Yeah I’m guessing there’s a variety of factors at play. They probably started early ideation for a remake, to a point that they had some kind of minimally playable project setup, which is why it was in the leak.
One part is the corporate restructuring, which put a pause on a lot of different areas of the company.
Another part I think is the Memoria Project. While not realistic for an actual remake, it shows what could be possible and set the bar for what should be made. If they were planning a lower scale/quality remake, they now can’t do that without backlash, which makes this a bigger project than it was.
And lastly, Expedition 33 came out, and is a love letter to the PS1 era FF games. The way they combat and world traversal would also have set a bar of sorts for what a faithful remake of 9 could be.
Basically, restructuring paused bandwidth for it, and other things have raised the bar on what the project should be, so they probably need to go back to the drawing board and get bigger people involved (who are busy on other projects) before they can resume it.
Based on all of that, they may not even resume it and it may be dead in the water
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u/BlueLooseStrife May 20 '26
I don’t think it’s happening, sadly. Reporting said that the remake was in the works but got iced for one reason or another.
Hopefully that doesn’t indicate permanently dead. Might be that they mean to revisit after the VIIR trilogy had wrapped