How to Play Final Fantasy VII on iPhone

Square’s 1997 role-playing game follows Cloud Strife, a mercenary who joins the resistance group AVALANCHE in the city of Midgar. Their fight against the Shinra Electric Power Company turns into a chase across the world after Sephiroth, and the Materia you slot into weapons and armor decides your party’s magic and skills. If you own the game, Nagori lets you play all three discs on iPhone and iPad.

What you need

• An iPhone or iPad with iOS 17.6 or later.
• Nagori from the App Store. Your first game is free.
• Disc images of all three discs of your copy of Final Fantasy VII: .chd, .cue + .bin, .pbp, .iso or .img, or .zip or .rar archives containing them.

No BIOS file is needed.

How to play Final Fantasy VII on iPhone

1. Install Nagori from the App Store.
2. Name the disc images with their disc number, for example Final Fantasy VII (Disc 1).chd, (Disc 2) and (Disc 3), and copy them to the Files app, in iCloud Drive or On My iPhone.
3. Open Nagori, tap + and select all three discs. For .cue images, select each .cue together with its .bin files, or add the archives they came in.
4. Find Final Fantasy VII on the PS1 shelf, one game with its box art, and press Play.

Three discs, one game

The disc numbers in the file names tell Nagori that the discs belong together (Disk and CD work too, as does your own .m3u playlist). You get one case on the shelf and one memory card for all three discs.

• At the end of a disc, the game asks for the next one. Pause and choose Change Disc, and the story carries on. The row shows which disc is in, for example Disc 1 of 3, and each time you choose it, the next disc goes in.
• Play starts from Disc 1. If you then load a save from Disc 2 or 3, the game asks for that disc: choose Change Disc until it’s in. Continue puts you straight back on the disc you were playing.
• Your saves carry over. Every disc uses the same memory card, and a save state remembers which disc was in.

Controls

Final Fantasy VII plays on the D-pad, the face buttons and the shoulder buttons, all of which the Standard touch layout gives you. To run from a fight you hold L1 and R1 together, and on touch both sit in the top corners of the screen. Pause, open Settings → Edit Layout and drag them down to where your thumbs can hold both at once.

With a controller, every button sits where it did on the PlayStation pad, and the left stick works as the D-pad too. Press the left stick to open the pause menu.

Saves

Final Fantasy VII saves at save points and on the world map, to the game’s own memory card. Nagori adds:

• Quit any time. Leave the app in the middle of a dungeon and Continue puts you back exactly where you were.
• Save states. Pause and choose Save before a boss, and Load if the fight goes wrong. Nagori keeps your last four saves per game.
• Bring an old save. If you played on another emulator, import its .mcd, .mcr or .srm memory card file with Import Saves in the game’s menu.

Speed up Materia and levels

Materia grows with AP from battles, and mastering the best of it takes a lot of fights. Nagori’s Fast Forward runs the game at twice its speed, random battles and long summon animations included. It isn’t on screen by default:

• With a controller, assign Fast Forward to a spare button under Settings → Fast Forward.
• On touch, open Edit Layout and add the ×2 button to My Layout.

Best settings

• Quality: High, the default, renders the characters, battles and world map at twice the original resolution. Towns and dungeons are pre-rendered pictures, so they keep their original detail.
• Precise Geometry, in Advanced Settings, steadies the wobble of PS1 polygons in battles and on the world map.
• Screen Effects → CRT Screen adds scanlines that blend the characters into the backgrounds, as a 1990s TV did.

European (PAL) discs run at 50 Hz, a little slower than the 60 Hz American and Japanese versions, just as they did on the console.