I last played now-beloved MMO Final Fantasy 14 in 2014, when it was only a few months old—not counting those first few aborted years prior to its relaunch as A Realm Reborn. I thought it was okay at the time, but it cemented itself as one of the genre’s all-time greats with its next few expansions (or so insist several members of the PC Gamer team who still play).
I’ve mostly watched from the sidelines, glad not to be dumping months of my life into an MMO, but the fiery hand of FOMO has gripped me on occasion—like when I learned that Final Fantasy Tactics designer Yasumi Matsuno had designed a raid for the game, or when Yoko Taro went and did some weird Nier stuff in there.
Today what I’m feeling is not FOMO, but rather fear of the inexplicable. Trepidation in the face of the profound. A flickering terror deep in my gut that the weirdest and perhaps dopest shit to happen in videogames in 2026 might somehow be a raid in Final Fantasy 14, because the game is doing a crossover with Neon Genesis Evangelion.
The anime. “Get in the robot, Shinji,” Cruel Angel’s Thesis, “I’m so fucked up,” Crisis of faith: the show, Depression: the show, cool robots, gross robots, everyone clapping—Evangelion is everything and everything in pop culture in the 30 years since has at least a little bit of Evangelion in it, such is its influence. Even a damn train was Evangelion.
It’s somehow still as popular as it’s ever been, probably because the film series “retelling” of the original show began just a decade later in 2007 and somehow dragged out until 2021. Now Final Fantasy 14’s creators have announced “a new alliance raid made with creative input” from the Evangelion filmmakers, called Ghosts of Desire. Will it be just another MMO raid, or somehow cleave the audience into those who weep with tears of joy at the beauty of existence and those who log in figuring to do a spot of the ol’ DPS and log off with existential depression?
Comments on the official Final Fantasy 14 YouTube account’s teaser trailer for the raid are disabled, as if to say: if this news causes you to experience a psychic break, please go have it somewhere else.
I’m just going to put it out there now: If the raid doesn’t end by somehow revisiting the death of Final Fantasy 14’s original world but with a giant severed head floating in an ocean of blood, somebody’s messed the whole thing up.
The new expansion, Evercold, arrives next year. Judging by the usual Evangelion timelines, we should see the raid sometime in the next decade.
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