Final Fantasy VII had 32 whole bits at its disposal. How well does it hold up with a quarter of that processing power?
When Final Fantasy made the jump to 3D in its seventh installment, it brought some pretty substantial changes to a formula that had worked well for the previous six games. Unsurprisingly, somebody had the idea to overhaul Final Fantasy VII to an oldschool 8-bit format. The bad news is that this happened a long time ago, and wasn’t very good – bootleggers released a Final Fantasy VII demake on an unlicensed Famicom cartridge in China, but the balance was severely off and some critical scenes didn’t make it in. A more recent effort has saved the project, though, overhauling the original bootleg into a respectable 8-bit adventure.
ROM hacker Lugia2009 spent four years rebuilding the Final Fantasy VII Famicom bootleg from the ground up. While the original demake re-used many art assets from Final Fantasy III, Lugia created new pixel illustrations based off of the PlayStation game’s renders. The new version includes a more complete story, updated music and art, and a slew of other improvements.
Lugia has now finished the new and improved version of this eight year old demake of a 16 year old game. He’s just getting warmed up, though: his next project is an overhaul of a NES bootleg of Pokemon Yellow, and he’s got plans to touch up a NES bootleg of Resident Evil.
Source: Destructoid
