Gaming preservationists have just rescued a significant piece of FromSoftware history from obscurity. A long-lost mobile version of King’s Field—FromSoftware’s very first video game and the spiritual predecessor to the Dark Souls series—has been successfully preserved and made accessible to players worldwide.
Yuuku preserved King's Field Mobile, a previously-lost King's Field i-mode game. 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! pic.twitter.com/rvdKdAdWGH
— RockmanCosmo (@RockmanCosmo) April 10, 2025
The preservation effort was spearheaded by feature phone preservationist RockmanCosmo, who announced that a user named Yuuku had successfully preserved the i-Mode version of King’s Field that was released exclusively in Japan back in 2004. This mobile adaptation came a full decade after the original PlayStation release that launched FromSoftware’s gaming legacy.
For those unfamiliar with FromSoftware’s origins, King’s Field debuted on the original PlayStation in 1994, marking the company’s transition from business software development to video games. The first-person dungeon crawler took place in the medieval world of Verdite, where players ventured into royal catacombs to search for their father and investigate a monster invasion. Unlike contemporaries such as Wizardry, King’s Field distinguished itself by featuring real-time combat—an early hint at the action RPG direction that would eventually define FromSoftware’s most celebrated works.
The newly preserved mobile version isn’t merely a direct port but rather a retelling of the original game with different map layouts and quality-of-life features like an automap function. The game was originally released for i-Mode, EZWeb, and Yahoo! Keitai compatible phones in 2004, with a special enhanced Yahoo! Keitai version featuring expanded dungeons, new monsters, and additional weapons and armor.
What makes this preservation particularly significant is that Japanese mobile games from the early 2000s have been especially vulnerable to being lost forever. The unique hardware and software ecosystems of Japanese feature phones (keitai) have made preservation challenging, requiring dedicated enthusiasts to import original hardware, hack the devices, and extract their contents. Many games from this era have already disappeared completely, making each successful preservation a victory against digital extinction.
For those interested in experiencing this piece of gaming history, an English language patch is already available, and setup guides have been provided to help players get started with the appropriate emulation software. The Keitai Wiki Discord community offers additional support and information about these preservation efforts.
This rescue of King’s Field’s mobile version represents more than just the preservation of a single game—it’s the recovery of a crucial link in the evolutionary chain that eventually led to Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring. FromSoftware’s journey from this humble dungeon crawler to creating some of the most acclaimed and influential games of the modern era provides fascinating context for understanding how the studio developed its distinctive approach to game design.
