A previously lost Final Fantasy 7 spin-off game has finally been saved and preserved more than two decades after its initial release.
Dirge of Cerberus - Lost Episode isn't the most well known game in the Final Fantasy 7 compilation. In fact, it's a 'midquel' of sorts to one of the most derided entries in the entire series, squeezing Dirge of Cerberus' shooter gameplay onto a mobile phone and letting us spend even more time with the ever-moody Vincent Valentine. But it's been completely unplayable for years... up until now, that is.
As reported on by Time Extension, video game preservationist Yuvi managed to get their hands on the rare game's data thanks to Naoya Shinota, a member of the feature phone preservation group Keitai Wiki, who just so happened to know a guy who was in possession of Dirge of Cerberus - Lost Episode and was looking to dump their old SD card.
"The only issue is that these SD cards are encrypted," Yuvi writes in their blog post, and the team didn't have access to a "special partition from the SD card to start the brute-force process to find the keys."
"This was the first time we have encountered such an issue, because normally we are the ones who have possession of the SD card, so we could get the secret key needed," Yuvi explains. The solution? Yuvi spent $900 to create a brute-force program and a GPU farm to help get it done.
"Now, I’m not going to lie and say it was still cheap; in total, this endeavour to save one game cost me well over $900 dollars, all said and done. But in my books it was well worth something we may have never had the opportunity of getting again," they write. I'd highly recommend checking out their blog for the full details.
It should be a good primer for Vincent Valentine's next big appearance as a playable character in Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, coming sometime next year.
