Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a turn-based RPG. First off, the game has an excellent premise, and one of the best openings in a game where it completely sucks you in. It’s set in a dark fantasy setting, with heavy French inspirations. Years ago, the Paintress appeared and from then one, on an annual event, known as the “gommage”, people who are at a certain age or above would die. The twist? This age decreases by one year each year, so that next year, more people will die. By the time of the game, this has decreased to 34.
We’re introduced to Gustav, in which he is in his last year of life, being 33 this year. We see his motivation and despite being only in the first hour of the game, one of the saddest scenes that hit really hard. It’s surprising that the game was able to connect the players to the characters so well with so little time, but the amazing music also helps. Gustav joins Expedition 33, as they set out to try to find the Paintress, kill her, and end this curse.
The world outside is completely different to the built-up city, and the expedition does not start off well. Gustav and the other characters will struggle to survive as they continue onwards with their quest, which is brutal and filled with death. The game is inspired by JRPGs, so there are many familiar elements from that genre. There’s even a world map of sorts, where the characters are relatively much larger in proportion than the environment so that they travel greater distances. It also feels lazier as a result, since the world is not interconnected, but rather contains “dungeons”.
The combat system is turn-based at its core, but it does a lot of things to shake things up. Whereas Final Fantasy continued to morph into an action game and fully left turn-based combat behind, Clair Obscur fully embraces it, and the additions enhances, rather than detracts, from it. The typical turn-based mechanics are here, where each character has a turn, and the player can select from a menu what to do. The basic attack, use items, and use special abilities are here.
Where the unique elements of the combat system come into play are when you select those special abilities. There is the addition of what are basically quick time events. These will appear when you use special abilities. Furthermore, when an enemy attacks, you will always have the choice to press a button to parry or dodge. While you must get the timing right, it’s rewarding given that if you succeed, you get to negate all damage, and if you succeed at a parry, then you’re even able to counter. It’s worth it to try and get the timing right, but the game also plays on this as it will constantly change and fake the enemy’s attack telegraphy.
Each character also has a gun that can shoot an enemy’s weakness. To round it off, each character also plays differently and has their own unique gimmicks. Gustav has an ability that would do more damage if you managed to strike the enemy more. Another character can change stances which can complement another character’s gimmick of stacking charges. Being able to successfully combo these various abilities together to cause additional damage is satisfying.
In addition, each enemy has a break meter, which will feel. Once broken, they take extra damage and will be stunned until their next turn. Elemental weaknesses can come into play, but you can generally ignore these, as they are not critical in normal mode, it’ll just make the fights faster.
The problem with the combat system is that it highly rewards parrying, and to not unbalance it, it had to add difficulty in succeeding a parry. This is where majority of the difficulty comes from. Later in the game, enemy attacks become more complicated. The attack animations are longer with multiple fakeouts and odd timing (slow animations that suddenly become quick) to bait you and miss the correct timing. By giving odd timings, there is a disconnect between the strike hitting onscreen and when you’re supposed to press the button to parry. As a result, the timing to hit the button to parry often feels too early. This ends up forcing the player to do trial and error to memorize attack patterns, which becomes a tiring chore over the course of the game.
Later bosses and enemies are very cheap with their extreme delayed attacks, annoying uncurable status effects, shields, and no quick easy way to instantly restart a battle. It just sours the experience when you are forced to repeatedly play to memorize the attack patterns and get muscle memory, rather than relying on pure instinct and reactions. In general, the game takes a lot of bad stuff from the JRPG genre like force platforming, instant death attacks and the plot getting distracted by having to collect a certain number of special items.
On the flipside, with successful parries becoming so powerful, with enough practice, you can tackle bosses that are higher level than you are. It’s a high risk high rewards kind of thing because when a boss does succeed in hitting you, you’ll probably be one-shotted. There are some gimmicky battles for the optional bosses. Thankfully they are optional as they can be frustrating. Doable with a couple of retries, but grates on you and burns its goodwill.
Other JRPG conventions include obtaining various pieces of equipment for your characters. The main customizability come from pictos, an item that grants the characters stats, but also special equippable effects. This allows all sorts of builds for players who want to play in a way that suits them. The flexibility is fantastic, and given that when characters level up, you are given the freedom to assign the stats increases however you want, it gives you a lot of freedom.
The graphics are probably one of the weaker points. It tries to hide it with its art direction but can feel overly generic. There is a smearing / Vaseline effect, which is distracting. Bright areas can be too bright, and dark areas too dark. There is no minimap in dungeons, which makes them feel bigger and less linear than it really is. Usually there is a straight road to the end with some branching paths, but the lack of a minimap and overall genericness can confuse you from time to time.
After the excellent prologue, the story is a slow burn. It stays intriguing for most of it, but the cutscenes can be boring. It gets distracted by the midway point, losing a lot of its mysteriousness and urgency. Even after the big reveals, it feels a bit underwhelming due to the buildup. The final boss combines a lot of the annoyances you might have had from previous enemies into one. You are also forced to fight the first phase again if you die and restart. By that point, you just want to finish the game (which only takes around 25 hours if you don’t do too much of the optional content). There are two endings to choose from based on one decision at the end. Is it a satisfying ending? Hard to say since neither is perfect.
Overall, Clair Obscur is a fun and unique game, although it might have been praised maybe a bit too much. It’s not perfect, the parry and dodge mechanics add a lot of action into the turn-based gameplay, but at the same time, to not let it become too overpowered there are delayed animations, which end up only serving to frustrate and annoy. The story starts out strong but weakens over the course of the game. It’s a fantastic start though and still a fun game, just that there are still flaws which hinder it from being perfect. It is clearly heavily inspired by many different JRPGs but manages to combine them into a coherent polished product.
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