While experimenting with changing the character bytes of party members in A Musical Adventure, I found that several unrecruitable enemies were able to be used as allies without issue. At the time, there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to which characters worked and which characters didn't — bosses and minibosses were pretty 50/50 as to whether or not they would crash the game upon viewing their status, although most at least worked in battle.
It wasn't until a few months later when I found out why some of these characters functioned so flawlessly when others were barely playable. It turned out that several Japanese gaming publications — namely Dengeki's 10th Anniversary Memorial Collection and volume 16 of PurePure — distributed special save files in which these characters were playable!
While I initially had trouble hunting down an archived version of the PurePure disc, the 10th Anniversary Memorial Collection was relatively easy to find. I'd never used one of these save file discs before, but luckily it was pretty intuitive once I got past the language barrier. (*cough* I just used Google Lens *cough*)
Dengeki's 10th Anniversary
Memorial Collection
For those of you who — like myself — have never used one of these discs before, the process is pretty simple. There are save files for tons of different games on the 10th Anniversary disc, but luckily, Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure is at the very top of the マ list (the game's full name in Japanese is マール王国の人形姫).
After selecting the right game, all you have to do is hit the circle button a couple of times and it'll write the save file to your memory card. (Obviously this works on standard hardware, but it should also work on any Playstation 1 emulator with memory card support. I think. It worked for me, at least!)
[Rough Translation]
"Puppet Princess of Marl Kingdom"
"Manufacturer: Nippon Ichi Software
Number of blocks used: 1
Genre: RPG"
"This data allows you to use 7 hidden puppets
(4 of which are rare puppets that cannot be
obtained in the game!) from the beginning."
"Are you sure? Yes = ◯ / No = ✖"
The save file has not made any progress, nor does it have any play time — in fact, loading the file will play the beginning cutscene as if you'd started a new game.
The four unobtainable puppets referenced by the 10th Anniversary disc are Mucholy, Shirowdia, Hao, and Nyao — palette-swaps of Marjoly, Crowdia, Gao, and Myao respectively. Contrary to what the description says, there are eight total puppets in this save file, not seven: Burg, Nyanko, Nyanki, and Nyanchi are also available exclusively through the 10th Anniversary disc.
All eight puppets can be found in the Monster Master's storage as soon as the game starts (the Monster Master, for reference, is located in Orange's shop). With the exception of Nyanchi, who is marked as long-range, they are all neutral and close-range. Of course, all this means is that their standard attack requires them to be one tile away — several have long-range abilities and spells. Also, please note that I'm referring to these characters as puppets for simplicity's sake — Burg and the cats are all classified as monsters.
 Mucholy
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 Shirowdia
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 Hao
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 Nyao
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 Burg
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 Nyanko
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 Nyanki
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 Nyanchi
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PurePure Volume 16
The PurePure disc was much more difficult to hunt down, and I briefly considered publishing this page without it. Luckily, I'm even more stubborn than I am bad at finding things.
There's a lot of other goodies distributed on PurePure discs, such as demos, trailers, and other miscellaneous information. Unfortunately, nothing else on this disc is Rhapsody related, so we'll be going straight to the Memory Bank. Maybe another time.
Sidenote, can we talk about how fun this select screen is? I'm a really big fan of PurePure's branding so far. And the weird dog thing above DemoPlayLand.
This menu was a lot easier for me to navigate than the one on the 10th Anniversary disc — the Rhapsody save file is helpfully marked with a Cornet icon, so I didn't even have to whip out my phone to use Google Lens.
Similarly to the 10th Anniversary save file, this save is marked as starting in Wonder Woods with no playtime, and loading the save plays the beginning cutscene. The only difference between the PurePure and 10th Anniversary save files is which characters are stored with the Monster Master — of course, this means that it's impossible to get both sets of characters legitimately in the same save file. (Illegitimately, on the other hand...)
This save file contains 5 normally unplayable characters: Etoile's bodyguards Momie and Hammer, the pageant contestant Olivia, the Centaur fought in the Temple of Gama, and an adult version of the puppet Flare.
 Momie
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 Hammer
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 Olivia
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 Centaur
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Hey, quick note: I don't want to judge or anything, but adult Flare suuuuucks. The only special ability he has is Wind Breath at level 1, and he never learns anything else. He has moderately better defense than regular Flare (a whole 28 point difference at level 99...) and a slightly higher movement range, but literally everything else is worse.
Why did they do this? Hasn't Flare suffered enough? First you orphan him, and then you make him worse at everything as soon as he gets out of his egg? What's your problem?
(The problem is that they cloned him from his parents and didn't give him any extra abilities. Poor thing.)
I've uploaded both save files here for everyone's convenience — and thanks to the PS1 Save Game ID Changer, I've included conversions that will work with North American releases of the game! (This is how I managed to get English screenshots of each character's status screen.) You can import the save files to a memory card using MemcardRex, but be aware that they'll only work with games from their associated region.
I also tweaked the 10th Anniversary save file to be in slot 2 instead of slot 1 so that the save files wouldn't overwrite one another. If you'd like to change this back, you can edit the header using the aforementioned MemcardRex — the identifier MARL-0 is save slot 1, MARL-1 is save slot 2, and so on.
If I can figure out how the checksums work, I'd like to convert these save files to the Steam port of A Musical Adventure. No promises, though! This is uncharted territory for me.
For now, I'm just glad to have found these save files and gotten them to work properly. It's a unique little bit of the game's history I haven't seen talked about too often. (Super huge thanks to marlkingdom on Tumblr for making the initial posts on this topic — without those, I wouldn't have even known that these save files existed!)
Last updated October 21, 2023.
