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Bushiroad's Road59 Multimedia Franchise Gets Manga This Spring
posted on by Crystalyn Hodgkins
The official Twitter account for Bushiroad's Road59 multimedia franchise revealed on December 27 that the franchise is getting a manga titled Road59: Shin Jidai Ninkyō Tokku (Road59: The Special Ward for a New Era of Chivalry). Ghidora, who is designing the characters for the franchise, is drawing the manga. The manga will premiere in Bushiroad's Monthly Bushiroad magazine this spring. The manga is billed as the first manga in the project.
The project is themed around yakuza, and is the company's fourth major mixed-media project after BanG Dream! (band theme), Revue Starlight (theater theme), and D4DJ (DJ theme). The title "Road59" is a play on the Japanese word "gokudo" (the extreme path) which is a poetic term referring to the yakuza way of life. The franchise's tagline is "A path from which you cannot return."
The franchise began with a stage play that ran from December 24-27 at Nakano Zero in Tokyo. A second play will run in April. The franchise stars:
- Yūki Kimisawa as Bakuto Yanagi
- Shūya Sunagawa as Shō Himuro
- Masahiro Inoue as Kensei Sumeragi
- Shōta Aoi as Benedict Lorenzo Vasari
Nobuhiro Mōri (Kamen Rider franchise, Argonavis from BanG Dream!) is penning the story and the setting of the franchise. Ghidora is drawing the character designs. GACKT is performing the theme song for the franchise.
The franchise's story is set in the near future, a few decades after the start of Japan's current Reiwa era, and is set in a new manmade island and "special ward" in Tokyo known as the Tengai Ward. Here, four yakuza organizations vie for prestige and influence, with each organization's leading figures bearing god-like powers as "Jingi." Each of the organizations seek the "Yamatanoorochi no Kubi" (The Head of Orochi) whose blood when consumed grants Jingi a power equal to gods, as well as a girl who bears the Orochi blood and can break the seal on the ancient artifact.
Jingi are individuals who have passed on their supernatural powers from sire to successor since the age of myth. They pass on their power to chosen successors, with their sire offering their blood in a cup in a formal ceremony. In the past, they have made their mark on the secret world by slaying mythical beasts, and performing incredible feats on the battlefield, and have sometimes clashed with each other in the shadows. As the ages pass, they adapt their form to the times, and today they operate in secret societies in the underworld. With ancient powers able to bend the rules of space and time, they are demigod-like beings.
