Damn, from what you are saying I would say its would be fair to guess that even with the Virtuos port fixing the platform specific rendering issues for the shaders, that we still would most likely not get it unless Square Enix somehow forgot to stop a developer from putting the files back in and porting them for us with the tools SE provided them.

Yeah, I saw the Aerith Garb on the US and EU PSN stores and assumed you could still buy it, but apparently not. We can still get it from the servers though thanks to the PS3 homebrew scene backing it up. But in Japan we actually got it as a code at the back of the V Jumps Books Master Guide for the game. The book was only around $11 but the book sash had the Aerith Garb and weapons as a big selling point for the book. So I can imagine why the Japanese player base would be annoyed at SE for doing what they did.

Its unfortunate how everything went down. And sad that we will most likely never get it for PC. This reminds me so much of the FFVII modding scene and the original modders who reverse engineered the backgrounds on PC and just vanished, so we never got the same luxury for the likes of FFVIII.

Anyway thanks for clarifying.

Originally posted by Krisan Thyme:

Long story short, the Aerith Garb model isn't in the PC release. A lot of the data for it was culled for this release actually, though the rest of that was never the problem. It's really easy to reconstruct the item data and its properties, the problem is solely the model alone. The consoles use a different revision of the model format than the PC releases do, they're also in a different endian to make it a tad more annoying too.

In order to get the Aerith Garb, the model format needs to be fully reverse engineered.. And I never made much headway on that personally, unfortunately. I was hoping someone else would, but everyone who cares about this series enough and has the skillset for it, has never made much progress either.. and after all these years it's ever more unlikely anyone ever will.

Thanks for the reply, This should put an end to the questions for now. Kinda weird that the Aerith Garb was the one garb from the dlc that they didn't include in the PC release or just straight up culled it. I wonder what the story behind that could have been.

I think the only thing that could change things as they stand now would be if the Virtuos ports of the trilogy adds anything new in terms of the Garb. But we might never even get to see those ports due to Microsoft dropping support for the Windows 10 store in favour of Steam which already has the games, and the Xbox One having the trilogy on back compat. Unless Sony wants to shell out a chunk of cash to get Square to push the trilogy over the line to port it to PS4 then it won't happen. (The updates from SteamDB show the test builds for Virtuos were from 2019, so they would have been working on PS4, but would still run fine on PS5, but again another issue that went against these ports).

As for the big endian/little endian issue, aren't their ways to convert between the two?

Originally posted by gordonfreeman01:

There are sites allowing to download PS3 DLC packages straight off official Sony servers (they can't be used on unmodded consoles without a proper license from the store but the package can be extracted). If it is for comparing the files, though I can't link to the site here, it is entirely possible to compare the existing PC vs equivalent PS3 DLC files. If this would be helpful please PM me.

I'm pretty sure that Krisan Thyme already looked into all this years ago [forum.xentax.com].
And as far as I can tell with the fact that be have this [www.patreon.com]means that somewhere along the line he figured this all out and was able to convert the dlc over to the pc release. I have no idea why the Aerith garb wasn't able to be done. I have asked him that, but he seems to be MIA at the moment.