You may have never played Professor Layton and the House of Deadly Mirrors, but with the help of some dedicated fans, you soon will be able to.
Before smartphones, Japan was ahead of the curve in mobile phones. They could do things that are common nowadays with their phones, like send emails, watch live videos, take photos, and even play games. There was deep gaming, and even big-name games like Final Fantasy were released exclusively on Japanese-only phones (also known as Keitai phones), like the Final Fantasy 7 title Before Crisis – and a few Kingdom Hearts games, most notably the original Kingdom Hearts Coded (the rest were just a few smaller games). A lot of this has been lost, though, as almost none of the games were released outside of Japanese phones, leaving fans to make up the shortfall.
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That’s exactly what fans have done with Professor Layton and the Deathly Mirror, a Japanese mobile game that remains unfinished to this day. Game preserver RockmanCosmo shared last week that fellow preserver Yuvi acquired an abandoned Fujitsu F906i phone, which just happened to have all six chapters of the Professor Layton mobile game. “Previously we only had the first three chapters,” RockmanCosmo explained. “The English translation will be done in due course!” The phone that contained the game is in such bad shape – it looks like it survived a house fire – that it’s honestly a miracle the entire game survived at all.
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Today, a lot of these games are no longer available, which is a real shame because one of my favorite games, Ni No Kuni, got a mobile version that was basically an Earthbound clone. There was even a Persona 3 spinoff that actually got ported to the Nintendo Switch and PC back in June, so if you were curious about what old Japanese phones were capable of before the unofficial translation of the Professor Layton game was released, that’s your best place to start.
