A lost piece of Final Fantasy VII history has just been preserved, thanks to a group of researchers of Japanese feature phones.
As reported on Twitter by RockmanCosmo, the demo of Dirge of Cerberus: Lost Episode, which came pre-installed on DoCoMo p903i feature phone devices, has now been successfully preserved, thanks to the individual xyz.
It even runs on Doja 5.1 SDK, with @m3M0RyHuN73R, usernameak, @XLeonier, and @XerShadowTail helping to get the game running on the emulator. As RockmanCosmo notes, the emulation isn't perfect for the moment (with the game still suffering from audio issues and not exactly running unevenly), but hopefully, when an improved Doja emulator comes along (like SquirrelJME), these issues will be a thing of the past.
Dirge of Cerberus: Lost Episode came out in 2006 in North America and 2007 in Japan and was a midquel to the Final Fantasy VII sequel Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII for the PS2. It was a collaboration between Square Enix and a London studio named Ideaworks3D (who also worked on the N-Gage and Pocket PC ports of Tomb Raider). The demo apparently includes a fairly large portion of the game, but there is apparently already a lead on someone who potentially has access to the full version of the game on a p903i device.
You can check out some footage of the demo of the game below. For more information and updates, you should join the Kahvibreak Discord server: