Final Fantasy IX 
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PlayStation Plus is about to suffer a big Final Fantasy exodus, but that pales in comparison to the real tragedyApr 17, 2024 - VG247Hello 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? Read more Final Fantasy 14 producer teases "secret" Final Fantasy 9 connection in Dawntrail expansionMar 25, 2024 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunOn 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. Read more Are Final Fantasy 14 Dawntrail's bonus items hinting at a FF9 Remake? Maybe! But Yoshi-P says the reason behind them is a secret for nowMar 24, 2024 - VG247Final 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. Read more Final Fantasy 14’s new cyberpunk city has me hoping Dawntrail will shower more love on the series’ best entryJan 8, 2024 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunAmong the slew of reveals for Final Fantasy XIV during Fan Fest Tokyo last weekend was a new town players will visit during upcoming expansion Dawntrail. While a new corner of Eorzea to explore is exciting by itself, the cyberpunk city has added to my hope that the MMO is set to shower a bit more love on the best Final Fantasy game. That’s right: Final Fantasy IX. Read more Final Fantasy 14’s new cyberpunk city has me hoping Dawntrail will shower more love on the series’ best entryJan 8, 2024 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunAmong the slew of reveals for Final Fantasy XIV during Fan Fest Tokyo last weekend was a new town players will visit during upcoming expansion Dawntrail. While a new corner of Eorzea to explore is exciting by itself, the cyberpunk city has added to my hope that the MMO is set to shower a bit more love on the best Final Fantasy game. That’s right: Final Fantasy IX. Read more An incredible must-listen new Final Fantasy orchestra album hits stores next weekJul 27, 2023 - VG247Video game music has been garnering more recognition in recent years, but despite that surge of interest there are still few series’ that garner as much attention or praise in the musical space as Final Fantasy - and now, fans have another example to demonstrate exactly why in the form of a new recording of orchestral arrangements from various titles in the series. Next week, Final Symphony 2 will land on all major streaming platforms, plus be available for purchase via Bandcamp. For those willing to lay down some cash rather than just stream, pre-orders begin today. Final Symphony is one of a few different FF-themed concert series’ - but it’s arguably the most ‘grown up’ of the bunch. Where the ‘Distant Worlds’ concert series and most of Square Enix’s in-house orchestra releases feature arranged performances of individual pieces from the Final Fantasy series, Final Symphony presents lengthy, winding orchestral suites that attempt to retell the story of the game - or evoke its overall mood - over the course of as much as twenty-five minutes. Read more Final Fantasy 14 had such a spike in players that Square Enix temporarily ran out of digital copiesJul 12, 2021 - PC GamerOutside of the old guard, Final Fantasy 14 is probably the great success story in contemporary MMOs: continually updated with expansions that delight the playerbase and revitalise its world, telling shared stories that feel meaningful in a way few MMOs manage, and attracting more and more players through word-of-mouth. And this weekend, it got so popular that Square Enix somehow ran out of digital copies... Read more.Final Fantasy 9 is becoming an animated seriesJun 21, 2021 - PC GamerSquare Enix's tale of a plucky thief who kidnaps a princess and then accidentally saves the multiverse is coming to the screen: An animated series based on Final Fantasy 9 is being developed by French Cyber Group Studios in collaboration with Square Enix... Read more.UpdateAug 6, 2020 - Community AnnouncementsThe following elements have been adjusted: ・The size of the battle command window. ・The BGM starting halfway through when returning from the Battle or Tetra Master screens. In addition to the above changes, other minor bugs have been fixed.Final Fantasy IX is 20 years old today and its soundtrack is still absolutely bangin'Jul 7, 2020 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunIt’s Final Fantasy IX‘s 20th anniversary today and what better way to celebrate one of the best Final Fantasy games ever made than to have a good old-fashioned sing-song? I’m not just talking about bellowing out the game’s celebrated end credits theme “Melodies Of Life” either. I mean a proper celebration of one of Final Fantasy IX’s enduring legacies: its superb, nay, one might almost say legendary soundtrack. Because let’s face it, even 20 years on, this is still one of the all-time greats of video game soundtracks, and arguably one of composer Nobuo Uematsu’s best bodies of work. So happy birthday, Final Fantasy IX. Here are nine of my favourite tunes to celebrate. (more…) Microsoft announces 50+ titles for Xbox Game PassNov 14, 2019 - EurogamerXbox Game Pass really is the gift that keeps on giving. Tonight at X019, Microsoft has announced more than 50 new titles headed to the service in the coming months. From a collection of Final Fantasy games and The Witcher 3, to indie gems like My Friend Pedro and Phogs, it looks like there's a little something for everyone on the way - and a bunch of new games have even arrived on Game Pass today. And, separately, Phil Spencer has said a cross-platform Final Fantasy 14 is coming. Read more Pretty much every Final Fantasy soundtrack is now on Spotify and Apple MusicJun 6, 2019 - EurogamerForget any announcements ahead of E3 - the biggest news of the week is soundtracks to pretty much every Final Fantasy game are on Spotify and Apple Music. The collection is pretty comprehensive - there's every mainline Final Fantasy game, several PLUS albums (bonus or unreleased tracks for games like 9, 11, 13 and 13-2), expansions for MMOs 11 and 14 and a variety of spin-offs, from Crisis Core to Tactics and more recent efforts such as Dissidia, Brave Exvius and World of Final Fantasy. Even the Spirits Within is on there, for those pining to hear the score of an underappreciated cinema classic. Read more Final Fantasy 9 remaster now on Switch and Xbox OneFeb 14, 2019 - EurogamerSquare Enix's remastered version of Final Fantasy 9 is now available for Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and on PC via the Windows 10 PC store. Final Fantasy 7 also now has a Switch release date, of 26th March. There's a lot of love for FF9 and its classic fantasy style. It's an homage of sorts to the series' old heyday. Also, its lead character is named after Zinedine Zidane. Read more Modders are using AI to upscale pre-rendered PS1 backgrounds with phenomenal resultsJan 25, 2019 - PC GamerFinal Fantasy 9 with AI-upscaled backgrounds and a light Reshade mod, via kennybones on Qhimm forums. PC modders have a history of fixing and improving ports of Japanese games, and the latest case is one of the coolest, most exciting applications of technology to old games I've ever seen. We recently wrote about how some people are using neural networks to upscale the backgrounds of Final Fantasy 7 , and in just a few weeks these projects have made enormous gains in quality and complexity, and for more than just Final Fantasy 7. Anyone can use these tools, and as a result we're at the start of what feels like a renaissance for PlayStation-era 2D art. A little background: When 3D was in its infancy, PlayStation game developers compensated for the hardware's shortcomings by pairing 3D character models with pre-rendered 2D backgrounds. Many of them, from series like Final Fantasy, are still stunning today: Detailed, stylized, beautiful works of art you could walk through as you went on an adventure. But the art files on those discs were naturally low resolution, and sloppy archival meant that when Square Enix finally ported games like Final Fantasy 8 and 9 to PC in "HD" form, it didn't have the original art files to use for modern high-res displays. Square simply upscaled the low-res files from the original games to 1080p and called it a day. The results weren't great. The backgrounds can be blurry or oversharpened—just like if you opened a jpeg in Photoshop and tried to blow it up to four times the original size. But what if ~the magic of AI~ could analyze the image and more intelligently resize it? That's what ESRGAN, or Enhanced Super Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks, are all about. OK, that name is a mouthful, and I'm not about to pretend I fully understand how it works. But there's a whole field of study around the concept of perceptual super resolution , and competing AI implementations for how to upscale images with the best results. ESRGAN is one of the most successful. Animated gif comparison of a normal upscale to ESRGAN. Via kingdomakrillic.tumblr.com. Game fans have latched onto this technology and are dialing in how to best use it for low-resolution background images. Here's a blog that walks you through how to install ESRGAN on Windows and shows off a few results. This forum thread compiles even more examples of the AI applied to different game backgrounds and textures. The most exciting project to me right now is for Final Fantasy 9, one of my favorite games and one with phenomenal art that doesn't look too hot upscaled to 1080p. Modder Ze PilOt is using this technique to upscale FF9's backgrounds and other textures, which is much more involved than upscaling a jpeg: As he tweeted in December, "every frame of the animation is on a different layer. Lighting is mixed with the background. I need to separate all these frames into...I want to live in this 3D recreation of Final Fantasy 9's LindblumJan 18, 2019 - PC GamerThe original screenshot and art used as a reference. Final Fantasy 9's Lindblum might be my favorite city in all of videogames. It's a grand capital perched on a mountain, with an impractically giant gate in front for airships to come and go. Its buildings are all strange shapes, often jutting out at odd angles or stacked atop one another against the mountainside. It's a warm, happy city that's sadly relegated to Final Fantasy 9's low-res pre-rendered backgrounds. Except, now, for one specific part of the city: the outside of Tantalus headquarters, which has been painstakingly recreated in Unity by artist Fabian Denter on Polycount. I've been following Denter's work for a few months as he's posted regular updates about this project. You can follow along with the process in a sequence of posts. It starts with basic geometry of the foreground area, which includes the Tantalus building and the buildings on either side and a sidewalk and stairs. By the second post, seeing a 3D recreation of the sidewalk's railing, I already wanted to be able to play around in this 3D reimagining of FF9. Denter recreated some of the textures from the original scene, including this great poster of Lindblum's ruler, king Cid Fabool. (He's been turned into an oglop, if that wasn't obvious). Check out how good the recreation looks! Tantalus HQ has been slowly coming along since October, and at this point is nearly finished. Denter hasn't posted an update since mid-December, but I expect he'll be back to completely finish it off soon enough. There's not much missing beyond a few background details and a Final Fantasy 9 character for scale. While modern Unreal Engine 4 remakes of classic games like Ocarina of Time are a dime a dozen, they're mostly garish and overly realistic, ignoring the art style of the original work. Higher detail doesn't necessarily make something better. Denter's work is different, I think, because it's deliberately trying to recapture the game's original look in 3D, right down to the camera angle and textures and colors. It'd be impractical to create the whole game world this way, of course, but it sure makes me happy to look at. Check out the model coming together piece-by-piece below. The best JRPGs on PCFeb 26, 2018 - PC GamerNot long ago it was unthinkable that Japanese RPGs would be ported to PC, much less that some of the best JRPGs ever made would find their way to our platform. Japanese RPGs actually have a rich and mostly forgotten PC history, and that's finally come back around. Today, you can play blockbusters like Final Fantasy on PC, cult favorites like The Legend of Heroes, and even western games made in the style of Japanese RPGs. We've collected our favorites below, with consideration of how they look and play on PC. That means, for example, that the ugly PC port of all-time great Final Fantasy 6 isn't on this list, and we didn't include other emulated classics, like Sega's Phantasy Star 4 or Shining Force. Here's our guide to the best JRPGs on PC—and not even half of them are Final Fantasy games. Final Fantasy 12 The Zodiac Age Developer: Square Enix | Link: Humble | CDKeys Tom S: The best Final Fantasy, obviously. What do you mean Vaan is an earnest, irritating child and the plot makes no sense—have you met Tidus from Final Fantasy 10? I’ve never really been into Final Fantasy for the plot anyway; I’m in it for the spectacle, and I love Final Fantasy 12’s world and the weird band of heroes you assemble. That’s the main reason I persisted long enough to properly engage with the gambit system and, oh boy, it’s a beauty. I love RPGs that allow any character to become anything you want. I can arm Vaan with a greatsword and watch him get pummeled forever on the front line of every fight. I can develop a team of four attack mages if I want. That would be dumb, probably, but the point is I’m free to make my own bizarre mistakes and break the game in cool new ways. The fast-forward command in Zodiac Age is a blessing too. I wish more games let me buzz through the nonsense to get to the good stuff—in this case, a combat system that allows for a ton of experimentation and whole deserts full of T-Rexes to test it on. Basically what I'm saying is don't play Final Fantasy 12 if you want to be able to enjoy other games. Wes: Don't listen to the naysayers who claim Final Fantasy 12 plays itself—its combat system is brilliantly customizable, letting you take precise control over your party in critical moments and automate the busy work with super specific AI commands. It's way more satisfying to put together intricate rulesets that tell your party members to cast haste when there's MP to spare, heal when you drop below a certain HP threshold, and target the enemy you know needs to go down first. It's like a strategy game layered on top of traditional JRPG combat, and just one of many ways Final Fantasy 12 is brilliant. Another way: an all-time great localization by Alexander O. Smith and Joseph Reeder, which gives FF12's dialogue far more flavor than your typical JRPG. A voice cast of British stage actors are a vast improvement over familia...Why the hell do they have mouths: a Final Fantasy 7 PC retrospectiveApr 25, 2017 - PC Gamer I'm obsessed with the mouths in Final Fantasy 7. If you first played Square's groundbreaking 3D Final Fantasy on a PC, sometime after 1998, you might be thinking: the characters have mouths. So what? But if you played Final Fantasy 7 on the PlayStation, you're more likely thinking: Wait a minute. Mouths? What mouths? On the PlayStation, the lumpy-limbed character models of Cloud and Barret and the gang had big anime eyes, square fists and absolutely no mouths. The more detailed battle models did, of course, but out on the field? Nope. But when FF7 came to PC a year after the PlayStation, suddenly there they were: little mouths, in the form of a terse line or a comically large, gaping black O. Why are they there? Who added them, and who decided they should be there? I started searching for the answers to those questions after looking into the history of the PC ports of Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 8, two rare, early examples of console games being ported to the PC. Because Eidos's name was on each box, I'd always assumed that the British company had ported Square's games itself. But after coming across this Gamefaqs thread and doing a little digging into Final Fantasy 7's PC credits, I realized that all of the development staff had worked at Squaresoft USA. So I set out on a quest to learn more about Final Fantasy 7's infamously quirky PC port: what it was like to port an early PlayStation game to PC, why new localization errors were introduced while others were fixed, and mostly, why the hell Cloud has a mouth. It didn't go well at first. Top: No mouths on PS1. Bottom: A comical O and a . Image via TheLifeStream.net. "I'm not really sure," programmer Jay Fong wrote to me over email when I asked why the character models have mouths on the PC. Fong works at Obsidian now, and his gig as a software engineer on Final Fantasy 7 was his first real job in the games industry. "I recall we worked on the port for just a little over one year. After the project, I was promoted to a Senior Software Engineer position and when it was decided to go ahead and port FF8 to PC, I served as Project Lead. Some of the programmers had left right around the time when work on FF8 PC began so we didn't have as large a programming team as we did on FF7. But we also had more experience porting the FF PlayStation code base." Total strikeout on the question that mattered most, but Fong still had plenty to tell me about the process of porting the Final Fantasy games to PC. Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 8 for PC were developed at Square Soft, Inc. in Costa Mesa, California. The original development was done by Square Co, Ltd. back in Japan. According to Fong, on FF7 they had a team of eight programmers. There are nine software engineers listed in the Mobygames credits , though as Fong explained later, at least one engineer joined partway through the project. On FF8, Fong says it was o...FFIX is OUT NOW!Apr 14, 2016 - Community AnnouncementsAll Aboard the Hilda Garde everyone! It's time to return to Gaia as Final Fantasy IX is out on Steam right now! Relive this classic Final Fantasy adventure with Zidane and his crew with a bunch of new features including: ・ Steam Achievements ・ 7 game boosters including high speed and no encounter modes. ・ Autosaves ・ High-definition movies and character models. Whether you want to enjoy FFIX for the classic gameplay or use the in game boosters to experience the heartfelt story again, the choice is yours! We hope you enjoy Final Fantasy IX on Steam and do let us know if you run into any problems! Be sure to follow us: Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/FinalFantasy Twitter - https://www.Twitter.com/FinalFantasyFFIX is OUT NOW!Apr 14, 2016 - Community AnnouncementsAll Aboard the Hilda Garde everyone! It's time to return to Gaia as Final Fantasy IX is out on Steam right now! Relive this classic Final Fantasy adventure with Zidane and his crew with a bunch of new features including: ・ Steam Achievements ・ 7 game boosters including high speed and no encounter modes. ・ Autosaves ・ High-definition movies and character models. Whether you want to enjoy FFIX for the classic gameplay or use the in game boosters to experience the heartfelt story again, the choice is yours! We hope you enjoy Final Fantasy IX on Steam and do let us know if you run into any problems! Be sure to follow us: Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/FinalFantasy Twitter - https://www.Twitter.com/FinalFantasyNow Available on Steam - FINAL FANTASY IX, 20% off!Apr 14, 2016 - Product ReleaseFINAL FANTASY IX is Now Available on Steam and is 20% off!* Selling over five million copies since its release in 2000, FINAL FANTASY IX proudly returns on Steam! Now you can relive the adventures of Zidane and his crew on PC ! *Offer ends April 21 at 10AM Pacific Time
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