After FINAL FANTASY XIV FAN FESTIVAL 2026 in Anaheim, California, it is impossible to not root for Naoki Yoshida and the development team behind FINAL FANTASY XIV Online as they try to make the best game possible for Warriors of Light everywhere to enjoy. This is an incredibly lofty statement to make, I know, but it is hard to not feel that way after seeing the love and care that they and SQUARE ENIX put into FINAL FANTASY XIV FAN FESTIVAL 2026.
This two-day event, spread across April 24 and April 25, 2026, took place across the cavernous Halls C, D, and E in the Anaheim Convention Center. While Hall C was almost completely the main presentation stage with tons of seating, all of the activities and overflow seating occurred in Hall D while Hall E underneath had merchandise sales and event registration. This made the overall event feel huge and yet truly connected in a way you were never far from everything going on.
The activities floor in Hall D was almost completely Solution Nine/Arcadion and Living Memory themed, with only the art competition and a couple of smaller games being in a designated Tuliyollal section. While last time there were only a handful of activities to do, there were a LOT more this time around when you weren’t attending the various panels.
I think my favorite activity was the Dancing Green boss fight that took place on a large, illuminated, dance floor called “Ride the Rhythm.” A group of people would be pulled up off of benches to take place in the raid fight, and they would have to move around the floor while dancing to avoid attacks by Dancing Green on glowing and shifting red tiles. Every so often a dance spotlight or a red tankbuster circle would appear, and you would have to have someone absolutely bust a MOVE to protect the entire party. At the end, the other people on the bleachers waiting their turn would determine if you won the fight or not by holding up signs. This was crazy, chaotic, and the most fun out of everything and I did not see anyone try it out who didn’t end up loving it.
There was also another game, called Crystalline Conflict Palaistra Challenge against the back wall. This game had two teams of five competing against each other on one of four battlefields to see who can knock the other team out in three minutes by a roll of the dice to shift the tactical crystal towards their winning goal. Each player had to take turns rolling a giant inflatable dice to see what color would pop up of red or blue to determine how the match would go. While this was entirely luck based, it was a lot of fun to cheer on your fellow Warriors of Light!
There were also some smaller games, such as Pelupelu Pitch (ring toss), Arcadion Slam (arcade basketball), and Metem’s Limit Break Challenge (scored punch bag) that helped occupy people. While these were more like reskinned carnival games than anything uniquely created for FINAL FANTASY XIV FAN FESTIVAL 2026, they definitely helped to ensure people were spread out more and always had something to do.
Tuliyollal had the Art Contest entries on display for everyone to look at. (Photos by author).
There were also multiple photo opportunities available. This was unfortunately one of the two biggest issues with the event. There was a G’raha Tia photo opportunity where you could take a picture with him in a gondola, and the line was capped almost the entire time with a wait of almost two hours. There was another photo opportunity with Honey B. Lovely in the Arcadion area, and that had a wait time of anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour at any given time. It also did not help there were themed stickers tied to both of these photo opportunities that you could only claim (mostly — they were giving out the G’raha Tia sticker to anyone passing by due to the line length) after you did them. SQUARE ENIX really should have duplicated these photo opportunities and run them at the same time to help the line move forward quicker. I was surprised at the very least that there were not two G’raha Tia gondola setups, as the FINAL FANTASY XIV Online fanbase is absolutely in love with him.
The Keynote address — which announced the Evercold expansion, the upcoming evolved combat system, the Nintendo Switch 2 platform release, and more — was quite lengthy and a lot of fun to watch. You can tell that Naoki Yoshida and everyone at the team is trying to right the proverbial FINAL FANTASY XIV Online ship by taking risks and trying to improve the game instead of playing it ‘safe’ by bringing more of the same in that they have in prior expansions with incremental improvements.
There were also amazing panels such as From Tacos To Tenders — Serving up the Lyrics of FFXIV run by Michael-Christopher Koji Fox with a special Ironmouse concert afterwards, and A /random Q&A with Yoshida where people had previously submitted a lot of questions that Naoki Yoshida answered on stage depending on how the roll of an inflatable dice turned out. There was even a piano concert the first night and a Primals concert the second night! The variety of panels, and the content in each panel, really were entertaining to see in person, and it was nice to be able to sit down and just watch them whenever I was tired of doing an activity on the exhibition floor.
The merchandise situation left a lot to be desired, however. There was a virtual queue you had to enter into to get a return time to go shopping, and this filled up quickly when the queue for the next day would go live. Even if someone got a merchandise slot, they would often have to wait a significant period of time to be able to get into the store to shop — if the item was still at all in stock. This was clearly frustrating for a lot of people, as it meant they could not get an opportunity to shop for FINAL FANTASY XIV Online-themed items and see everything that was happening the floor above at the event itself.
To be fair: I will say SQUARE ENIX did attempt to alleviate this prior to FINAL FANTASY XIV FAN FESTIVAL 2026 by offering an open preorder window where the Fan Festival-themed items would be delivered before the event occurred in Anaheim and a second preorder window is open now as well. So, if you knew you were going to the event (and the merchandise preorder occurred after the ticket lottery had happened), you had a way to secure your merchandise ahead of time so you wouldn’t have to go shopping. It was because of this that I personally did not need to go shopping, as I already had my event T-shirts and coasters and other merchandise in-hand thanks to the online preorder window and there were no in-person exclusive FINAL FANTASY XIV Online-themed items offered by SQUARE ENIX at the in-person booth only.
One of the biggest changes to this year’s event was the Meet and Greet opportunities with the developers, and I loved how those were handled. Before FINAL FANTASY XIV FAN FESTIVAL 2026, there was a random automated drawing for an opportunity to meet with the developers for a photo opportunity. Not a TON of those winning tickets went out, and so a lot of people initially weren’t going to be able to meet anyone. So, my biggest surprise of the event was when SQUARE ENIX introduced a Standby line at the event for the various meet and greet opportunities. While the super kind employees repeatedly said “there is no guarantee that you can meet anyone if you’re in the Standby Line,” and you had no say in who you would be able to meet (which was just like in the drawing itself), I never saw anyone who got in the somewhat lengthy line before it would be capped turned away from a meet and greet opportunity. There were several of these meet-and-greets during the day, and the times were published in a push notification through the Fan Festival app with the standby line announcement, and so you could have an idea of about when to wonder over to try to get in line. What this meant was that if you wanted to meet one of the team members behind the game — ranging from Naoki Yoshida to Masayoshi Soken and even Amanda Achen — then you could almost certainly do so.
And even if, somehow, you did not make it into one of the many Meet and Greet standby lines, see a team member when they popped up on the exhibition floor to play a game, or were an initial meet-and-greet drawing winner, both Foxclon and Hikaru Tamaki (aka “Mr. Prime”) held a final surprise meet-and-greet on the far end of the event hall at the end of the second day, and I did not see them cap the line for that. I was surprised that, after two full days of doing meet and greets and presenting at panels, they still had the energy and the desire to meet even MORE people, but they did. All of this made me feel like the FINAL FANTASY XIV Online team really wanted to try to see and meet as many Warriors of Light as possible when they were able to — even though they honestly did not have to do so.
I really, really, hope the development team will do this type of meet and greet opportunities again later this year in Berlin and Tokyo, and that SQUARE ENIX will do it at the next Fan Festival in the United States. These in-person events are really the only way people can meet the people behind this MMORPG that fostered this amazing community, and I know people do value it greatly.
Speaking of the community…let’s talk about that.
One of the biggest community-led events this time around was the swag trading that occurred. Lots and lots of Warriors of Light made their own stickers and their own charms and trinkets, and gathered together to trade and give them away to each other. This was much bigger here in Anaheim than it was in Las Vegas last time around, and it enveloped a large part of the floor by the entry doors. I think it is a real sign of the community’s strength that people would take the time to create art and to create things to give away to each other, and it took me by surprise how big it was this time around. I am hopeful that SQUARE ENIX and the FINAL FANTASY XIV Online team will make sure there is a large, dedicated, trading area set up for people to swap items and stories in whenever the next United States Fan Festival is held since I don’t see this going away anytime soon.
There was also so much cosplay on display! There were people cosplaying as everyone from the Scions of the Seventh Dawn to Emet-Selch to even the Ancients outside. So much of the cosplay was incredibly intricate and detailed, and everyone I met was happy to pose for photos. SQUARE ENIX even set up a dedicated cosplay repair station, replete with everything including hot glue guns and more, to help fix any issues that may crop up on the floor. This, plus the Glamoured to Life Cosplay Walk event, were incredibly impressive, and it showed that the company knows how important the cosplay scene is to FINAL FANTASY XIV Online fans.
It was also clear that SQUARE ENIX and the FINAL FANTASY XIV Online team took the ADA complaints from last Fan Festival in Las Vegas seriously. There were dedicated ADA lines at each of the activities, there was dedicated ADA seating at the concerts (with employees verifying that ADA wristbands were being worn, from what I understand), and there were dedicated ADA lines at registration. It felt like there was a very serious effort to make sure people with disabilities could participate in this year’s Fan Festival as much as possible.
But there were also a lot of quiet community moments you only could see if you attended in person and weren’t featured on the live streams. Throughout the event, you could stop by and watch one Warrior of Light try to clear FRU (Futures Rewritten Ultimate) while sitting on the floor in front of crowd on their computer. Or if you wanted something non-FINAL FANTASY XIV Online related, how about watching some random Beyblade matches?
The moment that stood out the most to me, however, was the real-life Ceremony of Eternal Bonding that took place on the balcony above Hall D. Two Warriors of Light from Leviathan server were married by a Moogle cosplayer in front of anyone and everyone who wanted to attend. This was not an event hosted by SQUARE ENIX (and honestly, I’m not sure if they were even aware it was happening), but it was absolutely magical to witness.
FINAL FANTASY XIV Online has a community unlike any other MMORPG I have ever played, and I am sure there are more stories like these that I did not get to see at this year’s FINAL FANTASY XIV FAN FESTIVAL 2026. This year’s event in Anaheim was lightyears better than the event that was held in Las Vegas, and it shows that feedback from that event WAS taken seriously and things DID try to be improved from that event.
With all that, I do want to close out with one final observation.
As someone who has covered the video game industry extensively for the past 10-plus years, the most striking moment overall for me from FINAL FANTASY XIV FAN FESTIVAL 2026 was when Takashi Kiryu took to the stage and said that SQUARE ENIX would be providing all the support needed to FINAL FANTASY XIV Online. This was a moment that was played partially for laughs, sure, but it shows that SQUARE ENIX is going to be putting their money into making this game the best possible game they can.
I think we just saw that announcement brought to life in Patch 7.5 with the fact that nearly the entire patch was voice acted and that G’raha Tia’s lines from 7.4 were clearly re-recorded, too. Warriors of Light, me included, have been conditioned to expect only the super major, important, cutscenes to be voice acted in expansions and patches — but never anything like what we saw in Patch 7.5.
There are also the upcoming Reborn and Evolved battle system modes. You can check out the group media interview with Naoki Yoshida we participated in here, but he spoke at length about how he learned from Star Wars Galaxies about how it can kill a game if you change the combat system entirely without giving people an opportunity to stay with what they are used to playing with. Developing duo combat systems, and making sure that all content can be cleared with either of them, is assuredly not easy or inexpensive to do since you have to dedicate developers and Q&A testers to it. While I have not gone hands-on (yet) with the Evolved battle system, I do recognize that this is yet another attempt to push the game forward, and to also ensure that Warriors of Light who do not WANT any change to how they are already playing the game will not have to deal with it.
I am hopeful these changes will continue into and through the Evercold expansion set to launch in January 2027 while still retaining all the things people already love about Eorzea. I am also hopeful that SQUARE ENIX will continue to listen to the FINAL FANTASY XIV Online community. If the improvements that were at this year’s in-person Fan Festival, and we have already seen in Patch 7.5 are any indication, then I am really excited for what is to come.
If you missed the media Q&A that Naoki Yoshida did at FINAL FANTASY XIV FAN FESTIVAL 2026,
you can check it out here.
Are you excited for the new Evercold expansion?
What was your favorite part of this year’s Fan Festival?
Let us know in the comments below!
