Hackers Rebuild Lost Final Fantasy Game
Hackers are painstakingly reconstructing Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII, one of the most elusive games from Japan’s keitai feature phone era. This game has been challenging to preserve due to its unique data overwriting mechanics.
The Challenge
Unlike other games that can be captured in their entirety on a single device, Before Crisis was constantly overwriting its data. This made it nearly impossible to recover the full game. According to hacker Yuvi, A phone with Before Crisis might contain only around 5% of the complete game.
The Breakthrough
Despite these difficulties, Yuvi and his team have made significant progress, particularly with the W51H phone demo:
Two days ago, we made a breakthrough with the W51H—a phone that had the Before Crisis demo preinstalled. I’d been working on cracking its file system and had managed to extract a few game files. It was slow, tedious work, but progress is progress. Then, out of nowhere, about an hour after I logged off, someone in the chat dropped a full dump of the file system. Something we’ve been dreaming of for years!
What Has Been Achieved?
So far, Shops, Materia generation and equipment are functional. Two game modes—Reno’s Training Mission and Arm Wrestling—are also playable with other modes close to completion. Crucial assets like the Fire Materia have been reintroduced into the game through this painstaking process.
The Road Ahead
For Yuvi, this is not just about finishing Before Crisis but expanding its scope:
I’m reverse-engineering the file formats bit by bit so we can create new files that the game will accept. Each new file gets us closer to unlocking more of the game.
This effort underscores the ongoing importance of preserving gaming history and ensuring classic titles remain accessible for future generations.
How important is it to preserve obscure games like Before Crisis? Share your thoughts.
preserving gaming history preserves culture and history that would otherwise be extinguished
culture and history are needed to preserve human dignities and freedoms
Reversing old games is a fun and rewarding learning challenge, I recommend anyone with an interest in gaming history to give it a goo
Unlike other games that can be captured in their entirety on a single device, Before Crisis was constantly overwriting its data.
What a security nightmare. Why on earth would you design a game like this? A game is not supposed to act like some computer virus.
Explanation from an article linked from the parent one:
“Phones at the time didn’t have much processing power, so the server did most of the work. For example, if you changed your weapon or materia, the server would generate a brand-new file based on your choices and send it back to your phone. Even a lot of the game’s text wasn’t stored locally — it was sent dynamically from the server when needed. Because of this, a huge amount of the game’s data never made it onto the client.”
Sounds like the game was too big to fit on the meager storage these flip phones had, so you’d have to download parts of it, then delete it to free up space and download the next part.
A lot of titles were just explicitly cut up into episodic releases for this reason, like FF4 After Years. I guess Square was experimenting with a different format to make this one appear more seamless.
