There was a time when Final Fantasy VII was especially hot. This was coming off the heels of the incredibly successful Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children film that smashed box-office records in Japan and the PlayStation Portable prequel Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII that focused on Cloud’s ally Zack and events leading up to his death.
Another game was announced at that time, going even further back, which would focus on Shinra’s Turks unit and showcase what happened to the first AVALANCHE team. This was Before Crisis: FFVII, but after an announcement, it never made it’s way outside of Japan.
Siliconera spoke to Keiji Fujita, who was in charge of SE’s mobile operations in the US at the time. He explained that, “After saying the game will be launched in the United States, there wasn’t any progress made. That’s a true story.
“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.”
And since the original producer left and joined Capcom, there wasn’t much enthusiasm for porting the game over to the latest devices or handhelds since.
Interestingly, he also talked about the about the Kingdom Hearts mobile game developed by Supersape and how “it 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.”
Perhaps that tussle is the reason that Disney and Square Enix haven’t been able to put out Kingdom Hearts 3? Time will tell.
