Lost Final Fantasy 7 Mobile Game Preserved After 20 Years

A rare Final Fantasy 7 mobile spin-off has been fully recovered almost 20 years after its original release. Dirge of Cerberus: Lost Episode -Final Fantasy VII- is now playable again after preservationist Yuvi and the Keitai Wiki community decrypted a surviving copy.

Lost Episode launched in North America in 2006 and Japan in 2007 for feature phones. It later became inaccessible after the services needed to download and switch between its episodes shut down.

The full game was found on an SD card

Final Fantasy 7 PlayStation discs, game case and three PlayStation memory cards arranged together. — Google

The recovery began after Keitai Wiki member Naoya Shinota contacted someone who still had the complete game. The owner provided a copy of the SD card containing its files, but the data was encrypted.

The team had already preserved a trial version in 2023. Recovering the full game was harder because the SD card data needed to find its encryption key was missing.

Decryption required more than 90 GPU servers

Yuvi created custom software to brute-force the encryption keys needed to open the files. The process used more than 90 GPU servers and over 125 active clients.

The required keys were found in around 72 hours. Yuvi said the preservation effort cost more than $900 in total.

Lost Episode connects to Dirge of Cerberus

Vincent Valentine holds Cerberus while wearing his red cloak in Dirge of Cerberus artwork. — Square Enix

Dirge of Cerberus: Lost Episode is a mobile companion to the 2006 PlayStation 2 game Dirge of Cerberus. It follows Vincent Valentine and covers events connected to the console game’s story.

Square Enix developed the title with Ideaworks3D. Its feature-phone release and reliance on discontinued mobile services made preserving it especially difficult.

The full game is playable again

Yuvi has confirmed that the complete version of Lost Episode is now preserved and playable. The recovery also opens the door for future fan translation work.

The preservationist is already working on another feature-phone game recovered in similar circumstances. That project has also been decrypted, though its identity has not yet been revealed.

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Lost Final Fantasy 7 mobile game has been preserved after 20 years

The full game was found on an SD card

Decryption required more than 90 GPU servers

Lost Episode connects to Dirge of Cerberus

The full game is playable again

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