longitude coordinates.
This allows stores with multiple locations to dramatically reduce geolocation requests and improve map loading performance.
It’s a small addition that can make a surprisingly large difference for stores relying heavily on location-based content.
Reliability improvements across the theme
As always, this update also includes a large number of fixes and quality-of-life improvements across the entire theme.
Some highlights include:
- Improved coupon handling between Cart and Minicart
- Fixed duplicate Ajax search IDs
- Fixed carousel and slider hover states
- Better handling for disconnected variants
- Improved expandable section borders
- Better Section Rendering API limits and safeguards
- Multiple fixes related to map failures and edge cases
Tokyo keeps evolving
With Tokyo 4.3, the theme becomes more flexible, more modular, and more capable than ever before.
From richer merchandising layouts to smarter product handling and better storefront customization, this release continues our goal of building a theme that scales with modern Shopify stores without sacrificing usability or performance.
We can’t wait to see what you build with it.