Final Fantasy X at 25: The Anniversary Video That's Really About What's Next

Square Enix dropped a 25th anniversary video for Final Fantasy X this week. The timing is not an accident. The Switch 2 port of the HD Remaster lands in three weeks. This is a publisher reminding you that a quarter-century-old game is still worth your money, and honestly? They're not wrong.

I played Final Fantasy X on a PS2 that sat on a CRT TV in my childhood bedroom. The loading times between every single battle were long enough to read a paragraph. The voice acting was revolutionary at the time and has aged precisely as well as you'd expect from 2001. The sphere grid was a mess of interconnected nodes that I never fully understood until I was an adult. And none of that mattered, because the game had something that most modern RPGs still chase and rarely catch: a complete, coherent vision that it never apologized for.

Final Fantasy X is a game about time. About the things you inherit. About doing what was asked of you and then realizing you were asked wrong. About the people who carry the weight so you don't have to. It's the rare Final Fantasy where the combat system and the story are saying the same thing. The conditional turn-based battle system — where speed and actions affect turn order — mirrors the game's obsession with sequence, with cause and effect, with the order in which things happen and whether that order can be changed. You're not just fighting fiends. You're practicing the central question of the narrative: can you rearrange what's coming?

This is where the connection I want to draw lives. Final Fantasy X came out the same year as Halo: Combat Evolved. Two games about cycles. Two games about a protagonist who doesn't belong in the world they're saving. Two games where the final boss is less a monster and more a system that needs to be broken. Halo's Master Chief wakes up on a ring world. Final Fantasy X's Tidus wakes up in Spira. Neither of them asked to be there. Neither of them gets to leave until the job is done. And both games ask you to question whether the people who sent you actually had your best interests in mind. That's the throughline. That's the thread. Twenty-five years later, I still think about how those two games, on completely different hardware for completely different audiences, were asking the same uncomfortable question: what if the hero is just a tool?

The anniversary video itself is fine. It's a montage. It has the music. It will make you feel something if you played the game. But the real story here is the Switch 2 port, and what it says about Square Enix's strategy. The company is betting that nostalgia is a reliable launch partner. They're betting that the people who buy a Switch 2 at launch want something familiar to land on. They're betting that Final Fantasy X — a game that has been ported to everything including phones — still has legs. And they're right.

Who is this for? It's for the person who hasn't played Final Fantasy X in ten years and wants to see if it holds up. It's for the person who played the PS3 remaster and wants to see if the Switch 2 version fixes the character models' faces. It's for the person who never played it and needs a reason to care about a twenty-five-year-old JRPG. The anniversary video is that reason. It's a reminder that some games don't age into irrelevance. They age into context.

I don't know yet what the Switch 2 version adds. Faster loading, probably. Better resolution, certainly. Maybe some control tweaks. But I know what it doesn't need to change. The core of Final Fantasy X is still intact. The blitzball minigame is still terrible. The laughing scene is still awkward. The ending still makes me feel like I lost something I didn't know I had. That's not nostalgia talking. That's just a game that was built well enough to outlast its hardware.

The anniversary video isn't for us. It's for the people who haven't decided yet. But if you're reading this, you've probably already decided. The question isn't whether you'll play Final Fantasy X again. The question is whether this time, you'll finally understand what it was saying about the weight of carrying someone else's unfinished business.