An enthusiast spent $900 and combined 90 graphics cards to decrypt a lost Final Fantasy 7 spin-off

A lost piece of the Final Fantasy VII universe is playable again after an expensive and painstaking restoration effort. As first reported by Wccftech, hacker and game preservation specialist Yuvi brought Dirge of Cerberus Lost Episode -Final Fantasy VII- back to life.

That mouthful of a title belonged to a mobile spin-off of Dirge of Cerberus, which was itself a spin-off of Final Fantasy VII. The game launched in 2006 on the Amp'd Mobile network and became completely inaccessible once Square Enix shut down its servers in 2018.

In 2024, Yuvi got hold of all the game files on an encrypted SD card and began trying to decrypt them and get everything running again. On his blog, he wrote that he spent two years searching for the keys needed to decrypt the files, without success.

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.

According to Yuvi, the task demanded extremely labor-intensive work. Progress was being made, but he decided the process was moving too slowly.

I spun up well over 90 GPU Servers to crunch these numbers so fast, spanning from RTX 4090s, A4000s, A4500s, A5000s, RTX 6000s H200, and more. To the point I had over 125 active clients crunching away. All of these combined, I was putting out nearly 5,500 GKeys/s. That’s well over 70x as fast as my single 7900XTX could put out.

The graphics cards involved included RTX 4090, A4000, A4500, A5000, RTX 6000, H200, and others. Yuvi spent more than 900 dollars on the whole setup.

As a result, work that was projected to take several months wrapped up in a couple of days. A working copy of the game, thought lost since 2018, now exists. Yuvi posted footage of the game running on his YouTube channel.

Beyond Dirge of Cerberus Lost Episode, other lost mobile titles from the Final Fantasy series remain out there, including Before Crisis Final Fantasy VII. Square Enix itself has made attempts to revive elements from these forgotten games.

Parts of the Dirge of Cerberus story made their way into the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy. And during the Final Fantasy XIV fan festival in Berlin, game director Naoki Hamaguchi said the team plans to weave more lore from these spin-offs into Revelation, the trilogy final chapter.