Way before their iPhone and Android push, Square Enix announced a suite of mobile games for feature phones back at a press conference in 2005. Hexcite Fusion, Code Age Brawls (a spinoff from the Japan-only PS2 game Code Age Commanders), Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII –Lost Episode- and Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII. While some of those games made it to the US, Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII didn’t come over.
Curious about the fate of the missing chapter in the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII series, Siliconera spoke to Keiji Fujita who spearheaded Square Enix’s mobile operations in the US during the time Before Crisis was announced.
“After saying the game will be launched in the United States, there wasn’t any progress made. That’s a true story,” Fujita explained. “The feature phones at that time were too low spec to bring Before Crisis to the US market. Because Before Crisis is an online game, it was only available for high end phones in Japan. There was no way to port the game to phones here.”
Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII is part of the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII series. It’s a real time game that focuses on the Turks and has a neat feature where you take photos to make materia. The story is a prequel and explains what happened to the first AVALANCHE team.
The original producer of Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII left Square Enix and is now working at Capcom. Fujita believes this may be one reason why nobody has taken care of the porting work. Although, Final Fantasy Type-0 producer Hajime Tabata expressed interest in remaking the game for Nintendo 3DS.
Fujita also told us an interesting story about the Kingdom Hearts mobile game for Verizon phones which was made by Superscape. “Kingdom Hearts was developed by Disney, not Square Enix. That’s why Tetsuya Nomura was very unhappy about the quality of the graphics because Disney just did it without his supervision.”
