11/23/2004: "Welcome Adventchildren_ / U.S. Release of Before Crisis Questionable"

The FF7 Citadel would like to welcome our newest affiliate, Adventchildren_,
a weblog community primarily dedicated to (what else?) Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. It's a cool and friendly place, so be sure to check it out!

Also, there has been some discussion lately about whether or not Before Crisis, the mobile game set six years prior to the original FF7, will ever be released outside of Japan-- or more specifically, in the United States...

Empy Claw wrote in with the following: "I was looking at the Compilation section on the Cit, and I read about Before Crisis probably being unlikely to make it to the western world. I figured you might like this quote from the November issue of GMR Magazine..."

"...at a pre-Tokyo Game Show event, Square Enix flatly denied the possiblity of releasing the game in the United States-- phones here aren't compatible with the top-of-the-line NTT DoCoMo FOMA 900i series headsets that Before Crisis requires... the company also stated that there are no plans to port it to another platform..."

Note that the FOMA 900i series (official site, Flash required) is the line of cell phones which includes a special "Cloud Black" model-- the very same phone featured in Advent Children.

This news was certainly big, so I researched it a bit and came up with contradictory information. Over a month after the Tokyo Game Show, GameSpot posted the news that Before Crisis would be released in North America "once the technology is available". Fortunately, it looks like the 900i may be sold in the US in the future, according to Eyes on Final Fantasy (site's news archives currently not working; Google cache here). Then there's an earlier, but still post-TGS, GameSpot article about Square Enix's plans for the Nintendo DS. At a Tokyo press event, Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto and Square Enix's Akitoshi Kawazu discussed the DS as a possible platform for Square Enix's mobile games-- presumably including Before Crisis:

Miyamoto: Square Enix is famous for Internet gaming. Well, we're planning to connect the DS to the Internet, so I'm wondering if Square Enix is thinking of anything in this vein.

Kawazu: I'm not sure if we can just bring our Internet games directly to the DS, since that would be rather difficult. And a lot of people are still saying that the barrier to playing network (games) is too high. But I'm hoping that the DS will help lower that threshold, by bringing mobile games to the DS.

So what does all of this mean? Is it possible that Square Enix is reconsidering their earlier statement, and plans to release Before Crisis in the United States after all? And is the Nintendo DS an alternative platform Square Enix is considering? I'm afraid we don't have any concrete answers at this point. As always, if you have any further information, feel free to send it in to us.

Posted by Reeve at 10:23 AM EST