Game preservation remains important, so it is always good news when a project thought to be lost is successfully rescued.
Following the worldwide success of the original Final Fantasy VII, Square Enix decided to expand the game’s universe with several titles, including console spin-offs such as Crisis Core and Dirge of Cerberus, as well as mobile games like the Turk-focused Before Crisis. Restoring and preserving these older mobile games proved to be a major challenge, but a recent breakthrough by preservation expert Yuvi has made it possible to restore and preserve Dirge of Cerberus: Lost Episode, arguably the least well-known of the Final Fantasy VII spin-offs. This breakthrough came at just the right time, as Square Enix continues to develop Final Fantasy VII Revelation, which actively incorporates narrative elements from the wider Compilation of Final Fantasy VII spin-offs.
Dirge of Cerberus: Lost Episode -Final Fantasy VII- is a mobile shooter starring Vincent Valentine. Originally released in 2006 with fully voiced cutscenes, it became completely inaccessible in 2018 when the authentication servers required to download and switch between episodes were shut down. In 2024, Yuvi gained access to the raw files for the entire game after joining the team working on the restoration of Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII. However, possessing the raw files alone was not enough to restore and preserve the title. The technical process presented significant challenges. After writing custom OpenCL software to decrypt the PKZIP file headers, Yuvi set up a massive GPU farm.
“Naoya Shinota had been in talks with someone who had the full version for many years before they kindly provided their SD card. The only issue was that these SD cards were encrypted. ‘No problem,’ we said, ‘we have a solution for this.’ However, we needed a special partition from the SD card to start the brute-force process to find the keys. This was the first time we had encountered such an issue because we normally had possession of the SD card and could retrieve the necessary secret key. Unfortunately, even two years later, we still had not received it. So, this past week, I decided to solve the issue once and for all. We had the data; we just needed to decrypt it. I set up more than 90 GPUs to crunch these numbers quickly, including RTX 4090s, A4000s, A4500s, A5000s, RTX 6000s, H200s, and more. At one point, I had more than 125 active clients working on the calculations. With all of these combined, I was producing nearly 5,500 GKeys/s. That was more than 70 times faster than my single 7900 XTX could manage” – Yuvi wrote.
Ultimately, the technical effort and the $900 investment were worthwhile. Dirge of Cerberus: Lost Episode -Final Fantasy VII- has been fully restored, and the fact that it is now playable again will likely pave the way for a fan-led translation project. This will allow every player to experience the forgotten side story. Debates surrounding the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII are growing more heated as the trilogy approaches its conclusion. In a recent video interview conducted by Ashif’s Release Notes at the Final Fantasy XIV Fan Festival in Berlin, Naoki Hamaguchi, director of Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core, confirmed that the spin-offs Dirge of Cerberus and Crisis Core, alongside Advent Children, will play a direct role in the trilogy’s conclusion.
“There are many other titles within the VII universe. We are talking about Advent Children, Dirge of Cerberus, and Crisis Core, for example. We want to incorporate all of those and ensure that none are left out. Once we have all of those in place, we can start thinking about the ending. The question then becomes: what kind of ending will we head for in Revelation that still has those ties? I think that is something players will really look forward to finding out” – Hamaguchi stated.
Since the INTERmission expansion for Final Fantasy VII Remake introduced Deepground, the Shinra military organization that originally appeared in Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII, it was to be expected that elements from the Compilation series would feature in Final Fantasy VII: Revelation as well. However, it will be interesting to see exactly how this will play out and whether the positive reception will lead to further remakes. While it is gratifying to see efforts to preserve games such as Before Crisis, playing an old mobile game can never quite measure up to a full-fledged modern remake.
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