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...
) 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 .