When you think of TwinBee you most likely think of SHMUPs, vertical scrolling shooters and a cute little robot shooting hundreds of bullets a minute. You wouldn't think 'dungeon crawler' and grid-based RPG would you? At least, you wouldn't if had even heard of TwinBee. He's barely known in the west and the vast majority of his games remain Japan exclusive.
Most of TwinBee's games are shmups. You fly from one end of the screen to the next shooting anything that gets in your way. With the first game released back in 1985 in arcades, it spawned numerous sequels and spin-offs including a radio drama and full-on JRPG. (and the JRPG actually looks really cool). There's also a platformer on the SNES, which, imo looks gorgeous.
The games see you play as "TwinBee", a humanoid-looking spaceship who in some games is piloted by a human boy. Sometimes the ship itself is living. There's not really any overarching plot and a lot of the games are standalone.
And while TwinBee himself remains obscure in the west there are a few of his games that are so obscure, most in Japan hadn't even heard of them.
TwinBee Dungeon is one such game.
TwinBee Dungeon is a 'Mystery Dungeon' spin-off and sees you engaging in grid-based combat, exploring randomly generated dungeons and gearing up as you dive deeper. The game features numerous callbacks and references to the whole series with pickups, enemies and locations from previous games all appearing. Even the famous rainbow bell is a useable item, though I have no idea what it does. From my research this appears to be an official Mystery Dungeon game, Hudson having gotten permission to make it so.
If you've played a Mystery Dungeon game then you have a good idea how this played. With it being released on flip-phones the resolution wasn't high (only about 20 tiles visible on the screen at once) and the frame rate was likely low. However, games like Mystery Dungeon work really well under the limitations of these phones.
The game sees you playing as Light, TwinBee's pilot. To investigate strange happenings on Donburi Island he ventures into various dungeons, looking for answers. From there on its dungeon crawling all the way to the end.
The game was officially released in 2004, likely May 13 for I-Mode-enabled devices. On I-Mode it was available for the Konami Net DX service. I haven't found any links that indicate this game was released on anything other than I-Mode. It retailed for 315yen, or about 3 CAD.
That's about all the information I can gleam. Most of the reviews and references I found to the game spoke positively, claiming that TwinBee worked well under this setting.
The game was first brought to my attention back in 2021 when Ares developer Near (RIP) sounded the alarm on Twitter that I-Mode was shutting down. The tweet has since been deleted but this was one of the games in particular he was looking for. It was this tweet that I even became aware of the 'Japanese phone preservation crisis'.
I've covered I-Mode extensively already but I will add this. Simply put, as of August 2023, there haven't been any major breakthroughs in cracking the 'I-Mode code' but work is still progressing. The most recent developments I am aware is that some programmers have been getting closer to cracking encryption and figuring out the keys were made on a per-device code. One user has also been steadily dumping all the combined knowledge of Japanese phones to a Miraheze wiki which I will link below. I intend to submit some of my articles to it (if I have not already done so by the time you read this).
As for recovery it is either someone with a copy of the game dumps it (which itself is not possible currently) or the game gets re-released.
And knowing Konami I'm not holding out hope. Has Konami even done anything with any of their properties lately? Not even the Hudson stuff, Konami as a whole isn't that active right now. All they seem to care about is Metal Gear Solid.
I think the best shot is hoping that G-MODE picks it up and re-releases it. That said; I'd also be weary of people using Google Translate or DeepL or something to try and convince them to release it. I'm worried doing so would actually discourage them to do the re-release. Regardless I do still check G-MODE's stuff and should they ever re-release this I will buy it. Even if I gotta use a VPN.
Within a lot of the sources I found of this game a lot also mentioned the existence of a Gundam Mystery Dungeon game. I imagine it would have been just as cool. Hell, it might have been the only Gundam game that actually appeals to me. It is however, not the subject of this article but if someone wants to dive down that hole, I welcome it.
