Memoria Project interview - the Final Fantasy 9 remake you’re not allowed to play
There’s a certain generation of gamers who were introduced to Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs) during Final Fantasy’s golden age – the PS1 era. While none of them can agree which one of the three mainline games released during that time is the best, it’s usually whichever they played first.
For Dan Eder, a senior character artist with over seven years of professional experience in the games industry, that game is Final Fantasy IX. “That’s actually one of the main reasons why I got into my current profession,” Eder explains. “I really wanted to remake those characters. It’s always been kind of like a fantasy of mine. No pun intended.”
Eder leans over his desk and produces a 3D-printed model of Vivi, Final Fantasy IX’s black mage. Vivi is one of Eder’s favorite characters in video games, and his love for this character is essentially how Memoria Project: Final Fantasy IX Tribute – a non-playable fan remake created by games industry veterans – got started.
“If you’ve played the game, it’s quite a story with Vivi,” Eder says. “Because he has this existential crisis. He starts off happy and kind of light-hearted. He’s a good kid. And then he’s faced with the reality of his own demise. That turns everything upside down and then he starts questioning the meaning of life. And it’s done in such a subtle way – a way that really honors the player.”
After studying the concept art for Vivi, Eder wanted to create a model of how the character would look with modern graphics. Here’s the result:
“But then I was like, ‘You know what, let’s try to take this a step further, let’s try to put this in an environment and have a mock-up of a Final Fantasy IX remake,’” Eder says. “So I reached out to Colin Valek, who works at Sucker Punch on Ghost of Tsushima. That game has gorgeous environments, and I saw some Final Fantasy fan art on his portfolio. So I reached out to him and he instantly liked the idea. So we started working together on remaking that whole tavern area of Alexandria.”
As soon as the pair posted screenshots of their initial work, applications started rolling in. More experienced game developers who were fond of Final Fantasy IX wanted to lend their talents to Memoria Project. There are currently around 30 people working on it in their spare time, alongside full-time jobs at major studios.
But don’t get too excited if the original game means the same to you. Memoria Project isn’t a game – it’s an art piece. Fan games get shut down all the time because big corporations need to protect their IP. To avoid getting lawyered out of existence, Memoria Project will never be downloadable or playable in any way to anyone outside of the core development team.
“Even calling it a ‘game’ is tricky,” Eder explains. “We’re not intending to make it playable. Going into this project, one of my main things was, I am going to make sure that I don’t step on Square Enix’s toes or put myself in jeopardy, legally. For us, this is pure fan art. We’re professionals but we’re fans. And this is just a proof of concept.”
The team is experienced enough that it could create something playable, but the goal here is to not get the project shut down. In other words, we’ll just have to make do with trailers and screenshots. In mid-2022, Memoria Project will release another trailer showing off more characters in a longer, “more exciting” sequence than the first trailer.
“Even if we did want to publish it, it’s not optimized to be run publicly,” Eder says. “We would be able to do locally, but not publicly. In a hypothetical situation that I get an email from Square Enix now and they say, ‘Let’s see if we can make this an actual product,’ then we can work towards that. As long as we get their consent, then we can start planning out how do we make this an actual playable game.”
If that hypothetical scenario were to arise, however, the team would have to increase in size dramatically. There’s a reason the Final Fantasy VII Remake didn’t even cover the entire first disc of the three-disc PlayStation original – these worlds are huge and filled with towns, cities and characters. Rendering all of that at today’s graphical fidelity is a Herculean effort. The Alexandria portion of the game – which the Memoria Project has been focusing on – accounts for less than one percent of Final Fantasy IX.
“We just want one to provide a sort of what-if scenario, but actually making the whole game like that? That’s an entirely different situation,” Eder says. “I would love to do that, but we’re so far away from that reality right now that it’s not even remotely possible with the size of a team, especially considering this is all volunteer work. A lot of fans send in messages saying, ‘I hope you release the whole game.’ That’s kind of a misunderstanding of what we’re trying to do. It’s not like updating the textures. It’s not a remaster. We’re using nothing from the original game. If Square did decide to move forward with this in an official capacity, it would have to be a much larger team and with the financial backup to support that.”
That’s not to say Memoria Project will just be a scene in a game engine, though. The team plans to implement mechanics into it, but only to showcase how things would look in a modern game – never with the intention of anyone playing. Once the Alexandria portion of the game is done, the next milestone is to implement a battle system.
“I think battles are one thing that I would really like to reimagine, but not in the way that you might expect,” Eder says. “Final Fantasy IX is a slow game, and people know that. A lot of people are turned off by the battles – they’re probably the slowest in the franchise. So while I say that I want us to be authentic, I would improve in areas where you can without destroying the authenticity. So once we approached battles, I would absolutely still keep it turn-based, but it’s not going to be as slow as the original game. It’s gonna be a lot more dynamic. Just imagine Persona 5, for example. Persona is also a turn-based game, but it’s flashy, fast and dynamic. I think we’ll be able to find a mix of both. Again, completely proof of concept, we’re not actually going to make this playable. As long as we don’t have Square Enix’s permission, we’re not even going to go there.”
If you ever want to play Memoria Project, there’s only one way to do it: become an experienced game developer and join the team. But even then, it’s not designed to be enjoyed this way – it’s created specifically to show off in videos and other assets.
“We’re not caring about polycount and optimizing textures and draw calls and all of that,” Eder explains. “We just want something to look pretty. So you can join the team and you can play, but the gameplay is not going to be very neat. It’s tailor-made for the proof of concept. So it’s not like you have this whole incredible game just waiting for you to explore it. It’s not the forbidden fruit that we’re not giving away and keeping to ourselves. In truth, it isn’t really edible. We’re just making it look edible.”
So, beyond it being Eder’s first-ever experience with a JRPG, why did he want to work on Final Fantasy IX specifically? In his mind, it’s the ginger-haired step-child of the series. Major characters from Final Fantasy VII and VIII turned up in the Kingdom Hearts series, but Vivi from Final Fantasy IX was relegated to a throwaway cameo. Final Fantasy VII has multiple remakes in the works, as well as a sequel movie that came out years ago. Two characters from VII also turned up in Super Smash Bros. The other games get all the love, basically. On top of that, IX has a unique atmosphere that’s never been explored in a Final Fantasy game since.
“Final Fantasy VII and VIII were very edgy games,” Eder explains. “I guess they catered more to teenagers, but they’re a lot easier to get into. Whereas IX channels this childish energy at first, which – along with the slow battles – turned off a lot of people. I think a lot of people had a hard time getting into this game, so they just gave up on it fairly early on. But if you continue playing and see through to the end, you understand how brilliant it is. I think it’s the best game ever made, to be honest. And that’s why I’m doing this project. I think the characters, the story, the music, the visuals, they’re so fleshed out. It’s so far ahead of a lot of other games in the genre – and even Final Fantasy games – that it almost feels criminal how underrepresented it is.
“That’s the reason why I modeled Garnet for example. Tifa and Aerith, you see them so many other places – you see them in Advert Children, Kingdom Hearts, Dissidia, a ton of other other other titles, But Garnet, who is the heroine of Final Fantasy IX, is absolutely nowhere. And that’s exactly why I wanted to remake her because I wanted to kind of bring back the love that that game has given me. So we’re trying to fix that because even based on the reactions of the trailer that we’ve released, there are a lot of other people like me.”
You can follow along at the Memoria Project website. In the meantime, why not check out the best Western RPGs.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.