The quest to preserve and document the fascinating number of games produced for Japanese "keitai" feature phones is one we've been covering on this site for some time now, but one of the most epic endeavours in this field suddenly seems to be making better-than-expected progress.
Like so many video game companies in the 2000s, Square Enix embraced keitai phones and released some of its most notable properties on them, one of which was Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII, a cellphone RPG that has been referred to by some as the Holy Grail of keitai game preservation.
As detailed by Read Only Memo, Before Crisis is tricky to preserve in 2024 because the game constantly overwrote its data, which means that the whole adventure would be effectively spread over multiple phones today, rather than just one.
Hacker Yuvi, who has spearheaded the mission to properly preserve the game, says that a single phone with Before Crisis installed might only hold "maybe 5% of the game." Yuvi has created numerous tools and moved mountains to get Before Crisis to a playable state today, and recently, their efforts have taken a massive stride forward.
The hacker tells Read Only Memo:
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! Now we’ve got a second copy of the game, with a whole bunch of new assets to work with. The demo itself is mostly playable now, which is awesome. But for me, the real battle has just begun.
And what a battle it is. Before Crisis was released on both of the competing keitai platforms back in the day, i-mode and BREW, and each stores game files in different ways. That makes preserving the entire game even trickier, but Yuri has been making amazing progress of late, thanks mainly to the aforementioned W51H phone.
Shops, Materia generation, and Materia equipment are all present and correct now, while two of the game modes – Reno's Training Mission and Arm Wrestling – are playable. Other modes are close to being playable, according to Yuri.
"I’m reverse-engineering the file formats bit by bit so we can create new files that the game will accept," the hacker tells Read Only Memo. "Each new file gets us closer to unlocking more of the game. Once the BREW conversion is finished, we’ll be able to add all of Chapter 1 to the list of things that work."