Spoilers for Remaining Fantasy XVI and its expansions comply with.
Not often has a recreation confused me as a lot as Remaining Fantasy XVI. Although I beloved most of my time with it, because of its pulse-pounding motion, heartfelt performances, luscious visuals, and impeccable rating, it undoubtedly faltered. Remaining Fantasy 16 deserted its most controversial and consequential storyline—centering a poorly dealt with slave rise up—and sidelines a few of its most intriguing ones, making for a muddled and disappointing story. A lot as I am keen on Clive, Joshua, Jill, Cid, and loads of different members of its forged, lots of them additionally really feel shafted after performing their perform within the story, being lowered to little greater than means to an finish. Remaining Fantasy 16 can also be dour, which isn’t tremendously completely different from the remainder of the sequence on its face, nevertheless it turns this distress into everything of its id, leaving little room for some other emotional expression within the recreation.
Remaining Fantasy 16’s expansions felt like a chance, then, to proper a few of these wrongs. On the very least, they might function explorations into underdeveloped plot factors and characters that the bottom recreation marginalized. They have been by no means going to thoroughly break from the trimmings of FF16, after all, however the Echoes of the Fallen and Rising Tide DLCs might atone for the sins of the bigger recreation.
Whereas I can’t sit right here and let you know they’re solely dwelling runs, the all-too-brief expansions are a window into what might’ve been, and I can admire them on that stage.
Echoes of the Fallen didn’t solely impress me at first, nevertheless it represented a good step ahead. It delves extra deeply into the Fallen, a sophisticated civilization that predates the occasions of FF16 and is referred to time and time once more, however not often ever spoken about at size. You spend a good quantity of that recreation restoring Fallen know-how and combating Fallen mechs within the ruins of Fallen buildings, and but FF16 treats them with indifference. They’re largely fodder so that you can reduce by means of, and whereas that continues to be true on this DLC, the huge dungeon on the coronary heart of it at the very least begins to elaborate on just a few of the Fallen’s machinations, plans that finally led to them incomes the identify by which their recognized in Clive’s period.
Echoes of the Fallen additionally culminates in probably the most ridiculous battle towards Omega, a little bit of a recurring enemy within the sequence that bookends the tremendous dungeon in gloriously brazen trend. The steadily escalating boss gauntlet of the DLC is its biggest asset, reminding me of the notorious eleventh-hour challenges of old-school RPGs. In a recreation filled with some extremely trendy encounters, each huge and small, Omega is an excellent little bit of managed chaos that serves to spotlight how enjoyable digging into FF16’s fight will be, in addition to how gratifying it may be when it lets up somewhat. Echoes of the Fallen’s precarious positioning as DLC that solely unlocks proper earlier than the sport’s remaining combat deflates any narrative rigidity it might’ve had, however that solely makes it extra of a joyous detour than it’s one among consequence.
If there’s a severe knock to be leveled on the DLC, it’s that it’s so visually dry. The Fallen’s aesthetic is a bland one, and devoting one more handful of hours to a dungeon in the identical palette as ones we’ve seen earlier than isn’t precisely a promoting level. For that purpose, I’m grateful for The Rising Tide’s fully new surroundings and shift in tone.
The lately launched Rising Tide growth closes the e book on FF16 with one final journey and a remaining(?) eikon for Clive and firm to face off towards. The DLC takes gamers to Mysidia, a hidden nation to the north of Valisthea—the place the first motion of FF16 takes place—which is threatened by Leviathan, a serpent-like deity that I’m certain Remaining Fantasy followers are greater than conversant in. Importantly, this alteration of locale ditches the grim purple sky of FF16’s endgame for a extra verdant and even magical land that remembers the great thing about the sport’s starting areas and hones in on the fairytale high quality that Remaining Fantasy video games are inclined to have.
On the coronary heart of The Rising Tide is a baby trapped in time by a curse, and your heroic journey to free them. Clive’s major thrust all through FF16 is the destruction of “mothercrystals” that threaten to destroy Valisthea, which sees him repeatedly clashing with Dominants, individuals who have the flexibility to summon basic FF summons as weapons of mass destruction known as eikons. It’s a heavy and political story that borrows quite a lot of components from Recreation of Thrones, which implies it’s additionally fairly bleak and harrowing. Quite a lot of the forged doesn’t make it to the tip of FF16, which makes The Rising Tide’s departure from this in any other case grim story so refreshing.
For instance of FF16’s bleakness, numerous of its facet quests tasked you with discovering individuals who incessantly wound up lifeless. Probably the most harrowing of those quests charged gamers with finding a lacking “pet” named Chloe. After making the rounds in search of her, I lastly discovered the corpse of a kid behind a constructing, revealing that Chloe was really the search giver’s youngster slave who died. Upon completion of the search, I stood up and took a much-needed breather from FF16’s oft-stifling darkness. It’s not that it was by no means in service of a bigger level the sport was attempting to speak, however I simply couldn’t all the time deal with the unbelievably horrible locations FF16 went with a purpose to make them.
By comparability, in The Rising Tide I launched into a quest to kill some Tonberries which had positioned a curse on a person on the town. In one other quest, I collected flowers and delivered them to a person as a result of his spouse didn’t know the way to introduce us some other approach. One other nonetheless had me deliver my Chocobo over from the mainland and introduce it to a younger lady totally fascinated by Chocobos. These duties and objectives aren’t exceptional or novel, and a few are certainly emblematic of FF16’s dire side-quest design sins, however they’re at the very least framed by issues apart from bloodshed and the lack of harmless life. On the finish of The Rising Tide, you face off towards Leviathan and save Mysidia, in addition to Leviathan’s dominant Waljas, a child who was changed into a weapon after which robbed of his life when it backfired. The Rising Tide appears like a dream of one thing higher throughout the recreation’s in any other case tragic setting.
And that, I believe, is the important thing to what makes each DLCs work for me. They could be disjointed items of the narrative, however they’re ones that I welcome anyway as a result of they merely stand out in comparison with what’s already within the recreation. FF16 might’ve taken extra cues from these brighter, tougher and chaotic episodes—which ought to’ve been labored into the sport fairly than delivered piecemeal afterwards—earlier in its life. They could be riddled with FF16’s pre-existing choices, however in addition they present what the sport might’ve been had it picked its influences a bit extra fastidiously, executed on concepts with some extra readability, and even simply paced itself higher. They really feel like components of a extra classical draft of FF16 buried beneath its new facade.
That’s most likely indicative of FF16’s biggest problem. It desires to be one thing else so badly that it sort of forgets itself and the strengths of the sequence it belongs to. Too typically, FF16 stumbles over itself in pursuit of some fame or standing other than its celebrated lineage. When it does bear in mind and leans into these tenets, FF16 is at its finest, and a few of these moments can solely be present in Echoes of the Fallen and The Rising Tide, which really feel like celebratory-if-brief encapsulations of what has made the sequence endure. I suppose my hope now’s that they’re portraits of the joyous potential of Remaining Fantasy’s future fairly than relics of the previous, consigned to be forgotten.
