This article contains Final Fantasy 16 spoilers.
If you’ve played Final Fantasy 16, you’ll know the door I mean. Down a side path in The Dim is a circular stone door that never opens, a bizarre enigma in a game otherwise overflowing with detail. Throughout the game, it remains a tantalising glimpse of The Fallen leading to a towering spire in the distance.
Until now! The newly released Echoes of the Fallen DLC begins with some slow preamble to loosely set up Clive and Jill’s visit behind the door, introducing a handful of new incidental characters. And then the door opens.
What’s behind it? A brief couple of hours of dungeon crawling and an enjoyable, if hardly taxing, boss battle. As players might expect, the door leads to a Fallen ruin – across the world of Valisthea are hints of this long-forgotten civilisation – that offers visual spectacle in place of real narrative insight. It’s just a hint of a side story from the past that doesn’t impact the main plot.
The Sagespire tower itself is glorious, the pinnacle of Fallen engineering prowess bathed in sunlight. There’s a sort of rogue AI that’s not happy with Clive’s intrusion and so begins a climb through intricate hallways infested with purple crystal growths, enemies floating in pods of goo, and corrupted veins of what looks like flesh. It’s all a bit sci-fi, touching on strange experiments and body horror – a striking change of theme for Final Fantasy 16.