BODY: If you ever wanted to see Evangelion Unit-01 share a screen with the Warrior of Light, Square Enix just confirmed it's happening โ and gave away slightly more than it meant to.
On October 31, at the Final Fantasy XIV Fan Festival 2026 in Tokyo's Makuhari Messe, the company debuted the first trailer for "Ghosts of Desire," the Neon Genesis Evangelion crossover content coming to the MMORPG's next expansion, Evercold (Japanese title: Hakugin no Wanderer). The expansion is due in January 2027 across PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC.
The trailer's hook isn't the giant purple robot. It's the voice. The whole thing is narrated by Misato Katsuragi, in the clipped, teasing cadence of Eva's famous next-episode previews โ the kind of delivery a Japanese audience can recite from memory. Producer and director Naoki Yoshida, demoing the footage on stage, started to explain that "Misato will also appearโ" before cutting himself off mid-word and admitting he'd said too much. The crowd reaction did the rest of the marketing.
"Ghosts of Desire" will serve as Evercold's alliance raid โ FFXIV's 24-player content tier, which traditionally rolls out in three installments beginning with the expansion's first major patch. The story is original, built by Square Enix for the game rather than adapted from the anime, and it's positioned as part of Evangelion's ongoing 30th-anniversary run, dating from the 1995 TV broadcast. Yoshida stressed the content is still deep in production.
The insider take
Evangelion collaborations are so routine in Japan that there is a running joke about which product hasn't had one โ bullet trains, razors, regional sake, convenience-store onigiri. What makes this different is scale: an alliance raid is months of bespoke boss design and cutscene work, not a reskinned cosmetic. The closest precedent is the NieR raid series Yoshida built with Yoko Taro, which Japanese players still cite as the high-water mark for guest-IP content in FFXIV, and the comparison is already all over Japanese social media. Khara's reputation for close creative supervision also means fans here are expecting something more faithful than a costume drop โ and Yoshi-P's "oops" was almost certainly worth more than any press release.
Originally reported by GAME Watch (Japanese).