A Mobile Port of King’s Field, The Debut FromSoftware Game, Has Been Found And Preserved

King’s Field was FromSoftware’s first game, a dungeon crawler first released on PS1 in 1994 then ported to select brands of Japanese phones in 2004. This latter version was thought lost, but has now been found and preserved.

Released for EZWeb and i-mode phones with rearranged content, this version of King’s Field is often referred to as the keitai release (keitai also means Japanese feature phone), and is a stellar example of what those phones were capable of over 20 years ago.

“Yuuku preserved King’s Field Mobile, a previously-lost King’s Field i-mode game,” said RockmanCosmo, a game preservationist, on his official X (Twitter) account. “A retelling of the PS1 original, it has different map layouts and an auto-map. For a real-time 3D 2004 keitai game, it’s very ambitious. There’s already an English patch too.”

FromSoftware’s Legacy

FromSoftware might be a well-known video game company now, but back in the mid 1990s it was just getting started. King’s Field is a relatively straightforward dungeon crawler rendered in 3D and uses a first person perspective. 

Players take on the role of the decidedly not-very-fantasy-named Jean and explore tombs in the kingdom of Verdite. Armed with a sword and spells, they encounter typical monsters far from the studio’s renowned weirdo designs, but no less effective in terms of challenge.

The keitai version of King’s Field was also ported over as King’s Field Ex in April 2004 as an exclusive to Yahoo! Keitai phones, with new maps and enemies. Both this and the recently discovered King’s Field i-mode version were technically published under FromSoftware’s mobile subsidiary, Fromcapsule. 

Phone Game Preservation

There are a lot of emulators around that focus on old games consoles, home computers and handhelds, but phone game preservation is often overlooked. Sometimes a well-known title makes the jump to mobile with extra or remixed content, as is the case with King’s Field, but as these aren’t physical releases they can easily get lost to time.

Back in 2021, FromSoftware started to delist a number of its Fromcapsule mobile ports, so there was a concerted effort to preserve as many of these titles as possible. Downloads were only available to Japanese i-mode subscribers, severely limiting access in the West to mobile versions of Armored Core, Tenchu and other famous titles.

However, the Game Preservation Society in Japan was quick to act and managed to secure a number of downloads. This then opened the doors for other game preservationists to work on ways to load the games via emulators on modern devices.

Mobile ports take a bit of extra elbow grease to get up and running, however, which is another factor that’s delayed many of these games seeing the light of day again. In the case of the recently recovered King’s Field, the Keitai Wiki site (a combined catalog and game preservation site for games from Japanese feature phones) has created an in-depth guide using its own Keitai World Launcher to help gamers get up and running.