This is my full 2026 English translation for the game. It's the definitive way to play and took me about 3 years to create with work on and off. It works on both Original 3DS and New 3DS consoles. Enjoy!
This update project has been in the works solo development wise by me on and off for the last year with me completely reverse engineering and coding the game to implement many, many, many needed quality of life improvements to better get this NES Demake inline with the true source material of the original PS1 version. Currently this update goes all the way up through leaving the Mythril Mines on the World Map after crossing over to the Junon area. I just wanted to get a playable build out there in the wild for people to playtest and enjoy with the excitement for the updates to come which should be much faster now that I have decompiled all of the code base and understand what I'm working with. I also want to take this time to give full credit to the history work on this FF7 Demake. It started off as a NES Chinese game bootleg released by SHENZHEN NANJING. Then went on to become a massive 4 year long Rom Hacking passion project of Lugia2009 and his team of contributors Lindblum, Chpexo, FlamePurge, Dizzy9, Tsumai, Dr. Mario, Sirasu, keithisgood and Darkmew5. It's thanks to their hard work that we had the polished and happily praised V1.1 game update release that brought the original Chinese game bootleg up to standard. And now I'm doing the same myself as a solo dev to continue to improve the game beyond that standard with these 2026 updates.
"This project sounds cool. But DrgnMaster what all does it really change and update?" I'm glad you asked, let me list a few examples.
MAIN CHANGES FROM V1.1:
- Adjusted the games encounter rate to feel more balanced and less overwhelming. (Yes no more getting into a battle every 3 steps)
- Added new custom enemy encounter pools for specific story areas. (Each area now has it's respective enemies only, like the PS1 original, no more random enemies)
- Improved enemy variety so different maps feel more distinct.
- Preserved and improved key music/event cues while also restoring the 3 cut songs from the game "Trail of Blood", "JENOVA" and "Attack on Shinra".
- Fixed various found text typos throughout the game.
- Removed enemy encounter logic from any locations that shouldn't have it.
That is just some of the many big improvements that I have been working on and done for the game. I'd love for this project to inspire other devs to want to contribute to this project further, potentially leading to more massive improvements or additions like adding Yuffie and Vincent into the game or even expanding the story out to fill in some of the missing jumped gaps from the original game.