It's been a while since we published an update from the feature phone preservation community, but that doesn't mean they haven't been hard at work saving more games from becoming lost media.
Case in point, RockmanCosmo yesterday announced on social media that the community member Yuvi has just preserved several previously-lost Capcom i-mode minigames, including a Breath of Fire IV-themed Daifugō game, a table tennis title based on the arcade fighter Rival Schools, and an Olympic sports collection named Glory of Athens.
All three games were originally accessed via the Capcom Party, a service that was offered via the Capcom Park website; this allowed users to download games for a monthly subscription fee, but it has long since been shut down, meaning there's currently no official way to access these titles. As a result, it has now fallen to an international group of preservationists to seek out and dump these rare games, to make sure they're still made widely accessible for modern audiences.
To give you some background, Breath of Daifugō was released in 2003, three years after its original PlayStation release in Japan and the same year as its Windows port.
It is based on the popular card-shedding game Daifugō (otherwise known as Fool, or Tycoon), which, as far as we can tell, sees players having to get rid of their hand by placing down higher-ranked cards/combos than the previous person at the table. The game features multiple modes, including 'Endless' and 'Knockout'-themed options, with the twist being that your opponents here are all characters from Breath of Fire IV, such as Ryu, Cray, Ershin, and Nina.
Similar to Breath of Daifugō, the next title, Rival Schools Table Tennis, also came out in 2003, and is another spin-off to a popular game, being based on 1997's Rival Schools: United by Fate (known as Private Justice Academy: Legion of Heroes in Japan).
It was released the same year as the later budget rerelease of Rival Schools' sequel Project Justice for the Sega Dreamcast, and stars chibi-fied versions of characters like the hand-to-hand fighter Hinata Wakaba.
As for the final game mentioned, Glory of Athens, as RockmanCosmo states, it was produced for the 2004 Athens Olympics and was released in three editions: track events, field events, and swimming. The version shown in the tweet appears to be the swimming version.
Like with the other i-Mode games the community has preserved, these games should be available to play using the KeitaiWorld Launcher.