Square Enix finally made it official: Final Fantasy 10 is getting a 25th anniversary release in November 2026, capping a year of fans asking for something bigger than a quiet re-release since the milestone started creeping up on the calendar. The news comes via MSN's coverage of the announcement, and details on pricing and exact contents are still trickling out.

I have a personal stake in this one. Final Fantasy 10 was the game that dragged me into the PS2 era kicking and screaming, and I still remember the first time that opening cinematic of Zanarkand played on a CRT in a dark room. After years of importing Famicom carts with a Japanese dictionary wedged under my wrist, here was a Final Fantasy where the characters actually talked. Tidus laughing awkwardly in that Luca scene is burned into my brain the same way Cecil's moon landing was for the SNES kids, and I mean that as a compliment.

The timing tracks with how Square Enix has handled its anniversaries lately. The series' 35th got a wave of merchandise and reissues, and FF7's remaster train never stopped rolling. FF10 sits in a strange spot in the catalog: beloved enough that its rereleases on PS3, Vita, PS4 and Switch kept selling for two decades, but never quite the merchandising machine that Midgar became. A dedicated anniversary edition feels like the company admitting Spira earned its seat at the table.

What we know so far is the release lands in November, which slots it neatly into a Q4 that's already crowded. Whether it's a straight repackaging of the HD Remaster with new extras, or something with actual restored content, is the question that'll decide if this is worth double-dipping for. The HD Remaster from 2013 was genuinely good, by the way. The arranged soundtrack ruffled some feathers, and the less said about the faces the better, but the International Version content finally reaching western players was a real gift at the time. Dark Aeons and the Penance fight had been Japan-only for over a decade before that.

Nina and I will inevitably end up arguing about this one in the Slack channel. She holds that the series' soul lives wherever the community does, which for her means Eorzea, and she's not wrong that FFXIV keeps the flame lit for millions of people. But FF10 is my counterargument every time: a complete, self-contained story about a summoner walking toward her own death, with a combat system flexible enough that the Sphere Grid still gets argued about 25 years later. No patch notes, no roadmap, no seasonal content. You put the disc in and Spira just exists.

That's rarer than it should be now. I wrote recently about how daily login rewards swallowed entire business models, and FF10 is the opposite of that design philosophy in every way. It respects your time by having a fixed amount of it. Even the grind for Celestial Weapons, miserable as some of those chocobo races were, is grind with an ending.

November puts this release right in the shadow of GTA 6, like seemingly everything else this fall. Square Enix has to know that, and releasing an anniversary edition anyway suggests they're not chasing chart position with it. This is a gift to the fans who kept buying it, and that's fine by me. Not everything needs to fight for the zeitgeist.

If the anniversary edition includes the Eternal Calm sequel episode and Last Mission alongside the base game, this becomes an easy recommendation for anyone who missed them. If it adds anything genuinely new, restored assets, developer commentary, a making-of, I'll be first in line. I'll have hands-on impressions once Square Enix ships the full contents, and you can trust I'll tell you straight whether it's worth your money or a pretty box for a game you already own three times.

Twenty-five years. Tidus has been complaining about his old man for a quarter century now, and somehow Jecht's laugh still lands. See you in Spira in November.