Final Fantasy 9 is a playstation 1 game which I still play through every couple of years-
with my latest playthrough I decided to do it with the Moguri Mod, which uses AI to upscale
the game’s graphics. I’ll be showing comparisons throughout this video- but don’t be too
quick to judge, since later on through the video I’ll be explaining a lot of the things
you might be noticing are a bit ‘unusual’ about these comparisons. All will be explained!
But first: Final Fantasy 9. As far as Playstation 1 graphics goes, there
isn’t a game from this era that has stood the test of time better. The pre-rendered
backgrounds and cutscenes, as well as the high-quality character models, made it a good-looking
game for its time, and has also made it one of the most effective candidates for AI upscaling.
Which is where the Moguri Mod comes in. It is trained on the game’s art style which
has helped it to work miracles on the low-resolution backgrounds in the game, and on the textures
of its 3D models. These backdrops have been AI-upscaled, then manually retouched and hand-cut
out to preserve sharp edges around foreground areas as the 3D character models pass behind.
It’s a major improvement, though the limitations can still be seen. It’s kind of funny that
at the time, the backgrounds looked great compared to the blobby 3D models, but on a
modern high-resolution screen it’s now the 3D models which look crisp and clear, and
the backdrops which seem to have aged more poorly!
And the mod doesn’t just upscale things- it uses widescreen whenever the backdrops
allow for it. This does lead to some odd situations from time to time where just one side of the
screen is black, or where you can see characters hidden off the side, waiting for their moment
to jump on-screen during a particular piece of dialogue. You can disable widescreen if
you want to, though I preferred to keep it on.
The one more questionable change has been to the pre-rendered movies- they’ve been
converted from 15 to 30 FPS. Problem is, they don’t always remain at that, dropping back
down to 15 again whenever there’s any fast-paced action. I understand why they made this decision-
they’ve chosen to minimise framerate conversion artifacts- since a lot can change between
the frames of a 15 fps video! But I think I’d have preferred a few more artifacts
than the regular, distracting jumps between the two framerates. In some cutscenes it happens
so frequently that it would have looked better at a fixed at 15 throughout. There is the
option to disable 30 FPS, so I can’t complain too much.
Out of curiosity I converted the intro animation to 60 FPS using DAIN, and you can see what
a mess it makes of the rain and foam. It has no problem with larger objects, like the ship,
and the general moving of camera angles. But it doesn’t know what to do with smaller
details which may only be on the screen for a single frame! The truth is that fast-moving
particle effects, especially when at just 15 fps, are well beyond the capabilities of
any AI-based framerate converter available right now. Too much changes between every
frame. For my playthrough, I was playing it on a
1440p screen, but ran it at 2880p for some super-smooth looking anti-aliasing. It looked
crisp and clear at these settings. It’s a real pleasure to experience this game at
a high resolution, since even with the limited processing power available at the time, the
character models were held back by the blobby nature of TV screens. You could identify characters
by their outline and colour palette, but it’s only with today’s high resolution displays
that you can see oglop antennas, Blank’s patchwork appearance and the abomination that
is Cinna. But hey, at least he washes up every morning.
Let’s talk you through a few comparisons and observations. Firstly, ignore the text.
I chose to enable the old-fashioned pixelated style, because I prefer it for the nostalgia-
you can choose which to use with the Moguri mod, so it’s not that it forces you to use
a more pixelated text. Second, the movies don’t seem to be upscaled
at all- merely converted to higher framerates where possible.
Third, a lot of these comparisons will appear to be lopsided, but this is only because I’m
lining them up for comparisons’ sake. Just know that the Moguri mod is almost always
better than the original, thanks to its widescreen support which will often show you more of
the screen than the vanilla game will. It really was lazy of the PC port to ignore widescreen
and to fill it with these low res bars instead. And lastly, these comparisons aren’t…
entirely fair. Take this image, for instance. Look at the plates in the foreground. I don’t
care how clever the AI upscaling is, there’s no way it would be able to separate the plates
from each other when the original is such a big blurry mess. The reason it manages to
is because the upscaling isn’t based on the PC version of the game. This is all explained
in this making of document. Although worded politely, it sounds like the PC version of
the game just stretched then denoised the background images, losing a lot of the original
details in the process. The Moguri team decided instead to base their
upscaling on the Playstation originals. Even these were often heavily compressed, downsized
and dithered to be able to fit into the Playstation’s 1 MB of memory. They extracted these images
and ran a more delicate denoiser to remove the dithering artifacts.
Then it was onto the AI upscaling. But first, it needed training! What they did was to find
any original artwork they could find for the game. Here’s some of the original artworks
which have been posted online by the artists who worked on the original game. Unfortunately,
a lot of the original stuff has been lost over the years, so the Moguri team complemented
this with artwork of a similar style from games like the Witcher, Tomb Raider and Dragon
Age. They then used the trained AI upscaler to
upscale all of the game’s assets, which took about half a day to do, but which was
done more than once if the resulting images weren’t considered to be good enough. The
result being the finest quality version of Final Fantasy 9 ever seen!
And it stretches beyond the 2D backgrounds; you can see that every bit of the game has
been lovingly reworked. The details on 3D characters appear sharper and higher-res.
The battle scenes seem crisper. Their backgrounds, no longer pixelated. And any transparent 2D
details have been significantly improved and more finely cut out. Even Zidane’s smile
on the savegame slot has been reworked, and his plastic surgery, undone. Which is a bit
unnerving, really. It’s incredible work what they’ve done.
They have stuck faithfully to the art style and content of the original game, and I wonder
if more could be squeezed out of these upscales if they based it on the original high-resolution
artwork for the game. For instance, I got this image of the castle and just ran it through
gigapixel and it produced an extremely sharp, crisp image with arguably more detail on things
than the Moguri Mod’s upscale of the original Playstation 1 background did.
But is it better? Maybe not. It has deviated from the original game’s art style. It looks
artificial and upscaled. I… think I prefer it, but it could lead to a more disjointed,
less consistent art-style across the game. So I respect the Moguri Mod’s faithful recreation
of the source material. Because in my playthrough, it was never distracting. It never felt ‘artificial’.
It just looked like I remember the original game looking, back when it first came out.
And that’s the highest praise I can give. Looking at them now, the high resolution renders
for the game sadden me a little bit. 20 years ago, these looked perfect. Photo-realistic!
But at high enough resolutions you can start to see the limitations of the render, like
the lack of ambient occlusion, the untextured grass and the slightly artificial, disconnected
look to everything. I don’t like seeing flaws in what I consider to be a timeless
masterpiece! I wish they kept better records at the time,
perhaps allowing us to re-render these scenes at higher resolutions and settings instead
of needing to rely on clever upscaling trickery.
Next time I play through this game, I won’t hesitate to use the Moguri Mod again. It’s
a welcome extra for those replaying it, and pretty much essential for those who are checking
the game out for the first time- else they get put off by the low resolution nature of
it all. Final Fantasy 9 is comfort gaming for me.
Each area is like Christmas as I collect all the items, learn all the skills and experience
all the minigames again, but in an even more efficient fashion than in the last playthrough
I had of the game a few years ago. Would I want them to remake the game like
they have with Final Fantasy 7? Yeah why not. It would be a bonus extra. But I won’t deny
that Final Fantasy 7 needed a remake a lot more than FF9 did- which always looked much
better, as it came near the end of the console’s lifespan where the developers were finally
comfortable with what the machine was capable of.
Check out the mod in the description, as well as a link to a collection of high-resolution
renders of the game’s environments.