The Japanese feature phone preservation community have shown themselves to be experts at recovering games that many had believed would be forever lost to time, but its latest achievement could be one of its most impressive finds yet.
That's because, as revealed yesterday by RockmanCosmo (one of the leading experts on the preservation of old feature phone games), a member of the community (Yuuku) has miraculously managed to locate and preserve a copy of DoDonPachi DaiOuJou DX Reco.ver (大往生DX-ﾚｺver.-), a game that was only available to purchase for a single day on December 30, 2007.
In his announcement post, RockmanCosmo describes the title as "a score competition variant of DoDonPachi DaiOuJou DX", which was a simplified feature phone port of Cave's classic 2002 shoot 'em up DoDonPachi DaiOuJou, released via Cave's online web portal Game Center Yokocho.
In the past, DoDonPachi DaiOuJou DX was reissued on G-Mode Archives in 2021, for both Steam and Nintendo Switch, but this competition variant has never been available to play until recently, with the game now being made available of the part of the fanmade Keitai World Launcher.
You can watch some more footage of the game below: