25 years later, Final Fantasy 9's stylized visuals have ensured it's aged brilliantly without a remake

Whether a Final Fantasy 9 remake should happen remains a hot button topic in the wake of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. Revisiting the classic PS1 RPG myself 25 years later, I'm personally not convinced it does – simply because of how well the original has aged. Playing it now feels as good as it did back then. While I'd love Final Fantasy 9 to get a fancy re-release, I'd love it to focus on making it easier to appreciate this legendary epic as it was.

Part of the fun of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy so far has been seeing the world and characters of the PS1 game rendered in startling high-fidelity. While the characters there are still stylized, it shoots for a realistic-adjacent art style that admittedly looks stunning. That approach would be impossible to pull off with Final Fantasy 9 because its own fantasy world is stylized in a different direction. Huge, bustling castle towns, incredibly iconic character designs, and a serious story that always cuts to my core – Final Fantasy 9 feels like a lively fantasy book brought to life.

Less is more

Ask me my favorite Final Fantasy game and I'll start to sweat, but there's three games I can always confidently recommend as a unit: the entire PS1 era. As with the rest of the series, all these numbered releases are standalone, but they tell the story of its developer, from the genre revolution that was Final Fantasy 7, through to its fidelity-boosting followup, and then Final Fantasy 9, which feels like Square Enix at its most confident with the RPG series – even today.

Final Fantasy 9 understood that chasing higher fidelity wasn't the only way to evolve an artistic vision. Final Fantasy 7 mixed together chibi-like models when exploring the overworld with chunkier more realistically proportioned ones in battle, and Final Fantasy 8 felt like it took the style of those in-battle models and allowed you to control them all the time. Final Fantasy 9 is almost the reverse, taking the chibi-style aesthetics and revamping them to feel even better, becoming the totality of the designs in play.

There's an infamous moment early in Final Fantasy 8 where someone says to protagonist Squall "you're the best looking guy here", and in its original release Squall's model looks blocky and crushed. Final Fantasy 9's characters may be cartoony, but they never look wonky. Whether their chunky models are filling the screen or wandering around a town at distance there's always perfect clarity in their expressions.

After all, black mage Vivi Ornitier is one of the best Final Fantasy characters of all time, and he's permanently shrouded in a massive wizard hat and cloak with two little yellow-dot eyes peeking out (a callback to even more classic Final Fantasy games). There's never any doubt how he's feeling – even as he quietly grapples with his inner turmoil – and controlling him as he plods around in the game's opening gives you a real sense of his character on its own.

Speaking of openings, the same can be said for the whole theater sequence that has protagonist Zidane and the rest of the Tantalus troupe performing for a crowd. No dynamism is lost here because the characters are more cartoony than its immediate predecessors – quite to the contrary, the choreography is fantastic and the action reads incredibly well because it's so easy to follow each movement.

Just after the sword fight, Zidane uses the performance as pretense to kidnap Princess Garnet (who uses the situation to her advantage as she also yearns to escape her oppressive mother). Just as with exploring the town earlier, this has you run through several backdrops as you run through a castle and its battlements. They look gorgeous to this day, as does just about every area throughout this RPG.

Honestly, it might be the environments that are the real star of the show for me. Final Fantasy 9 deploys its pre-rendered backgrounds exquisitely. Still images, while showing the amazing art style, don't quite do these areas justice. Exploring each of these stunning screens, the cartoon style of the characters meshes perfectly with each one to really make you feel a part of each scene.

Each one, too, smartly features moving elements – rippling water, cogs turning, spinning windmills, thunder flickering through dark clouds – Final Fantasy 9 is always reminding you this is a living world that you're a part of. I almost feel like if these environments were fully modelled in 3D in a Final Fantasy 9 remake some of the charm would be lost.

From camera angles to how much is in sight at any time, the way these are presented are always part of the developer's intention – a directorial choice as important as how a camera is used in film. For my money, Final Fantasy 9 remains one of the best looking fantasy games ever made.

Reading steiner

The anime-like visuals and fairy tale world don't detract from Final Fantasy's ability to tell a serious story, either. Bodyguard Steiner's immovable stare hides a noble spirit and his quest to return the princess has him questioning just what it is he values. The rat-like, reliable dragoon Freya, meanwhile, has a complicated history with her people as she searches for her lost love.

In fact, Final Fantasy 9 still has some of the best character writing to date. The RPG deftly handles serious topics like loss and trauma, the emotive character designs becoming easy to connect with even though they're far from realistic. The conflicts between kingdoms even evoke the mouse-centered Redwall fantasy series to me in tone – it's fantastic stuff.

It all adds up to make Final Fantasy 9 really stand apart, even to this day. Perhaps it simply arrived at the perfect time in gaming generations, an intersection of technology and budgets that even meant that Square Enix could release three brand new Final Fantasy games during the PS1 generation in the first place. These days we're lucky if we can get one per console. It's easy to forget that FF7 released in 1997, FF8 in 1999, and FF9 in 2000. Even a year after that, we got FFX in 2001.

After Final Fantasy 9, subsequent games in the series feel like they've continued to chase tech improvements to serve jaw-dropping fidelity. Don't get me wrong, I'm susceptible to it too, and love all those later Final Fantasy games. Final Fantasy 16 definitely left me gasping at times. But I can't help but yearn for Square Enix to return to Final Fantasy 9 in spirit, to take a moment between releases to return to its core and explore what it can do with using its technical prowess for stylization instead of fidelity. I want more color in Final Fantasy 17, and for more strange little pals I can come to love in the party.

There's a reason Final Fantasy 9 remains so beloved all these years on, and is often cited as one of the best Final Fantasy games among those devoted to the whole series. Thanks to its smart design you don't need to wait for a Final Fantasy 9 remake to appreciate it – you can just boot it up now and it's as good as it ever was.

Sometimes revisiting a game from your childhood can change your appreciation for it: Final Fantasy 9 has changed a lot over the years, because I have