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.

Here's the rundown from the Moguri Mod page:

• Upscale re-rendered of all backgrounds, aided by Stable Diffusion, mixed with the original result
• Full rework of battle backgrounds (re-render, re-stitching, re-mood)
• Redrawing of many layer edges
• Improvements of most lights
• Animated textures upscaled on Monsters/NPC
• Rework of some FMVs
• Many visual bugfixes (battles, backgrounds…)

While I don't have any comparisons of this 9.0 update vs the last version, this look at the Moguri 9 beside the unmodified PC port is striking:

There are also some neat experimental features available in this latest release, including new “toon” and “realism” shaders for character and enemy models. I don't know if I prefer either over the original's unmistakeable PS1 polygons, but it's pretty neat how dramatically they affect the look of the game without replacing the character models outright.

Moguri is installed from a Final Fantasy 9 mod launcher called Memoria, and as a modding platform it's actually been adding loads of features over the last three years that can now be paired with this latest AI upscale rework. Most notably:  

• High framerate options (60 fps, 90 fps, 120 fps)
• 16:10 and ultrawide support
• Custom fonts
• Built-in anti-aliasing

The mod couldn't magic up extra art for ultrawide displays where none existed, so you will still see black bars on the sides of the screen in some places if you're on a 21:9 monitor. But because the environments often scrolled and extended beyond the sides of the original 4:3 screen, there was more art to use in some places. It's wild looking at this old 4:3 game in ultrawide. The 16:10 support, meanwhile, is great for the Steam Deck, getting back a bit of that vertical screen space lost in the crop from the original resolution.

There's even an option to replace Final Fantasy 9's card game, Tetra Master, with the more popular and less random Triple Triad from Final Fantasy 8. Let me be clear, though: if you do this, we cannot be friends.

Memoria looks like it's still under active development, so even if this ends up being the final update to Moguri's AI upscale overhaul, it seems like Final Fantasy 9 modding as a whole will keep on trucking. At this rate, fans will have completely remade the game before Square Enix's own long-rumored remake finally appears.