When most people think of retro games, they don’t think of phone games. Retro games, after all, are broadly speaking from a time before smart phones. But then again, phone games existed before smart phones did. Such is the case with Japanese feature phone games, keitai games for short, which date from the mid to late 2000’s. Games on the I-Mode internet service from NTT DoCoMo could often be quite elaborate, and major developers like Square Enix, Capcom, and Sega all had their own storefronts on it and other services. Most of these titles had been thought lost to the time- but a recent dump from Naoya Shinota has seen the revival of 18 Square Enix titles.
These games span a huge variety of genres and franchises. FFVII Before Crisis is a real-time action RPG, with FFVII Dirge of Cerberus Lost Episode is a hybrid shooter fairly similar to the original Dirge of Cerebus. FFVII Snowboarding is just a board of FFVII’s snowboarding minigame.
Kingdom Hearts Coded is a 3D platformer that borrows heavily from the mainline games for its minigame content, remixed through odd ways- like backporting KH: Re: Chain of Memories into sprites from the Game Boy Advance Chain of Memories game. Kingdom Hearts Avatar Kingdom allows for the creation of avatars in the Kingdom Hearts style. Kingdom Hearts Rhythm Parade is a rhythm game, and Kingdom Hearts Reversi is a reversi game, and Kingdom Hearts Magical Canvas is a picross game.
In addition to these, there’s a full-on remake for Seiken Densetsu for Game Boy. Overall, the titles aren’t too different from what might be expected on dedicated gaming handhelds from the same era- reinterpretations and expansions of existing popular gaming properties. What is a lot different, and what has made these games notoriously difficult to preserve, is the extent to which these games relied on data from Square Enix servers rather than just existing natively on the phone’s own files. Consequently, in contrast to many ROM dumps being playable right away, dedicated hobbyists have had to go through quite a bit of work to get these games playable at all. Game preservationist Yuvi had to engage in some server jujitsu to even get FFVII Before Crisis to run at all by using a local server to trick the game into connecting to a fake Square Enix server.
While this is unfortunate for the sake of game preservation, this does explain a bit why Square Enix even went to the trouble of developing for such an odd platform in the first place. In between advanced (for the time) 3D graphics and fast Internet speeds, I-Mode phones could offer unique experiences compared to other technology. They were also ideal for a subscription model, the monthly fees making them a precursor to modern mobile games as we know them.
Emulating these games remains a challenge. According to RockmanCosmo, there is only one emulator for the i-mode platform: an emulator embedded in DoCoMo’s official DoJa 5.1 SDK. I-mode games run on DoCoMo Java (DoJa), a custom profile of Java Micro Edition. Due to this custom profile, DoJa games don’t work on regular mobile Java emulators. The DoJa 5.1 SDK’s emulator does the job, but it is far from comprehensive. It was mainly developed to test basic stationary applications, not high-performance games. As a result, it struggles to run games with 3D graphics and graphically-intense 2D games. It also constantly struggles with sound emulation. However, there is a comprehensive Java Micro Edition emulator in the works: SquirrelJME. It aims to be fully compatible with DoJa applications.
That’s a direct quote. Sadly, I, personally, just do not understand programming well enough to be able to parse most of that. But there’s every reason to be optimistic that these games may be playable for everyone in the future thanks to those more technically inclined. OnepieceFreak recently decompiled Professor Layton: Mansion of the Deadly Mirror and recompiled it into an English version. The Rockman EXE Zone has also been dedicated to providing patches for the Rockman EXE games released on this platform. Anyone interested in helping out would be well-advised to pay a visit to the Keitai Wiki, which also has a link to a Discord with further aficionados of this curious era of gaming history.
William Schwartz is a media writer who specializes in South Korean media, but also writes about a wide variety of popular culture subjects- including retro video games.
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