Before Crisis

Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII

Proof of Concept

Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII is a "feature phone" action, role-playing game by Square Enix. It was released in 2004 and is a prequel to Final Fantasy VII. It takes place six years prior to the events of Final Fantasy VII and focuses on the adventures of the Turks, a group of covert operatives working for the Shinra Electric Power Company, and their fights against both rebel group AVALANCHE and their corrupt employers.

Controls

• Arrow keys - Move
• Enter - Select/accept
• Space - Menu
• Escape - Exit/back

Project

I've been working intermittently on this project for a while and decided to resurrect it, as an excuse to learn Godot. (Which I can highly recommend!)

This prototype consists of one screen and two battles.

Development is paused indefinitely to support the preservation effort over at the Keitai wiki Discord.

Preservation

Thanks to the hard work of the feature phone preservation community, there is a dump of the game, but due to the architecture of the game, it's unplayable in it's current form.

Unfortunately, the game relies heavily on a client/server architecture where the client (the game) is a small binary on the phone (with core logic). In order to play a mission the client requests data from the server. The server response claims to be a .jar, containing the map, collision, dialogue, audio, sprite and any other data the player needs for the mission in a carefully optimised binary. The only way to reproduce the mission data is through careful reverse engineering of the client side parser.

There's been great work so far to get the game to boot, and load the tutorial, but there's still a long way to go.

If you're interested in helping out, you can head over to Discord and join the Keitai wiki server using this link: https://discord.gg/tWUYbF3N9F