LORD of VERMILION IV (ロード オブ ヴァーミリオン IV)

» see lordofv.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The fourth and last arcade Lord of Vermilion started on 13 July 2017. Arcades upgraded into it rather than buying a new machine: a conversion kit turned the Re:3 cabinet an operator already owned into this one, the way a Japanese arcade line usually continues. The setting moved to a Tokyo of 2030, with sixteen playable protagonists. Taiki drew the characters and Taku Iwasaki wrote the score.

The cabinet is the thing to picture. It was a table unit with a big touch panel and a second surface called the play screen, and your deck was made of physical cards that you placed and slid around on it while the match ran. Four players a side captured mana towers and spent the mana on familiars, aiming at three arcana stones on the far end of the board. Every game the machine printed another card and handed it over, and that is how a collection grew.

The site announced the ending in pieces, over five months. The producer, Shigeyuki Hirata, said on 20 March 2019 that the update due eight days later would be the last one, and a notice of 31 May gave the closing time as 23:59 on 31 August. On 1 September it posted once more to confirm that it had happened.

An arcade cabinet that prints trading cards is a machine with a supply chain behind it, and the network underneath this one, Taito's NESiCAxLive, operated in Japan. Everything about the product assumed you could physically stand in front of one of those cabinets. That is a harder barrier than language or price, and it kept the Japanese arcade card-game era almost entirely domestic.

~ the case file ~

~ the card that stopped saving ~

The save medium was a NESiCA, Taito's IC card, and five months before the end Square Enix announced that the newer Amusement IC cards would not be supported. The consequence was worse than a compatibility footnote. A player who moved their data onto an Amusement IC card was locked out of the game permanently, with no route back.

The paid currency went the same way. Spirit cores bought with real money all expired on 31 August regardless of the expiry date the game itself was displaying, and the free ones died with them. After the network closed the cabinet would still read your cards for practice matches and tutorials, but nothing could be written back to the NESiCA, so the collection stayed legible and stopped accumulating.

~ the story went into a novel ~

The plot was not finished when the servers were. Square Enix published seasons one through three as video and then put season four onward out as a free web novel, O Brave New World, hosted on the game's own site. That page is still serving in 2026, fourteen kilobytes of it, on a site whose game has been gone for seven years.

The rest of the site has been quietly dismantled around it. lordofv.com now redirects into square-enix.com, where the surviving pages are the story, the characters and the card list. The arcade locator and the rankings answer with a page byte-identical to the index, the shape a deleted section takes when nobody removes the link to it. The whole information tree, including every closing notice, was taken down in December 2024 and now redirects to the front page.

There is no shutdown date for the cabinets, because nobody ever announced one. The closing notice said only that play would continue offline, and the cards the machines had printed over twenty-six months stayed exactly where they were, in boxes and binders, no longer counting toward anything.

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