The Thousand Musketeers: Rhodoknight

» see rose.marv.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The premise is that famous antique firearms have human incarnations, young men called kijushi, and that you collect them, raise them and take them into a war against an empire. The first game, The Thousand Musketeers, was a joint project between LINE and Marvelous and ran on LINE's game platform from 22 March 2018. It had cleared seven hundred thousand pre-registrations before it opened. It closed at 15:00 on 11 June 2019, after fourteen months, with Marvelous saying it had become difficult to maintain the quality of the service.

Rhodoknight was the second attempt, announced at a concert in February 2020 and launched on 24 November 2021. Its fiction picks up seven years after the first game's war. Appirits built it, Marvelous published it, and the world came from an outside creator credited as Tsubashi Yatsuwa on both games.

It lasted two years, four months and eleven days. The notice went out on 4 March 2024, and Rose Stone sales were halted at the moment it was published. Service ended at 14:00 on 4 April, and the servers themselves stayed up another three months before being switched off at 13:59 on 3 July 2024. No reason for the closure was published, and four chapters of the main story were still unwritten.

None of this was ever localized, and what blocks it is structural rather than commercial. The project's weight sits in Japanese voice-actor culture: character songs released as singles, concerts at Toyosu PIT, a radio show, drama CDs. All of it was made in Japanese for a domestic audience, and it accounts for most of what the project was.

~ the case file ~

~ the four who were never in it ~

On 24 May 2019, eighteen days before the original game died, Marvelous announced five kijushi who had been designed and cast but never added to it. Their audio dramas went out on three CDs across that autumn: Pennsylvania in September, Navy and Pepperbox in October, Jager and Minie in November. The earliest of the three shipped fifteen weeks after the game those characters belonged to had already stopped running.

Rhodoknight picked up exactly one of them. Pennsylvania became playable on 25 February 2022, inside the American chapter of the road stories.

So Navy, Pepperbox, Jager and Minie are characters with voice actors and discs you could buy in a shop, who have never been playable in a video game at any point in the seven years since they were announced. Two further characters from the enemy army, Parume and Muku, are in the same position.

~ what shipped afterwards ~

The main story never finished during service, and the shutdown letter says so plainly and apologizes for it. Marvelous wrote that it was looking into some way of delivering the rest, and then it did. G-mode put Rhodoknight on the Nintendo Switch, announced in October 2024, scheduled for 26 February 2026, then pushed to 25 June 2026 because moving it off phones turned out harder than expected. It sold in three editions, from 8,800 yen for the download up to 25,080 for the limited one.

What that money bought was the rest of the book. The Switch version adds chapters five and six along with the Italy and Japan arcs, and it closes on a final chapter that had never been written before, with the main and road stories fully voiced. The script runs past 1.5 million characters and five more kijushi became playable. Both editions carried an apology bonus for the delay, an illustration card of all thirty-one playable characters and a new short story from the original creator.

~ october the fourteenth ~

Marvelous has observed 14 October as Thousand Musketeers Day every year, and it was still doing so in 2026, thirty months after Rhodoknight stopped existing. The staff letters on the news site run to twenty-three entries and the most recent one is dated this month.

That letter announced a scenario book, published by G-mode, made to order, shipping in March 2027. For the five characters the first game never implemented it adds ten intimacy episodes each, along with newly drawn card art and standing portraits. The two from the enemy army get three episodes apiece. Somebody is commissioning fresh illustrations in 2026 of characters the first game never got around to using, for a book about a sequel that was switched off in 2024.

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