Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII

~ the obituary ~

Before Crisis was Japan-only at the carrier layer, which is a harder lock than a language or a shipping address. It did not run on a phone so much as on NTT DoCoMo's FOMA service, billed monthly through the operator, with episodes delivered from Square Enix's own mobile platform. In Turkey in 2004 a phone game meant a java midlet bought through an operator portal or passed around between handsets, and there was no version of this that could have reached us.

It was a real Final Fantasy, not a spin-off with the name attached. A prequel set six years before Final Fantasy VII, following the Turks, Shinra's covert operatives, against the rebel group AVALANCHE and eventually against their own employer. Tetsuya Nomura had the original idea and designed the characters. Hajime Tabata directed, his first major project, with a core team of eighteen people starting work in 2002. It shipped on FOMA on 24 september 2004 after a beta the previous month, then reached SoftBank on 30 january 2007 and EZweb on 5 april 2007.

The mobile-specific features are why it still gets talked about. You acquired materia by taking a photograph with your phone's camera, and the game reduced the image to its dominant color to decide what you got, so a dark green picture produced Bio and a blue one produced Cure. Up to three players could team up over the network. If you were defeated you could choose to be imprisoned rather than restart, and wait for another player to come and rescue you, which worked even while your phone was switched off.

The numbers were there. Two hundred thousand users registered on the first day and the game was accessed over a million times. Fourteen years later Square Enix closed down its old Final Fantasy Mobile service on 31 march 2018, along with the Dragon Quest equivalent, and Before Crisis went with it.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually was ~

A subscription game on a carrier deck, delivered in episodes, which meant the content lived on a server and arrived when you paid for the next piece. That model was ordinary in Japan and nearly unknown everywhere else, and it is the reason the game cannot be preserved. There is no cartridge and no local install to keep.

Square Enix kept adding to it for years after launch. A fighting arena called Battle Square went in during 2006, alongside an easy mode that auto-evaded incoming attacks for you. A hard mode aimed at advanced players followed in 2007.

~ why it never left Japan ~

The western release was announced at E3 in 2006, two years after the Japanese launch, and then quietly did not happen. Keiji Fujita, who ran Square Enix's mobile operations, gave the honest reason afterward: phones in the west were too low-spec, and the game only ran on high-end Japanese handsets in the first place. By 2008 the producer, Yukimasa Ito, had left for Capcom, and there was nobody inside the company left to manage a port.

Tabata floated a full remake for the Nintendo 3DS in 2010, rebuilt so that a substantial number of players could enter missions together. Nomura and Yoshinori Kitase both liked the idea. Tabata was busy with two other games at the time and it never got made.

~ what got buried with it ~

The SoftBank version stopped being deployed in june 2015 and the rest ended in march 2018, which leaves a major Final Fantasy title that no legal method can reach. Fan preservation exists in fragments, mostly video, because episodic delivery means there was never a complete copy sitting on anybody's device to dump.

Square Enix did eventually come back for it. Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis retold the Before Crisis story, and the first official localization of that story arrived in 2026, twenty two years after the original, while Ever Crisis itself was winding down toward a shutdown announced for 6 october 2026. The story got out of Japan in the end. The game never did.

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