FINAL FANTASY IX News

The beauty and tragedy of Final Fantasy 9 is that it came at the tail end of the PlayStation 1's life and featured some of the finest 2D environmental art ever put in an RPG… all rendered at 240p. Square Enix's official PC port didn't do the best job upscaling the highly detailed backgrounds to modern resolutions, but along came the Moguri Mod, an AI upscale treatment that did a better job of preserving some of the art while blowing it up by approximately a billion pixels. Three years after I thought we'd gotten the final version of Moguri Mod, it's now been given a complete overhaul, including every background being re-rendered using a different learning model...
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As rumours about a Final Fantasy 9 remake continue to swirl, Final Fantasy 14's Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yoshida says one thing's for sure: he's not making it.

Back in March, some Final Fantasy 9 themed items were revealed to be coming to Final Fantasy 14 alongside the MMO's latest expansion, Dawntrail. He wouldn't say why there will be Final Fantasy 9 items, out of all the games, only that the reason behind them is a secret. With it being Not-E3 season and all, there's of course been more discussions about those Final Fantasy 9 remake rumours, but Square Enix hasn't announced anything just yet. However, during a recent Final Fantasy 14 Letter from the Producer, Yoshi-P outright denied that he's involved in the project, and also said he knows nothing about it.

Important to note that this isn't him saying there is one - he's just saying he's not making one. To be clear, the reason he's addressing the rumour at all is because of fan comments saying that they wouldn't want him to handle it because he might change the game's combat into real-time action as opposed to turn based. However, even if he isn't working on it, he did say "If we were remaking FF9 people would complain we'd turn it into an action game! But I'd make it turn-based," so at least you don't have to worry if Yoshi-P suddenly does end up remaking it for whatever reason.

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Hello there, a whole bunch of games are set to leave Playstation Plus next month. There are 25 of them, to be exact, and some pretty big names are on that list. A smorgasbord of Final Fantasy titles, for example. Though, that's not what you should be most concerned about. Monster Jam Steel Titans 2 is leaving too, and to be honest, I don't think the service will ever recover from that.

First, the rest of them (thanks, PushSquare). If you're itching to play Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy 8, Final Fantasy 9, Final Fantasy 10/10-2, Final Fantasy 12: The Zodiac Age, and Final Fantasy 15: Royal Edition, all of which I can confirm are Final Fantasy games, you'll have to do so prior to May 21.

Look, I know Final Fantasy titles have some amazing stories and characters in them, and you're now looking Monster Jam Steel Titans 2's Metacritic and saying to yourself 'this looks really mid, even for a racing game'. But does FF have Grave Digger in it? Does it let you pop a wheelie or do a flip in a big, silly toy that's designed to look like a big bull's head, or an alien spaceship, or a zombie?

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On top of announcing the release date for Final Fantasy 14's next expansion, Dawntrail, at PAX East over the weekend, producer Yoshi-P set Final Fantasy tongues wagging even further by mentioning the words "Final Fantasy 9" and "secret" in the same sentence. Many of the pre-order and special edition bonus items players can get with the upcoming Dawntrail expansion are suspiciously FF9-themed, you see, but when pointing this out to PAX-goers, Yoshi-P said "the reason is a secret" for now, sparking fresh rumours about Square Enix's supposed Final Fantasy IX remake/remaster.

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Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail finally has a release date, but some Final Fantasy 9-themed items are raising some eyebrows.

Yesterday at PAX East, Square Enix finally confirmed that Final Fantasy 14's next expansion, Dawntrail, will be arriving July 2, a week after Elden Ring's Shadow of the Erdtree (which yes, does seem like it was on purpose). That's exciting enough for Final Fantasy fans, but one of the more subtly interesting parts shown off by Square Enix is that Dawntrail will feature a number of Final Fantasy 9-themed items. One such item is a pre-order bonus of a wind-up Zidane minion, and there are other in-game bonus items like a wind-up Garnet Minion, and an Ark Mount, all from Final Fantasy 9.

During the panel, producer and director Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yoshida didn't ignore the inclusion of the Final Fantasy 9 items, but he did play coy about them, saying "You may have noticed a lot of Final Fantasy 9 references here… but the reason is a secret." Now, that obviously raises some questions. What secret could there possible be behind such a secret? There could always be a Final Fantasy 9-themed raid planned for the expansion that hasn't been revealed yet. Or, perhaps that long-rumoured remake is finally actually happening.

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