I think the port job was done by Silicon Studio Thailand (as their name pops up in the opening credits) though they may have simply had a hand in the creation of the port’s engine, as Silicon Studio have done quite a lot of work with Square Enix before. In addition to all of this, you’ve also got a few extra bonuses like the ability to give yourself unlimited gold or skip random encounters and so on, so if you just want to get through the game or skip certain parts, you can. It’s not necessarily the best method of controlling the game, mind you – getting next to a character to chat to them can be a bit finicky, and you’ll still need to use the keyboard for anything other than option selection and the Confirm/Cancel buttons, as I couldn’t find any way to access the menu via the mouse – but hell, it’s nice to have, and seems to work alright in battles. And you even get a bonus FRAPS framerate counter in the corner, too, you lucky devils. Either way, I’m really happy with how most of it looks: the cutscenes are higher-res than expected and still look lovely thanks to their stylised nature, and the character models and textures have a slightly exaggerated, cartoony look that works rather well even now. I’d guess the textures have been redone at a higher resolution, though it may simply be that things look awfully sharp on something that isn’t a PSX on a CRT TV. The backgrounds are pretty blurry at any sort of high-resolution as they’re all pre-rendered images, but the character models are surprisingly gorgeous. Graphically, it’s actually held up rather well. It “feels” pretty much identical to the original, rather than being a crappy alternate version of it. I repeat: I don’t have much of a problem with this. I will note that battles feel like they’re running slower than 30, but I think that’s just the combat animations bits and pieces like the UI and the damage numbers are all silky smooth compared to the slightly choppy combat animations. Every bit of gameplay is running at 30, while all cutscenes are at 15, and considering the cutscenes tend to make use of pre-rendered animations that’s hardly a surprise. In terms of framerate, Final Fantasy IX runs at a mix of 30FPS and 15FPS, but I’m 90% sure that’s exactly the same as the PSX original so I’m not really going to complain. As represented here by a little dolly that a grown man with a pink beard should not be able to immediately pull out.
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