After 3 years, the best Final Fantasy’s essential PC mod gets a surprise update that fully reworks the classic JRPG’s gorgeous painterly backdrops

Final Fantasy 9 - AKA the best Final Fantasy - just keeps getting better.

More than two decades since its launch, Final Fantasy 9 remains a jaw-dropping game thanks to its beautiful, hand painted backgrounds that set the stage for every single scene. But it's those same gorgeous, painterly backdrops that suffered the most when Square Enix ported the classic to PC and modern consoles, since they were all essentially blown up to fit bigger screens, and they just looked a little odd when juxtaposed against the shinier, newly-HD character models.

To celebrate the classic game's 20th birthday and to smooth over those visual issues, modders released the sweeping Moguri Mod three years ago to upscale and improve Final Fantasy 9's backgrounds. It was a pretty big deal at the time because Final Fantasy 9's backgrounds aren't all contained in single files; one background is comprised of a bunch of different images in the game's files that are then stitched together to create the whole, and some are actually video files instead of still images, making the process a massive achievement. 

But three years after the magic Moguri Mod released, a new 9.0 update takes things a step further. The latest version fully reworks all battle backgrounds, further upscales the previously re-rendered backgrounds, redraws several layer edges, makes improvements to lighting, and much more. There's also new "Toon" and "Realism" filters for characters and environments, in case you didn't want to stare at the same PS1 polygons for your 19th playthrough. 

All of this and more can be downloaded via the dedicated Final Fantasy 9 mod launcher called Memoria, which also hosts a bunch of other features like 120FPS support, the ability to switch between the original soundtrack and the orchestral version, and a cursed option to replace Final Fantasy 9's Tetra Master card game with Final Fantasy 8's less divisive (and less fun, don't come for me) one.

Final Fantasy 9's Moguri Mod 9.0 might not be the last time that Zidane and Co get a facelift either. The prophetic Nvidia leak namedropped a possible Final Fantasy 9 remake project, years before icons from the game started popping up in Final Fantasy 14. "You may have noticed a lot of Final Fantasy 9 references here," the MMO's producer Naoki 'Yoshi-P' Yoshida said on stage with a smirk, "but the reason is a secret." 

These Final Fantasy 9 fans spent three years making a gorgeous JRPG remake you’ll never play.