Final Fantasy XVI: The Rising Tide Review (スメラギ)
One would probably be inclined to assume that the northern territories about which you would hear from the very beginning of the game, the place where the tribe of Shiva's dominant, the Eikon of ice, once resided and where our good boy Torgal, the frost wolf, hails from would be some kind of snow region with very cold climate, but no, somehow this DLC takes place in a lush tropical jungle littered with Mesoamerican looking ruins even though it's situated almost on the same meridian as Sanbreque and Waloed which have very rigid weather, but maybe it's a piece of lore that I missed where this is explained, everything is possible in final fantasy after all.
What can I say about the DLC? Well, it feels and plays like filler content as the very big proportion of this game does, you get a new area to explore and find nothing in, you get a new settlement with 10 houses and that is apparently the entire population of motes of water, where live another set of boring npcs and characters who have a couple of mundane sidequests to waste your time on, and the storyline in the dlc follows the missing Eikon of water, which is ok and keeps your attention, you get 2 new skillsets which are almost fun to play, braindead "press x to awesome" gameplay prevents a lot of fun in my opinion.
I don't know whether to recommend this or not, I personally wasn't impressed though I guess it is serviceable, the environments look beautiful and leviathan boss battle is very cool and it's being accompanied by that epic song you heard from the trailer. So I'd say yes, If you're invested in the story and game's world you should definitely give it a go, but be sure to play The Rising Tide after Echoes of the Fallen, there's a character tie-in happens between them. I think it took me close to 10 hours to finish it, with all the sidequsts, which is 3 times longer than the other DLC, overall thoughts: buying complete edition is not worth it, the 2 dlcs are just cut content that was sold back.
Things that I explicitely did not like:
-English VA for Shula was a particularly bad pick and unfitting for the role, a big contrast to the rest of the cast, mind you.
-You can't replay Leviathan boss battle on the Arete stone (literally why?).