This NES port of Final Fantasy VII is far from your average rip-off. It’s the work of a gifted group of Chinese programmers, who utilized revolutionary techniques to squeeze a relatively complete version of the PSone classic onto a cartridge that plays on ancient 8-bit hardware.

Cinnamon Pirate explains:

First off, Final Fantasy VII is the only NES ROM I have ever seen to have its own several-hundred character 16×16 font. Most Japanese games are written in 8×8 hiragana or katakana only, and Chinese games typically waste CHR banks dedicated to 64 characters each, and optimize the banks for literally every text window in the game.

Some areas of the game are missing, such as Yuffie/Vincent and Chokobo racing, but just remember even the gifted coders at Nintendo couldn’t achieve Super Mario World on 8-bit hardware.

There’s a ROM dump, a heap of screenshots and a detailed review of the game (and the technology behind it) at the link below.

From polygons to pixels: Final Fantasy VII [Cinnamon Pirate via BB Gadgets via Kotaku]

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This entry was posted by Tim Hanlon on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 6:13 am and is filed under Classic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.