Final Fantasy IX Has Noped Out of 2020

A lot of us are making jokes about the whole world claiming 2020 was just an April Fool’s prank. Between the Pandemic, possible WWIII, all of Australia burning, and middling reviews for Resident Evil 3, many are considering calling a mulligan and just restarting the whole damn year. If I were the DM, I’d have told everyone to re-roll at the end of February. Among all the complaining and memes, one title had the stones to say, “ight, imma head out,” and pull out of existence completely: Final Fantasy IX.

Originally released in 2000, Square Enix saw fit to re-release Final Fantasy IX on Steam in 2016. It’s a bit of a pisser to pay $21 for a game that came out 20 years ago, but the benefit of a Steam release is that the game can finally see new updates. These can come in the form of new content, but usually are just bug fixes. In this case, someone at Square Enix decided the game’s entire existence was a bug. A bug they squashed with prejudice.

As of April 2nd, Final Fantasy IX on Steam no longer exist. The Store page is still there. Just none of the game’s files. This isn’t just a patch that changed something about the launcher that now causes the game to crash. That’s a coward’s bug. The update deletes all of the game’s files, leaving just the launcher. Just check out those sexy patchnotes. It’s just several pages of files deleted. How anyone could fuck things up this completely is beyond me. This must be the intentional work of someone who decided that Final Fantasy IX was too good for this world and shouldn’t have to witness our end.

Of course, this is probably just an accident. Or someone being incredibly petty. Either way, it will likely be fixed soon. Until then, you probably shouldn’t click the link here to Final Fantasy XI for $21 on Steam. That would be incredibly stupid.

EDIT: Apparently, it was all just a mistake. Final Fantasy IX is back. You can now proceed to spend $21 on a 20 year-old game.