This year marks the 25th anniversary of Final Fantasy IX and Square Enix is being uncharacteristically attentive toward the game that was once the series’ black sheep. The celebrations will last the entire year, with special fan events and special artwork and figurines, among other fun new things. There’s really only one thing on everyone’s minds, though: Will the long-rumored remake finally be confirmed?
That was the big question two months ago, anyway. It’s September and Square Enix continues to pretend like the internet hasn’t been asking the same thing every day since July. Last week, the company’s official blog shared the latest in the anniversary agenda: stories about how Final Fantasy 9 has impacted its developers’ lives.
How fascinating. How fun. How infuriating. Not even the faintest recognition of the torment we endure. They taunt the hungry thousands. “Let them eat South Gate Bundt Cake,” I imagine Final Fantasy brand manager Yoshinori Kitase smirked before clicking Publish on the post (I pretend he’s the one that writes them).
And so that day I declared: Let my fantasies of experiencing Alexandria in full 3D be final. So what if Square Enix refuses to announce a modern remake? You know what we do have? Final Fantasy 9. The one that’s real and that you can play right now.
An Uncomfortable Thought
Seven days ago I jumped into my Steam version of Final Fantasy 9 with all intentions to beat the game (something I hadn’t done since 2004!). But I was only a few hours in when I caught myself thinking, I’m not having fun.
This wasn’t the first time I’d felt this way. I’d attempted multiple playthroughs in the past and bounced off the game each time. Previously, I’d always have an excuse for giving up. I don’t have the time right now. I’ve started other games that I have to finish first. This time was different, though. For the first time, I considered that maybe the problem didn’t lie with me.
Hold on, is Final Fantasy 9 shit?
I wasn’t enjoying this at all. Every animation took… too… long… to… start… up… and… play… through… to… its… end. Fights forced me to sit through a seconds-long swirl animation followed by a sweeping camera shot of the battle area and all parties involved. Then I had to wait for ATB bars to fill up before taking an action, and each acion had its wind up and execution frames. Even winning meant a victory dance that ended with an annoyingly slow fade to black.
The most maddening part: all the random battles. Imagine sitting through 10 seconds of actual play wrapped up in 30 seconds of visual effects fluff, then once it’s all over, every step you take threatens to make you do it all over again.
I’m aware that the PC port of Final Fantasy 9 comes with a fast forward feature, though from what I can tell it isn’t explained anywhere in game. Turning it on certainly helps make the game’s long animations more tolerable, but its implementation feels awkward and poorly planned. First, it applies to the entire game, not just battles, so unless you want Zidane to crash across the world map like Sonic the Hedgehog zoinked out on sugar, you have to constantly toggle the feature off and on. Second, there’s no way to adjust the magnitude of the speed boost. I didn’t want to skip past animations entirely; I just wanted to give them a kick in the rear.
A Whole New World
Things have changed a lot since Final Fantasy 9 was first released. We swapped out bulky CRT televisions for flatscreen LCDs decades ago. The phones in our pockets are hundreds of times more powerful than the console that Final Fantasy 9 was designed for. We players have changed, too. In 2000, I was juggling the excitement of hunting down Kuja with the nervousness of going to junior high; now I have a wife and a kid to care for and a mortgage and bills to pay. There is almost no way Final Fantasy 9 makes it through this 25-year time portal unscathed.
The good news is that while the combat commits unforgivable sins against the player’s free time, almost everything else about Final Fantasy 9 holds up. Zidane is still the series’ most likable lead. He’s charismatic and energetic, with a strong sense of empathy and justice. The rest of the main cast is equally delightful; each has a distinct personality and motivations that make them worth investing emotionally in them. Even Quina, who barely factors in the overarching plot, helps keep things from getting too grave through their slapstick side adventures.
Still, those delightful bits together aren’t enough to make up for the painfully slow combat. Final Fantasy 9’s storytelling peaks are separated by long valleys of unhappy random battles. In other words, this is a great game except for the parts that are a game. I fought against myself to see the story to its conclusion, my determination waning with each passing hour.
Alexandriam ex memoria recreare
Unable to bear it any longer, I turned to fan forums and websites, where I discovered that I’m not that special. It turns out there’s an entire subset of grizzled millennials drawn back to the game by nostalgia but discouraged by the sluggish animations and excessive grinding. We all wanted to play the game as we remembered it, not as it actually was, and one suggestion kept coming up: Memoria patcher.
Usually, I’m a vanilla purist. I’ve played hundreds of hours of Fallout, Obsidian, and Skyrim without ever installing a single mod. I don’t use quick saves in my emulators. But these were desperate times. The goal was simple: help the game get out of its on way. That meant removing all the things I felt were keeping me from having a good time by fixing the slow battle animations, reducing the excessive RNG related to stealing items and Tetra Master, and, if possible, tweaking the Active Time Battle system. Looking through the Memoria patcher website, it looked like there were solutions built into its launcher; all I’d have to do was download it and show it where the game was installed.
Installing Memoria patcher on my Steam Deck was as easy as executing a single command in the Konsol. The script handled everything else, so all that was left for me to do was run the game.
Upon executing Memoria patcher’s launcher, I was met with a wall of options. I could tweak the speed in battles, adjust how fast Zidane moved on the world map, toggle full analog support (the PC port is strangely limited to eight directions), reduce the random chance in Tetra Master and remove all randomness from stealing, and dozens of other cool quality of life settings, including the ability to remove the ATB entirely.
Playing Final Fantasy 9 with Memoria patcher was a revelation. This is it—the best way to enjoy the best Final Fantasy game. The combat is snappy without losing any of the game’s distinctive style and flair, bringing the game in line with modern JRPG conventions.
A World Worth Revisiting
One of Final Fantasy 9’s greatest feats is convincing the player that there’s a world that exists independently of its main heroes. Side characters like enterprising theater buff Ruby and the gysahl pickles merchant, who in any other JRPG would be given few text bubbles at most, are given their own silly subplots. The Tantalus crew get an entire arc where the thief troupe looks for a way to depetrify their brother in arms turned to stone. Many of these aren’t just disparate threads thrown in for color—they circle back into the main plot, sometimes through playful callbacks, sometimes contributing significantly to the primary narrative. It all must have been a nightmare to plan and write, but the result is a uniquely vibrant world that breathes.
It’s a shame we never got to see more of the four kingdoms of the Mist Continent. Each was constructed with a clear care for the asymmetries and imperfections that make places look and feel lived in. Walk through the cobble streets of Lindblum or climb the windy branches of Cleyra, blurry as the renders are in modern screen resolutions, you can see why fans so loudly and persistently demand a remake. This was Squaresoft at the peak of its worldbuilding powers.
Final Fantasy 9 was meant to be a return to Final Fantasy’s roots after 7 and 8 took the series on a heavy sci-fi bend. But it was a commercial disappointment, which Square higher-ups took as indication that the future of the series was not in fantasy. The series has been running away from itself ever since. It’s ditched ditching turn-based combat, shrunk down its main casts, and made its heroes more brooding, gruffer, less relatable. The culmination is whatever the hell Final Fantasy XVI is supposed to be.
Do I want a total remake of Final Fantasy 9? Hell yeah! But you know what I really want from the Final Fantasy franchise? A game that doesn’t favor spectacle over storytelling. Don’t give me Final Fantasy 9: Rebirth; I want a rebirth of the entire franchise but with more modest ambitions. Ditch the voice acting, and toss out the million-dollar cutscenes. Just give me text bubbles, fun characters, full worlds, and good times.
