We can finally play 2006's flip phone-exclusive Monster Hunter port thanks to the tireless work of game preservationists and fan translators
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."
Like many keitai games, Monster Hunter i was assumed to be unsalvageable. Initially released on i-mode phones, the Monster Hunter G port was split into three separate apps that each comprised two of the game's six quest regions, and it required a monthly subscription. A later version that unified those apps and did away with the monthly fee came preinstalled on Sharp phones—a practice that I believe would heal today's society if it was replicated on every iPhone and Android device.
After years of MHi languishing on those few surviving devices, preservationist Xyz—working alongside the community of keitai specialists at Keitai Wiki—finally solved the mystery of how to dump the entombed software just last month, liberating a piece of Monster Hunter history in the process.
Unfortunately, the preserved version of MHi lacked the online functionality necessary for some features as basic as weapon and equipment switching, which relied on assets downloaded from Capcom servers. Thankfully, the Keitai Wiki community was able to rig a private server to host extracted assets from surviving phone saves, and is even working to recreate lost models and textures.
And within the last week, the preserved MHi is even playable in English thanks to a full fan translation patch from translators Grender and Yukiwa.
As for how playable it is—I mean, it's a game that was designed for the finest mobile phones of the year of our lord 2006. You can get a sense of how Monster Hunter i handles in the YouTube video from LEXX embedded above. Unsurprisingly, it plays pretty stiff, and only Sword & Shield and Greatsword animations were recovered in a playable state. Particularly upsetting is the lack of multiplayer, given how Monster Hunter's become synonymous with cooperative creature killing.
Even so, it's a little magical to see it in motion and imagine carrying around a remarkably full Monster Hunter experience in a flip phone. All my phone does today is give me depression. We've fallen so far.
To play MHi yourself, you can seek out emulation information at the Keitai Wiki community Discord. Or you can trawl Ebay for your own early 2000s Sharp phone. Up to you.