Forgettable and worthless. Every unit of intrigue present in such an effervescently cool title is disregarded the second the characters begin talking. Any hope of an interesting narrative is eschewed and replaced with even more jargon centred around crystals. Not ten minutes since I rolled credits had I already forgotten every event of this "story".

In the stead of a story stands a drawn out, exasperated cacophony of homogeneous fights.
Coming from FFXIII to this was not the refresher I wanted in terms of linearity. These combat encounters are served to you along one exhaustingly long hallway. There are a lot of hallways in this. If you put bends and stairways in your hallway but don’t actually make it non-linear, it is still a hallway. The combat in these fights is, admittedly, still incredible. However, not one ounce of the credit for that falls to this DLC, as it is entirely unchanged from the base game.

This is not worth your time. Perhaps its greatest merit may end up being that it serves as a ticket of admission for the second part of the expansion pass, which looks much more not terrible. I am at least confident in the fact that they would struggle to make another DLC any more drab than this instalment.

Final Fantasy XVI was a good game. Very flawed in a lot of ways and pretty unremarkable on the whole, but good. I wasn't really desperate to play the DLC, was pretty content with what I got from the base game, but I guess I needed a bit more Final Fantasy in my life after Rebirth, so here I am, having played both of these small expansions.

The first DLC, Echoes of the Fallen, doesn't have that much going on. I guess if you really, really love the combat in XVI then it's a great time since it's just going up a large tower with barely any story (though what's there is actually surprisingly funny, which was a surprise after the very serious base game), fighting a whole lot of battles and a few pretty interesting mini-bosses before a final fight against Omega, who was a pleasant surprise since it was actually fairly challenging (by which I mean I died once) in contrast to the very low difficulty of the base game. I sort of like the combat in moderation (I still wish it required a bit more from the player) so I had a pretty good time and the DLC is only around 2 hours so it doesn't at all overstay its welcome, though I did make the mistake of playing on Final Fantasy Mode since it doesn't really make things more difficult as much as it just gives enemies and bosses way too much health. The new music is also very good, as expected, and I had sort of forgotten how good FFXVI looks graphically, even if it is a bit disappointing that this is mainly just a reskin of other tower-like areas in the base game.

It's also very strange how the reward for beating it is a sword with exactly the same stats as the base game's ultimate weapon, which I already had. It looks pretty cool, at least. The weapons of XVI in general look really good actually, and I feel like that's sort of an underappreciated thing about it, even if it's a very small thing.

way better than the base game. it was short, but one of my biggest problems with the base game was all the unnecessarily long and boring cutscenes. this doesn't have that, and most of it is combat.
thankfully, they actually made the bosses challenging, which is nice because the game was pretty easy before. the only challenge before was the crazy high health, but they don't have that anymore, instead they do crazy high damage.
i also like that they finally gave me accessories that aren't completely useless. 90% of the base game's accessories were just slight cooldown reductions for single abilities. at the end of the dungeon, i had swapped all my accessories for ones i found in there.