In the '00s, mobile gaming was exploding in Japan to such a degree that major publishers were scrambling to get their big franchises onto the keitai feature phones of the day. One of the most notable examples of keitai gaming is Before Crisis: Final Fantasy 7, a canonical prequel to the classic JRPG that fans have spent years trying to preserve.
Preservationists have just hit a major new milestone in the quest to save Before Crisis, resurrecting the title's Chocobo racing minigame. "Here is most likely some of the first-ever footage of Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII Chocobo Racing in action," as hacker Yuvi says in the description of the YouTube video below. (Thanks, Time Extension.)
"I've been on a mission to resurrect this game and the network-heavy servers it needs," Yuvi continues. "This is just one of the many features currently working in the game."
Keitai preservation is a wild scene, as the people working to save these games spend their time importing Japanese flip phones and cracking them, mostly simply hoping that there'll still be some as-yet-undiscovered game left on the device's memory. We've previously covered the efforts to save a Xenosaga RPG, a lost Professor Layton game, and an impressive King's Field port, but as you might imagine, a canonical entry in a story as beloved as Final Fantasy 7 has drawn a lot of extra interest.
Before Crisis has proven particularly difficult to preserve because it was released in episodes, and many of its features had to check in with Square Enix's servers in order to operate. With old episodes being regularly deleted to free up the tiny bits of storage space available on keitai phones, even finding one with Before Crisis installed would leave you with an incomplete game, never mind the work you'd have to do to make sure the online-tied features worked.
Yet still, little by little, more of Before Crisis is being saved. "This was thanks to a P900iV that I secured," according to a tweet from Naoya, another member of the keitai preservation scene. "The more copies we find, the more we can recover." Here's hoping the keitai scene manages to continue this run of good luck.
Some of the best JRPGs ever made have notable keitai spin-offs.
