Before I start this review, I want to say that I'm going to use this to not only review The Rising Tide but also Echoes of the Fallen as I wasn't active on this site when the latter released and I feel like I have a lot of the same things to say. I also never review Final Fantasy XVI on here so I have to outline some of my thoughts there. So this will be a long one... Sorry...

Final Fantasy XVI was my GOTY for 2023, and while I found that there were several flaws, it hit on a lot of the elements that I personally love in games, and delivered a story that made me care a lot about the world and cast. The only major thing that I felt let down by after finishing my first playthrough was a feeling that I wanted a few more unique encounters. Both DLCs set out to address just that issue providing 2 full "stages", a new world area, several new bosses, a new Eikon fight and a new suite of abilities to play with. However, several other issues the main game had are not resolved, and the implementation of the DLC leaves something to be desired.

First I want to cover the new encounters, which are all absolutely incredible. Final Fantasy XVI truly thrives on the battlefield, fights are well paced and exciting, Clive's abilities make him incredibly satisfying to control, and both DLCs do a great job of expanding on this. Both stages contain several new enemies, but they truly shine in their boss fights. While the stages all use the same formula (pulled straight from FFXIV) of trash enemies, mini-boss, trash, mini-boss, trash, stage boss, it is fortunately a good formula which is enhanced by the variety and quality of encounters. Omega stands at the end of Echoes of the Fallen, and proves to be one of the most harrowing fights with a wildly unique moveset, and an intense DPS check. The Timekeeper is at the end of The Rising Tide's normal stage and proves to be the most interesting humanoid boss in the game, utilizing a some abilities of a specific Eikon against you. Afterwards you face off against Leviathan in the most difficult Eikon fight in the game. It has strict movement, and a tight DPS check on Final Fantasy mode. All of these encounters seem to be directly focused on addressing concerns of the base game being too easy even on Final Fantasy mode, and they thoroughly succeeded. The new abilities added to Clive, along with some balancing made to his kit have made combat even more engaging and varied. Making Clive a ranged powerhouse is now a viable way to play, and he has several new methods of crowd control. It takes some time getting used to Leviathan's playstyle, but once you do it feels incredibly satisfying. In regards to combat there is one more thing which is the rogue-lite mode "Kairos Gate". While this was a fun challenge to work through, my only real disappointment was the lack of any unique boss in there as all were reused, though they were much more interesting and difficult than their normal incarnations, and the reward for finishing these challenges is nice, though you have nothing to use it on unless you want to chase high-scores.

I've been praising this set of DLCs quite a bit but I do need to bring some more heavy criticism in. Both The Rising Tide and Echoes of the Fallen repeat the base game's issue of having unengaging questing structure. Most of these quests boil down to walking and talking, while this can be a great opportunity to unearth lore, develop characters, and immerse you into the world, it unfortunately tends to drag the pace down to a crawl. This game is fully voice acted, which means that I am just staring at very stiff models with terrible lip syncing as they talk about something that could be interesting but is taking too long to explain. I hoped that in the DLC they would find a way to break up the monotony through either some better exploration, or shortening these interactions. Unfortunately, it is largely the same outside of a universal change they made to being able to immediately return to a quest giver after finishing their objectives. While this is nice, they could have learned more from the criticism to create a more engaging set of expansions, the way it currently is makes them feel like more of the same.

A much smaller problem I wish the DLC fit more naturally into the main narrative. I get the issue the devs were having though, they wanted to make new content that felt like endgame content, but also were wanting to have it be with the main game’s characters before the ending. Echoes of the Fallen mostly works before the very end since it is shorter and feels like good background context before the final fight, but The Rising Tide would do good to be somewhere between Bahamut and Odin’s encounters as that is where the base game could use a stage and Eikon fight to spice things up.

Oh also, both DLCs continue the trend of blowing my mind at the impressive real-time graphics, and the OST absolutely was nailed by Soken and his team. Overall, I really enjoyed my return to FFXVI with this DLC. I still absolutely love the combat and characters, and spending more time with them is great. I really hope that we get to see CBU3 do another single-player FF game as I think they could absolutely make a game which is perfect in my eyes if they take the best of this game and refine it with things like what CBU1 is doing with the FFVII ReTrilogy.

Final Fantasy VII Remake is a game I played before being on Backloggd, but it was my favorite game of 2020 and is one of my favorite games of all time. There are some flaws, air combat was stiff, level design was rough in several of the chapters, and it suffered from pacing issues. However, I felt that it was an excellent foundation to the FFVII remake series, and if they could address those issues, the follow ups could easily exceed this already amazing game. Remake also introduced additional story elements that hinted at a new overarching narrative, I hoped it wouldn’t completely eliminate the elements from the original game, and it is an interesting set up if they could nail the conclusion. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth had to tackle all of those elements from Remake, while also contending with the larger scope of the world outside of Midgar.

Rebirth manages to get SO MUCH of this better than I could have ever thought possible. The world outside of Midgar feels vast, towns are more lively than their pre-rendered selves implied. I would go so far as to say that these are the best towns I have ever seen in an RPG, especially Kalm and Cosmo Canyon. Each region feels vast and unique, with tons to do and the diversity of activities allows exploration to remain entertaining even after 90 hours. This element was one of my main concerns going into Rebirth from Remake, especially when we saw the existence of "Ubisoft Towers”, but I think this is one of the best implementations of this gameplay system. This is assisted by the wide variety of mini-games, while not all are equally enjoyable, some are remarkably deep, and keep the game varied and interesting. Also, Chocobo Racing is amazing and I absolutely would love to play more, and I hope they have more in part 3.

Combat is also vastly improved by expanding on the excellent ATB system from Remake, as well as the synergy system from INTERmission. Combining this with more refined character movesets led to a superior version of the already amazing combat from Remake. On top of that, the new playable characters all felt amazing to play as, including Cait Sith which was a pleasant surprise. I really can’t wait to see how they handle Vincent and Cid in Part 3.

Level design was vastly improved, while still having some awkward moments where you have to move a box or something. Each dungeon mostly focused on a different party member's unique attributes, allowing for them all to have a moment to shine and these were some of my favorite moments of the game, especially the final dungeon.

While there were still pacing issues, most of these were actually present in this section of the original. Like with Remake, several additions were made to mixed results, though mostly positive to just neutral. I won't go into specifics to avoid spoilers but I overall like the direction of the story and where they chose to flesh out the narrative. A few exclusions from the original do worry me that we may not see these elements in part 3. And that's really my main concern that I hope causes this review to poorly age. This is an excellent middle chapter, that sets up beautifully for the final part, and it is on part 3 to use what it has been given to create a satisfying conclusion.

Boy oh boy this one is frustrating. The first 2 Star Wars Battlefront games were a huge part of my childhood. I remember coming home from school, loading up a massive instant action playlist and playing until my TV time was up. When rumors around a possible port of the games began surfacing I had high hopes, both have their strengths and weaknesses, and the PC versions had issues of their own (though years of mods could fix some of these) I really just wanted a way to quickly boot up the original duology and play them on a modern platform. In that way, this collection somewhat succeeds.

Starting this on switch immediately flooded me with nostalgia right down to the profile creation. However, upon jumping into the first game's campaign, I instantly noticed something wrong with the loading sound effects, a portent of what was to come. That said, this was running at a smooth 60fps, and was scaled mostly well to 1080p. Other than that, the game played almost exactly as I remembered, wrinkles and all, but some things looked a little off. This continued once I moved over to Battlefront 2 where certain textures were detached from level geometry, and at the beginning of certain matches, several frames would drop for a few seconds. That said, the game is still playable, largely unupgraded, but I wasnt looking for an upgrade. Unfortunately, the online efforts were near non-existent, with there barely being any servers, and said servers being completely unpopulated after a few days, and the performance on BF2 while in online just being absolutely awful is unacceptable.

This last point is a more personal thing, while I definitely wanted the game to be faithful to what came before, I also thought this would have been a perfect opportunity to fix issues that plagued the original, namely the dumb AI, and the overly aggressive aim assist. Another thing would be that BF1 has air combat on ground maps, and BF2 substituted that with just having space maps, but this would have been a perfect opportunity to port some of that over. Finally, I think it would have been a good opportunity to bring some of the content from the PSP games, and for $35, I think its fair to expect more. However, at the end of the day, the bare minimum is what I expect of Aspyr, and they seemingly cant even do that.

As of today, Aspyr have announced a patch that will be addressing several of these issues, and hopefully returning to this later will prove to be worthwhile.