The latest update for Final Fantasy 9 on Steam has seemingly removed the entire game, making it unplayable.
A handful of threads have been made on the Final Fantasy 9 General Discussion board on Steam, with all of them discussing the sudden disappearance of the game. The update, which went live at some point in the past 24 hours, has reduced the game’s file size to zero megabytes, effectively rendering it gone entirely.
Square Enix has not issued official patch notes, but the SteamDB update tracker notes that on April 2 an update removed a long list of files. That long list appears to be every file in the game.
Investigating myself, I’ve found that if you download Final Fantasy 9 from your Steam library, it requests 0 MB of disk space, and downloads instantly (because it pulls down next to nothing). With it installed, you’re able to load the launcher from which you choose screen resolution, but clicking ‘play’ simply shuts the launcher down and nothing happens. Steam itself recognises that the game has closed, and resets its big UI button from ‘Stop’ to ‘Play’.
The PC Final Fantasy 9 community is relatively active, largely due to the fantastic Moguiri mod that makes the game look significantly more impressive than the PC port usually does. But without the actual game files, the mod is – as you’d expect – useless.
Without official patch notes this seems a mistake on Square Enix’s end rather than an actual update. Or it’s a dreadful April Fool’s that deployed a day too late.
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For a PC Final Fantasy you can play right now, check out our review of the latest Final Fantasy 14 expansion, Shadowbringers, which cements the MMO as one of the very best in the genre’s long history. It also recently picked up a new raid based on Nier: Automata.
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Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer. You can follow him on Twitter.
Source: IGN.com Final Fantasy 9 Steam Update Seemingly Removes the Entire Game