(no subject)

[cielsosinfel]

Hello, hello, first time posting here!

I just read an amazing article (from about a month ago, but I didn't see it shared here) about the effort to reverse-engineer and preserve the Japan-exclusive 2004~2007 mobile game, Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII (one of the earliest spin-offs Squenix launched as part of its Compilation of FFVII project, focused on the Turks.) It seems like the project is currently on pause, though it sounds like they got a significant chunk of the game running already!

The Before Crisis crisis: How hackers are rebuilding the lost Final Fantasy VII mobile game piece by tiny piece

Comments

[artabria]

I remember searching for let's play of that game in youtube for fics purposes! I wonder how the emulation works, because I think you got materias by taking photos or something like that?

[cielsosinfel]

Yes, after reading about the way the game utilized phone features, I'm curious to know how this team is adjusting things to make it work. They do mention in the article they have materia generation working, and they reverse engineered the core game system so they can run it off a custom server.

Was looking at the forum a lot of announcements about the project are made on (I think everything else is otherwise on a Discord server), and it seems they have a playable version of the Before Crisis Demo for download! Very last post on this page. Takes quite a bit of set-up:

https://thelifestream.net/forums/threads/the-ffvii-mobile-game-initiative-2004-2008-era.20015/page-14

And there are also posts about recovering and preserving the Dirge of Cerberus Lost Episode mobage! With youtube video links. I didn't even know that was a thing TBH.