A piece of Final Fantasy VII lost media has been restored after an expensive and painstaking process. First reported by Wccftech, hacker and game preservationist Yuvi has restored Dirge of Cerberus Lost Episode -Final Fantasy VII- to working order.
Dirge of Cerberus Lost Episode -Final Fantasy VII- (yup, that’s the full title) was a mobile-only spinoff game for Final Fantasy VII spinoff game Dirge of Cerberus. The game was released in 2006 on the Amp’d Mobile cellphone network and became fully unplayable when Square Enix shut game servers down in 2018.
However, in 2024, Yuvi acquired all the files for the game on an encrypted SD card and set about trying to decrypt them and restore the game. They wrote on their blog that they spent two years trying to procure the keys necessary to decrypt the files, but to no avail. “So this past week I said enough is enough; I’m going to solve this issue. We have the data; we just need to unencrypt it. Let’s figure out how,” Yuvi wrote.
According to Yuvi, it took a lot of extremely involved work. And while they were making progress, Yuvi deemed that the process was taking too long. So… “I made a GPU farm,” they wrote. “I spun up well over 90 GPU Servers to crunch these numbers so fast,” with those GPUs including “RTX 4090s, A4000s, A4500s, A5000s, RTX 6000s H200, and more.” They also said they spent over $900 to make this all happen.
As a result, a job that was projected to take a few months was finished in a couple of days, and we now have a working copy of a game that’s been lost since 2018. Yuvi put up a video of the game on their YouTube channel.
In addition to Dirge of Cerberus Lost Episode, there are a number of other lost Final Fantasy mobile titles including Before Crisis Final Fantasy VII and Square Enix has itself attempted to revive elements of these lost games. Portions of Dirge of Cerberus‘ story have made it into the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy, and during a Final Fantasy XIV Fan Fest event in Berlin, director Naoki Hamaguchi said the team is planning to incorporate more lore from these spinoffs into Revelation.