New Final Fantasy 9 Anime Project Leaked

A Final Fantasy 9 project that was seemingly shelved earlier this year is reportedly back on schedule and will be ready to release in just a few years, but it's not the remake a lot of fans have been hoping for. Instead, fans will be getting an anime adaptation of Final Fantasy 9, with the short series targeting 2028 for its release.

The Final Fantasy series has been bringing high-fantasy RPG adventures to players around the world since the first game's release in 1987, but there have been a number of Final Fantasy anime show and movie releases spread out across the past 31 years. Most of these have been OVAs, but the franchise has also spawned a single-season anime show and a movie in the past, and with a recent announcement, another series seems to have been saved from the scrap heap.

Square Enix Adds Fuel to the Final Fantasy 9 Remake Rumor Fire

Square Enix updates its official website commemorating the 25th anniversary of Final Fantasy 9, and fans think it's a hint of big things to come.

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By Carley Garcia

Final Fantasy 9 is Getting an Anime Adaptation

Over the summer, Final Fantasy 9 celebrated its 25th anniversary, having first released in Japan on the original PlayStation console on July 7, 2000. Part of that celebration included mention of an upcoming animated series based on the game, which had been officially announced by Cyber Group Studios way back in 2021. However, plans for that series seemed tenuous well before the game's 25th anniversary, as the France-based animated television producer and distributor had entered a legal filing for financial insolvency in 2024, and a judge had ordered its assets liquidated in April 2025, seemingly putting the project one the shelf before it had a chance to be released.

Zidane and Vivi by the bell in Final Fantasy 9

Now, reasons for the animated series' inclusion in the celebration seem a little clearer, thanks to a report from French television and film industry publication Ecran Total. According to that report, the series is back on track with a projected 2028 release window, but it will be completed under the wing of Euro Visual, a company best known for its work on French animated children's series Atout 5 and the second and third seasons of The Bellflower Bunnies. Like Euro Visual's other notable works, the Final Fantasy 9 project will be a children's animated series targeting the 6 to 13 age demographic, which is appropriate, considering the ninth installment in the RPG series' gentler and more cartoonish tone compared to the other games that surround it in the timeline. The report also states that the series is planned for 13 episodes, each with 22-minute run times, and it will be presented in a 2D format.

While the animated series being back on track is good news for fans, it's probably not the announcement that most of them wanted to hear. Following the success of Final Fantasy 7 Remake in 2020, plenty of other classic games in the series have been tossed up by the community for the potential of getting the remake treatment too. Rumors of a Final Fantasy 9 remake over the past four years have suggested that it's an official project at Square Enix, and those claims have been backed up by datamining efforts on Nvidia and info dumps from reputable leakers.

Still, there is no official confirmation from Square Enix that the 2000 classic RPG has a new version currently under development, and more recent rumors could spell bad news for the potential project, assuming it exists. In October, leaker Nate the Hate reported that he had nothing new to report about the project, assuming that the Final Fantasy 9 remake had been delayed or otherwise "put on ice," stating he did not know if or when the software company would resume working on it. Nate the Hate's reliability as a leaker is a topic of discussion in the gaming community, though he has been right about several things in the past, including release dates for Nintendo Switch 2 games and the contents of multiple game showcases.

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