While Echoes of the Fallen may have only offered Final Fantasy XVI players a couple of hours of new content, producer Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi P) says the DLC The Rising Tide should be viewed as an expansion.
The Rising Tide will expand to Northern Valisthea, a place we haven’t seen before. More importantly, it’s Jill’s home area. With a whole new zone, the scope of the new Final Fantasy XVI DLC isn’t just adding in new material but rather completing the story that the developers wanted to tell.
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When asked about the scope of the DLC, its director, Takeo Kujiraoka, explained, “The main scenario for The Rising Tide is about double the length of Echoes of the Fallen. On top of that, because we have a new field, and in that field, we have a new town, you’re going to have side quests that take place in that area, as well as in that town as well. So, you’re going to have all of that content.” Kujiraoka states that completing all of the content and exploring the area would bring total play time to about ten hours of new content. But that’s not all.
The Rising Tide will also feature a new endgame section of Battle Content. “Once Clive has gotten his new [Leviathan] ability set, we wanted to create a place for him to use that. And so there’s endgame battle content as well, which will take us over ten hours if you want to battle and win,” Kujiraoka said.
Kujiroaka added, “You can kind of think of this as an expansion to the main game. So you have a new story, you have a new field, you have a new ability, you have a new Eikon, battle, all of the things that you expect from the main game in Final Fantasy XVI. We’ve taken all of those pieces, and we’re getting a little slice of that in The Rising Tide.” He expanded on the Battle Content as well. “This new endgame battle content is something that’s completely new. It’s created with a new complete framework that was designed just for this. Once players have finished this story, they can take all of the stuff that is in here and then use that in this endgame content to continue their excitement.”
The Rising Tide will also be the most difficult combat yet. Yoshida said, “In the main game, we want them to be to help move the story along. We didn’t make them so difficult that players wouldn’t be able to get past them because then they wouldn’t be able to see the story. However, this final battle with Leviathan is the final Eikon battle before Cloud goes off and fights Origin (Ultima).”
Yoshida continued, saying “We decided to make this one extra challenging in the sense that if you go in there thinking, ‘Oh, this is going to be easy just like all the others I know,’ you’ll be wrong. This final battle with Ifrit versus Leviathan is going to be kind of like the final test. Players will have to use everything that they learned from those previous rebels. They need to use and master all of those actions or they are not going to be able to get past this.”
With new side quests and main scenario, The Rising Tide also expands Clive and Jill. For Clive, his new ranged combat ability from the Leviathan ability added to his kit will change how he plays. Kujiraoka explains, “The main characteristic of this ability set, because we wanted to make it unique from the other ones, is that this is more of a ranged ability set rather than melee. But then you think, ‘Okay, how is it going to be able to do range attacks, when [Clive] is a melee fighter? Is that going to mess up his fighting style?’ We want to let you know that we’ve been able to create the system under the direction of Suzuki-san. He’s able to take this range stability set and have it fit pretty much seamlessly with Clive’s battle style to create something very, very unique, and something that fits into the game.”
But Clive’s combat isn’t the only thing evolving. So is he. Without getting into any spoilers for The Rising Tide DLC, Yoshida teased how different Clive will be because he gets to relax a little. “You get so see endgame Clive and you see kind of how over the course of the story he takes on more responsibility. As we get closer to the end of the game, he takes on so much responsibility and puts it all on his shoulders. He has to save the world. [He has] taken from so many people, and so there’s a lot of weight on his shoulders here. But going to the new city and going to this place that’s no longer dark and gloomy, a little bit of that weight is taken off. You get to see a little bit of a calmer Clive now that things aren’t as pressing as they were right before… He just isn’t scowling as much.”
Kujiraoka let us know that Jill will also get much-needed narrative attention. “In Echoes of the Fallen, there’s a little bit more focus on Josh. Basically, he was in his element, talking about all these things that he had studied and things in the Sage Spire. Whereas The Rising Tide is going to have a little bit more of a focus on Jill. Mysidia [the new zone] being in the northern territories and Jill having been born in the Northern Territory, she’s basically going back to a land that was her home. And so we get to learn a little bit more of her background and her ties to this area and to the story. [Jill] is going to have a lot more dialogue compared to Joshua this time. So players will get to learn a little bit more about her.”
One other key takeaway from the Mysidia as the new zone is that it’s a stark break from the dark and gloomy atmosphere that Valisthea has become. “We wanted to create something that felt different from the rest of the world but also kind of felt like it fit in. Because it is a different area, we had to create all new assets for this. This is a place where our art team really gets to shine because they got to go in and create all these new assets to make the place feel very, very unique. But then amongst that, one of the biggest changes in this content is the blue sky. Because of Primogenesis, the sky gets really dark and so very gloomy towards the end [of the game]. A lot of players [said] ‘I want to play in a nice bright colorful place but everything’s so gloomy here in the end game.’ We finally now have this area.”
The Rising Tide releases on PlayStation 5 on April 18, 2024.
