The Final Fantasy 9 upscale mod just got a surprise update after 3 years, including a 'full rework' of its backgrounds, 120 fps, ultrawide, and more

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:

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:  

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.

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