Development
The official and authorized Final Fantasy VII game was developed by Square and released worldwide in 1997 for the PlayStation. At an unknown date, ShenZhen Nanjing Technology developed an unauthorized remake of the game, for the Famicom. The game was released in 2005, and both the box and manual make reference to Final Fantasy VII Advent Children as the game's full title, a statement supported by the game's manual. Despite the name on the box and cartridge, the title screen simply states "Final Fantasy VII," and the game itself includes no content or plot elements from the film. The game was developed for the SUBOR entertainment system, a clone of the Famicom, though can also be played on Famicom and Nintendo Entertainment System consoles through the use of an adapter.
Due to the Famicom's restricted hardware capabilities, the remake is entirely two-dimensional. Special compensation was made for some of the in-battle sprites such as Cloud Strife's, combining two 16x24 pixel sprites side-by-side instead of the usual single sprite to account for weapons such as Cloud's sword or Barret's gun. While most Japanese games use only 8x8-pixel hiragana or katakana fonts, and most Chinese games use 4-color 16x16-pixel tiles stored in dedicated CHR ROM pages, this game uses its own several-hundred 16x16-pixel monochrome font instead. The script itself is strewn in chunks across the code; at the beginning of each piece of text for dialog boxes is a three digit number preceded by an @-symbol, signifying which character portrait to display.
The cartridge's circuit board layout is unique compared to most Famicom games, using a single two megabyte PRG (program) ROM chips. A RAM chip instead of a ROM for the character graphics data, similar to the "UNROM" method used in some Nintendo games. As a result, the data is strewn across the PRG ROM in various banks. The cartridge features one 8-kilobyte battery-backed RAM chip, used for the game's single save slot. Many of the game's graphics are borrowed from other games, mostly other Final Fantasy titles and including Super NES graphics converted to four-color palettes used by the Famicom's hardware. Much of the game's music is borrowed from other games as well, in many cases shortened significantly to a few repeating notes.
Read more about this topic: Final Fantasy VII (Famicom)
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