Despite being a devoted Monster Hunter sicko for well over a decade now, even I didn't know about Monster Hunter i. And for good reason: The 2006 port of Monster Hunter G wasn't just a Japan-only release—it was a keitai game, released exclusively for early 2000s Japanese cell phones. It was Monster Hunter's first game for mobile phones, and until last month, it was believed to be lost to history.
As you might expect for games whose natural habitat was an early 2000s flip phone, preserving keitai games is a complicated process of recovering and decrypting software from decaying handset hardware. As game preservationist RockmanCosmo wrote for Hit Save in 2022, keitai preservation is "one of the most difficult sections of video game preservation due to its obscurity, regional concentration, and lack of documentation."
