Final Fantasy 14 director Naoki Yoshida has addressed rumors that his staff is working on a remake of Final Fantasy 9, following mistranslations of interviews during the Dawntrail media tour.
The Final Fantasy 9 remake is one of the industry’s worst-kept secrets. Originally mentioned during the Nvidia GeForce Now leak, different sources across the Internet have confirmed that it is real, even though it has yet to be officially announced.
The upcoming Dawntrail expansion for Final Fantasy 14 has also hinted at the rumored remake. The pre-order bonuses for Dawntrail include Final Fantasy 9 characters and summons. Also, Dexerto recently previewed Dawntrail, which featured a boss called Apollyon, who is based on Abadon from Final Fantasy 9.
It was during the Dawntrail media tour when news filtered out through interviews, that Yoshida’s team at Creative Studio 3 is working on multiple games. This led to speculation that one of them is the Final Fantasy 9 remake.
On June 14, during a Letter from the Producer on the Final Fantasy XIV YouTube channel, Yoshida took the opportunity to put these rumors to rest and denied all involvement with any remakes.
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Yoshida’s translator said during the Live Letter, “Yoshida is not working on any sort of Final Fantasy 9 remake. It’s a wonderful, wonderful title, and a lot of us are fans of the original Final Fantasy 9. But it’s quite a hefty game. I think it has more volume than Final Fantasy 7, so the scale of it is much different.”
He continued, “I think we’d have to be very careful and very mindful if we were to handle Final Fantasy 9.”
While Yoshida and his team might not be responsible for the Final Fantasy 9 remake, it doesn’t mean the game is not in development. The references to Zidane and his friends in Dawntrail do feel as if they’re planning to cross-promote a remake that’s in the works.
Square Enix’s Creative Studio 3 has been extremely busy over the past few years, working on Final Fantasy 16, Dawntrail, and the regular content updates for Final Fantasy 14. Squeezing a remake of Final Fantasy 9 might be too much, but plenty of other studios could be reworking that classic game for modern systems.
