Square Enix has produced countless spin-offs to Final Fantasy VII since its original release in 1997, but few have proven quite as mysterious or interesting to Western fans as its prequel Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII.
Originally released episodically for NTT Docomo's FOMA 900i line of mobile phones as a Japan-exclusive, the action role-playing game was the first title to be released in the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, and took place six years prior to the events of Final Fantasy VII. It focused on a new story about the Turks — the covert organization previously seen working for the villainous Shinra organization — and was published across numerous chapters that were released between September 2004 and March 2006.
Square Enix once had plans to release a localized version of the game for Western players, advertising the game publicly and even previewing it to the press. However, due to the low-spec nature of mobile phones in both Europe and North America, it ended up staying a Japanese exclusive, with the full version of the title later being ported over to other Japanese feature phones, including Softbank and EZWeb handsets in 2007.
For almost two decades now, Western fans of the series have done their utmost to try to learn and document everything they can about the curious prequel and all of its features — something that has only become more important after the game was pulled offline in March 2018 putting it at risk of becoming "lost media". In the past, for instance, fans have gone to extreme lengths to try to recreate the game in the game engine RPGMaker, while preservationist groups such as those associated with the Keitai Wiki Discord community are hard at work trying to preserve a complete copy of the original title.
As a result, we wanted to dive into the history of this mysterious title and the community that has emerged around it. Over the last year, we've been looking into Square's initial intentions for the project, and also the ongoing fan efforts to keep it alive. To do this, we enlisted the talents of the Japanese-to-English translator Stephen Meyerink to help us create new translations of old interviews with Square Enix employees and spoke to several of the individuals who are doing their best to save the game from oblivion.
First, though, we should probably set the scene a little, which means taking a look at how Square Enix ended up entering the mobile market, to begin with.
The Road To 'Before Crisis'
Our story originally starts back in the early 2000s, shortly after the launch of Docomo's i-mode service in 1999. At the time, Square, Enix, and another legendary Japanese video game developer, Namco, had all started developing a closer relationship with one another, revealing plans to create a new joint venture to operate Square's PlayOnline game network and to "develop software support solutions for cell phone game development".
For all three companies, it was clear that online gaming and mobile gaming would play a huge part in where the industry was headed in the future, and that each of them would benefit from leveraging the other's resources. However, this planned joint venture never ended up happening, with Square and Enix instead announcing plans in 2002 for the two companies to merge, essentially cutting Namco out of the deal.
The reason given at the time for the decision to link the two companies together was the rising costs of game development and the threat of competition from foreign developers, but another less significant aspect was arguably their joint desire to grow and expand their online and mobile operations.
Square, for instance, had already started making inroads into online development, releasing Final Fantasy XI earlier that year, and had also launched the first entry in the mobile game series Chocobo Anywhere.
Meanwhile, Enix had already published a portable version of Dragon Quest Monsters for Japanese phones and had also greenlit an ambitious trilogy of mobile remakes based on Yuji Horii's influential adventure title The Portopia Serial Murder Case and its two follow-ups (The Hokkaido Serial Murder Case: The Okhotsk Disappearance and Karuizawa Yūkai Annai). The two companies were, therefore, perfectly aligned to pool together their talents and expand this element of their business through a closer collaboration.
The two companies merged on April 1st, 2003, and several months later, in September 2003, announced plans for enhanced ports of the NES/Famicom titles Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest to be released the following year. This was then followed by the news in July 2004 that the company was planning to release an original app for FOMA phones based on the hugely successful Final Fantasy VII.
Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII, as the project was called, was developed by a small team of 11 inside Square Enix's Tokyo offices and had started production one year earlier in 2003, while development on the remakes was underway. It later ended up receiving a beta release in August 2004, with the first chapter released shortly after in September of that same year.
Speaking in an old issue of Gangan magazine, the Final Fantasy VII character artist Tetsuya Nomura stated about the origins of the project, "It all started from us wanting to do something on mobile devices. Phone games these days tend to be solo, offline experiences, despite the fact that phones are communications equipment, you know? From my perspective, it seemed a little odd that those experiences weren't online—that you weren't necessarily doing things with others. And in terms of picking FFVII as the subject matter, it's that we figured doing so would make it an easy entry point for people.
When I was thinking about how to get people interested and make them want to play, I had been working on Final Fantasy VII Advent Children, so I wondered if there was a way to tie the two things together somehow
"When I was thinking about how to get people interested and make them want to play, I had been working on Final Fantasy VII Advent Children, so I wondered if there was a way to tie the two things together somehow. And I thought to myself that it might give it a fresh feeling if we were to set it from the Turks' perspective."
The game's producer Kosei Ito said elsewhere in an interview with itmedia, "[Having the Turks be the lead] was Nomura's idea. Right around when we made the choice to use [the world of] FFVII, the staff had made an FFVII timeline. It was really detailed, and it stretched to an era that was really far back [in the world's history]. It was pretty impressive.
"When we traced back to an earlier era in the timeline, back before Barret claimed the name 'AVALANCHE,' there was another similar rebel group with the same name, and it was like, 'Oh, we can totally use this!' (laughs). We thought it would be a shock to players to have AVALANCHE be the enemy, and there was so much about the world of the Turks that we could include in the game. This combined with the fact that the Turks were popular with women led us to decide to use them as protagonists."
Unique Features & Gameplay
In the original launch version of the game, players were tasked with selecting a character from a group of new recruits that had signed up to the Turks (this included a male and female character known to fans as "Rod" and "Gun" due to their choice of weapons). They were then presented with a menu, enabling them to train, embark on various story missions, inspect and alter their names, and switch between the various playable characters. This last point was especially important as Square Enix planned to introduce new characters to the game in the future with the release of subsequent chapters, alongside other additional modes and other content.
The cost of these add-ons would be paid for by the player via a monthly subscription fee of 525 yen, with Square Enix releasing 24 story chapters in total, alongside three additional special missions based on the character Tseng, The Legendary Turk, and Reno.
Unlike Final Fantasy VII, which utilized 3D models and pre-rendered backgrounds, Before Crisis was notably displayed from a 2D top-down perspective and also featured pre-rendered 3D sprites, with players being able to use the directional buttons on the game's phone to guide their characters around the game's different environments. As for the battle system, this took place on a separate plain and was designed to be played in real-time, with characters being able to run around freely and attack the enemies onscreen or default to using the confirm button to automatically target whoever is closest.
Masahiro Hora, the head of Square Enix's mobile division, told Japanese publications at the time that the team had gone to great lengths to try and "recreate the fun of (home console) action games" on the new format, settling on an approach that combined "rapid button presses" with newly introduced "puzzles and battle logic". He also discussed some of the new features that took advantage of the phone's capabilities, including how the team approached its "multiplayer" aspects that let users interact with each other over a network.
"[With mobile online RPGs], the player has to be able to enjoy the game in the short period of time they have while waiting for the train, and not necessarily have to respond immediately [to things in the game]," Hora stated. "You can't make a call without connecting directly to the other party, but a message can be sent without worrying about the other party's circumstances, and then they can read and reply to it at their own convenience. We're going to introduce a [game] system that takes that into account.
"It's [also] possible to form parties not only with acquaintances but also with strangers. Communicating with people you don't know can be a big hurdle to overcome for new players, so we're putting a lot of care into making it easy for even those kinds of users to participate."
[With mobile online RPGs], the player has to be able to enjoy the game in the short period of time they have while waiting for the train, and not necessarily have to respond immediately [to things in the game].
There would end up being several examples of multiplayer included in Before Crisis, with the Rescue Mode, for instance, allowing players to rescue friends who had fallen in battle, while elsewhere players could also request and share materia across a network.
The game's producer Kotei Ito elaborated on how this materia-sharing system worked in his interview with itmedia, "The materia support system came from the question of how do we, with those kinds of restrictions in mind, implement the 'network' part of a 'network RPG'. The way it works is that when you run out of MP and are pinned down by enemies, you can send a message to HQ requesting materia support. Next, a notification is sent to another user, who can then send you materia, which you then become able to use. We're using the 900i series' DX message function for this."
Interestingly, this wasn't the only clever way that Before Crisis took advantage of the features of its platform either, with the game also featuring a "materia generation system" that allowed players to generate different types of elemental materia based on the colour of images taken with their phone's in-built camera.
"Since mobiles have cameras, we found ourselves wondering if there was a way we could use them in an interesting fashion," said Ito, again in conversation with ITMedia. "That thought is what led us to create the materia generation system we have now. We've produced a one-of-a-kind 'image analysis' system. The 'color' of the photo's subject determines the materia that will be produced. Fire comes from red, Thunder from yellow, Quake from neutral colors, and so on and so forth."
Early on, there were admittedly some teething issues with the technology, though, with one of the initial reviewers of the game noting that, no matter how hard they tried, every image they were taking ended up producing the same result: Quake. Perhaps anticipating this problem, Ito ended up issuing some advice to publications ahead of time about a potential solution for this scenario, telling users to brighten the colour of the image on their camera settings or to take a photo of a matte material (one that doesn't reflect light) to enjoy the best results.
After 'Before Crisis'
Throughout the period in which Before Crisis was live, countless new modes and features were added to it, including the ability to visit the Golden Saucer and play various minigames, and an optional Weapon mode, which saw various users across Japan join forces to take down the Jade Weapon. Those outside Japan, however, were mostly oblivious to what they were missing out on, due to most of the coverage of the game's events being in Japanese and very few players actually taking the time to capture footage of what it was like to play the game.
In the years following the initial release of Before Crisis, the Final Fantasy fan community in the West ended up rallying to track down whatever information they could find about the title, collecting old interviews with the developers, combing through Japanese fan sites, and searching for any videos they could find of the game in action. This led to the discovery of a Japanese playthrough from an individual named Rinrin on the video-sharing site NicoNico, which was later translated into English by the Before Crisis researcher Grimoire Valentine and served as the basis for RichterWalker's RPGMaker recreation.
These videos gave us our best look yet at Before Crisis's story and the basic structure of the game, but there were some in the community who wanted to take things a little bit further: actually locating and preserving an original copy of the game to make sure future generations could experience the title. Among them was the Final Fantasy fan and feature phone preservationist Naoya, who began looking for the game in 2021.
"I've known about the game since Final Fantasy 7 Advent Children came to the US thanks to the two-disc DVD set," says Naoya. "On the second disc, they had the trailers for the FF7 games, and they showed Before Crisis. I had no idea what I was looking at. It was only after I finished Final Fantasy VII Remake that I was like, 'Oh, I want more Final Fantasy VII stuff.' So I looked Before Crisis up again and I found Shademp's post on the Livestream, which was talking about the hunt for Before Crisis, and I saw, 'Oh, no one's found it yet, we're still looking for it.'"
I've known about the game since Final Fantasy 7 Advent Children came to the US thanks to the two-disc DVD set," says Naoya. "On the second disc, they had the trailers for the FF7 games, and they showed Before Crisis. I had no idea what I was looking at.
According to Naoya, he offered his services to try and track down more information, and soon managed to acquire a demo of the EZ-Web version game that came pre-installed on a KDDI W51H. This only covered the first chapter of the game. During this time, he also continued looking for leads on the full version of the game, eventually stumbling across an interesting Twitter post from a Japanese user, which seemed to feature some brand-new, never-before-seen images of Before Crisis taken on a Docomo P04B.
Almost immediately, Naoya excitedly got in touch with the user via DM and asked them if they would be up for eventually helping them dump the game if they were able to come up with a way to extract the contents. And, remarkably, they agreed.
"As you know, there's only a single playthrough of Before Crisis online," says RockmanCosmo, another prominent member of the feature phone preservation community online. "Like, sure, there's the RPGMaker one, but that's kind of a recreation. But in terms of, like, a direct feed of full gameplay, there's only one of those online. And it doesn't have footage of everything, of course. So this Twitter user happened to post some screenshots of different Turks doing different moves, and Naoya had never seen footage of that before. So he reached out to the guy, and said, 'Hey, do you still have the phone with this game? Because I'd like to help you preserve it.'"
As both Naoya and Cosmo told us, the first major obstacle preventing them from preserving Before Crisis was getting the game off the phone itself.
XYZ, a friend of both Cosmo and Naoya, had previously managed to develop a non-destructive way of dumping games from certain Japanese feature phones using a cable (the method of which is outlined in our previous piece on feature phone preservation), but this wasn't initially compatible with the type of phone the software was being stored on.
As a result, more work needed to be done behind the scenes before Naoya could convince its owner to send it to them and let them try to extract the relevant files. It was during this excruciating wait that Naoya ended up having to carry out what Cosmo describes as "a three-year-long negotiation" with the phone's original owner, having to establish and re-establish contact several times to make sure the opportunity didn't slip away.
Eventually, on July 2024, RockmanCosmo and Naoya announced on Twitter that the team had made a tremendous breakthrough behind the scenes, successfully dumping not just Before Crisis but 18 other i-Mode games that were previously considered lost from the single device. The work wasn't exactly over yet, though, with the next step inevitably being to get the game to run in the Doja SDK emulator — something that the team has still only had limited success to this day due to the convoluted way in which the game was built and the fact that the Square Enix servers have long since been pulled offline.
"Before Crisis is our biggest foray into Square Enix's absolute mess of how they handle their Keitai games," Cosmo tells us. "Because what they did was say, 'We're going to have one chapter on your phone at a time. And then when you need to have another chapter, we'll just communicate with our server'. That was a good solution at the time for the phone space limitations. But when it came to something that was ambitious, like Before Crisis, it became a big problem because it just was constantly relaying data with Square Enix's servers. And mind you, this is a 2004 flip phone game. So basically, a lot of the most important things that make Before Crisis function are all server-based."
To try and find a way around this, the team ended up putting out a request for help, which was eventually answered by an individual named Yuvi, a game preservationist, hacker, and translator. A Final Fantasy fan themself, Yuvi agreed to try and help the team reverse engineer the servers they needed, in order to get the game up and running.
Yuvi tells us, "As you mentioned, the game communicates constantly with servers that no longer exist. To this point, the only way we can rebuild the game servers is to understand what the game is doing and what type of data it is looking for. Once we understand those parameters, it mostly follows trial and error until we find the data that fits. Before Before Crisis even reaches the main menu, it will go through no less than six packet requests, and more if you are a new user. These requests vary from checking to ensure you have enough points to play the game, checking for updates, getting your player name, saving data, Chocobo data, golden saucer data, chapter info, Turk data, and lastly, downloading a file called "Fix." The Fix file is the main file of that game that is used to populate and load the main menu of the game."
So far, the team has had some incredible success rebuilding the game, managing to reach the main menu after just two days and roughly "24 hours of actual work", and later being able to recreate various elements of the game including shops, materia generation, materia equipment, and Reno's Training Mode.
In order to progress further, Naoya, Cosmo, Yuvi are all agreed that they'll likely need more phones to access all the assets from the other chapters that they'll need to rebuild the game — something that will likely take a number of years and a combination of luck and hard work. The team, however, seems ready to take on the challenge, if that is what it takes to bring back the game from the dead.