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...)
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
