FromSoftware’s King’s Field laid the blueprint for pretty much the entire Souls series – unsettling atmosphere, mysterious worlds, and brutal difficult – and while the Japan-only PS1 original is well-known among modern fans these days, the same can’t be said for its similarly region-locked 2004 mobile port. That’s just changed, however, as the once lost phone version has been found, preserved, and even translated into English.
This 2004 phone version of King’s Field was developed internally by FromSoftware itself, and features different map layouts alongside some improved quality-of-life features, like quick-saving and automaps. It’s still a first-person dungeon-crawler that might look primitive to a modern eye, but in the context of early ’00s phones, it’s darned impressive.
Many Japanese phone games of the era have effectively been lost to time, pending the efforts of preservationists importing these phones, hacking them, and dumping their contents for the world to see. Japanese feature phones of the era, also known as keitai, were a big deal, and many notable developers released full-on, proper entries in popular series that fans are trying to prevent from disappearing. The recent preservation of a canon Xenosaga spin-off is a notable recent example.
News of the preservation of this version of King’s Field comes courtesy of keitai preservationist RockmanCosmo, who attributes this work to a user called Yuuku. You can check out the original post on Bluesky for a look at the game itself, as well as a guide on how to get an emulator that can handle it up and running.
If you’re a connoisseur of retro video game memes, you might recognize King’s Field for another reason: it’s the game that provided the screenshot of two skeletons from an old gaming magazine captioned “the PlayStation can produce mind-boggling effects.”
The quaint image of the undead warriors with that superlative description has become downright infamous over the years, and I was prepared to conclude this story with some terribly clever joke about how “mid-’00s Japanese phones can produce mind-boggling effects.” But I’ve already been beaten to that gag. Many, many times. Ah well, it’s once again proof that the internet can produce mind-boggingly similar jokes.
King’s Field sadly did not make our list of the best FromSoftware games. I know, I know, I’m gonna bring it up at the next meeting.
