The feature phone preservation community has saved another game from digital oblivion. This time it's Puyo Puyo Fever Habanero, a Puyo Puyo spin-off that was released for i-Mode, EZWeb, and Softbank-compatible phones in 2007, via Sega's now defunct Sonic Cafe portal.
According to RockmanCosmo, the game was dumped from a handset by a user named Chicken and is specifically the i-Mode version of the game, which has been extracted from a D903i phone. Prior to this discovery, many online had considered the game to be "lost media", as Sega had long since stopped selling it officially and fans had no idea whether a phone still existed that contained all of the files.
There were also only a small handful of images available of what it actually looked like — a couple of which came from this interview on Sega's website with one of its developers Kumazawa Minami (translated here by the archivist/researcher Windii).
Puyo Puyo Fever Habanero was designed as a spin-off from the Sonic Team-developed Puyo Puyo Fever games for consoles. It reuses graphics and the title screen from Puyo Puyo Fever 2 but is reported to have an original story. In total, it includes just three modes: Solo Puyo Puyo, battle select, and Tokkoton Fever, with the last being based on the Fever mechanic from previous games that sees players neutralizing garbage Puyos to fill a gauge and unlock a preset sequence to fall that can be cleared to add to your chain bonus.
In a bizarre twist to the story, after RockmanCosmo made the news about Chicken's preservation efforts public, the official Puyo Puyo Twitter/X account seems to have put out a message indirectly referencing the breakthrough, posting a promotional shot of the character Raffina with the message "Would you accept the call?"
As we mentioned in our recent King's Field mobile article, if you want to play the game, you can head over to this setup guide, which is where you'll find instructions on how to get started.
We also recommend joining the Keitai Wiki Discord if you want to know more about these kinds of preservation efforts, or how you can help out.