A "lost" demo for a Japan-exclusive Resident Evil mobile game has been dumped online, by a group of feature phone preservationists.
Biohazard: The Stories is an obscure piece of Resident Evil history that we're assuming most Western fans of the series won't be too familiar with (we know we certainly weren't!). It was released in 2004 exclusively in Japan for DoCoMo devices and was also apparently made available for other feature phone services like Au's EZWeb and Yahoo! Keitai. The game is a follow-up to Resident Evil: The Missions released in 2003, and similar to its predecessor uses a 3D engine and graphics inspired by the original PlayStation releases.
Yesterday, RockmanCosmo shared the exciting news on Twitter, revealing that they had managed to successfully dump the demo from a P903i phone with xyz's "ktdumper" script. In the thread, they also gave credit to a number of other individuals who had helped them with the effort, including Memory Hunter (who got the game running on an emulator), XLeonier (who captured some footage), and usernameak (who assisted them with reading the files).
The footage shared shows Jill Valentine exploring a bunch of pre-rendered environments taken from the Clock Tower section from Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, and comes from the time-limited "Situations" mode (which are playable offline).
There is also a "Stories" mode included in the demo, but unfortunately, it seems to require an internet connection and communication with a server in order to function properly.
To discover more information on the dump and the ongoing effort to preserve Japanese feature phone history, we recommend following RockmanCosmo on Twitter or joining the Kahvibreak Discord.