Qu'on aime ou pas Final Fantasy IX, difficile de ne pas tomber sous le charme de ses nombreux environnements. Villes médiévales, forêts luxuriantes, châteaux chassieux, la direction artistique est probablement l'un des meilleurs atouts de cet épisode enchanteur. Ce week-end, un utilisateur du forum américain NeoGaf a regroupé des dizaines de croquis, illustrations conceptuelles et images d'environnements dénichés sur les portfolios des nombreux designers ayant travaillé sur le jeu à l'époque. Il est assez incroyable que ces montagnes de visuels sont restées cachées toutes ces années, et n'aient pas fait l'objet d'un artbook compilant toutes ces œuvres.

N'hésitez pas à partager ici vos meilleurs souvenirs concernant cette belle aventure. Qu'il est bon de faire un tel saut dans le passé !




More thumbnailed images:



(Perhaps the “Crystal World” at the end of the game was meant to be a literal tree?)

The following pieces are without comment:


"CRYSTAL TREE"


"IFA TREE" / Brain Tree
I wanted to give the tree a brain-like appearance. The final model ended up as a combination of two of my production paintings.


"COFFEE MAN"
(looks like my Dad)


"EARLY IFA TREE"


"THE LAST DUNGEON"
This is an enormous structure made out of petrified human beings.


Some of these pieces are stunningly detailed – which I find astounding given the inevitable loss of detail and clarity necessary to get the artwork onto the PSX disc. It is evident that if Square Enix have kept this material in their archives, they could produce a wonderful Resident Evil Remake –esque remake of Final Fantasy IX.
First, the final character designs that the in-game and CGI cutscene models were based on:


More thumbnailed images here:


EDIT - FURTHER IMAGES


Regardless of whether you think this post-processing is an improvement, upscaling and filtering cannot add to detail that didn’t ship on the game discs.

In my research, I unearthed artwork that show a ludicrous level of detail went into the game – detail that never made it into the final product due to the limitations of the target format. The “lost art” referenced in the thread title isn’t meant to describe this content as having been lost and found – it refers to the art details that were lost when the graphics were downconverted to a limited 32-bit console.

The following pieces are the highly-detailed environment art from a selection of Square USA staff. The intense details were eventually downscaled to the 320x240 native resolution of the PlayStation to become pre-rendered in-game backgrounds. As you can seem much was lost: