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clair obscur: expedition 33 retrospective
Okay, yeah, as people watching my Tumblr may have already noticed, I gave Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 a try on a whim (mostly because of this post tbh) & I had a grand old time & now I'm here to dump some thoughts about it before I lose them forever.
Full disclosure, a big reason that I got SO into this game (devoured it in ~2 weeks) was because Bird Guy got into it too, at exactly the same time, and did you know it is VERY fun to blast through a big bombastic game in Your Favorite Genre alongside the love of your life? Highly recommend it. We were heckling each other and swapping strategy protips and speculating wildly about the plot together the whole time; it was SO weeby in our household lol.
We historically have somewhat divergent tastes in video games (he plays FPSes, Soulsbornes, and grand strategy games; I tend more toward turn-based tactical RPGs, narrative-driven RPGs, stealth-action games, and platformers). There's also a lot of places where our tastes overlap (we both love a good puzzle game, hence both of us getting oneshot by Blue Prince a few months back, and we both enjoyed e.g. Breath of the Wild), but up until now I don't think he's ever liked anything in the (admittedly fuzzy) space of "big, bombastic, narrative-heavy 90s/00s-style RPGs."
He's tried a few times! Because, uh, yeah, I do talk about my childhood faves (Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy 9, Final Fantasy 10, etc) frequently enough that he's gotten curious and given a few of them a try. But man, the gameplay of a lot of the older Final Fantasy games was just never going to be appealing to him, and even the ones with more interesting gameplay are showing their age in a lot of ways. I have the nostalgia to help me push past that cruft but I get why he bounced off them.
Happily, this game seems to have been created by a bunch of thirtysomething French guys who were like "we grew up playing 90s/00s-era JRPGs and love that shit, why don't people make stuff in that style anymore, let's do that but with Modern Conveniences and also a more interactive combat system." And goddamn did they ever succeed. A ton of design decisions feel like they were like "let's take [thing we loved from some childhood game] and just bolt that sucker in," in a good way. To wit:
* The overworld feels very Final Fantasy 7 or 8-ish in the sense of wonder it evokes, how satisfying it is every time you get an "upgrade" on your "vehicle" and can travel further and faster, and how fun it is to just poke your head around and explore. Did you know sidequests used to be fun? and had their own little crunchy refreshingly-different areas instead of just being some dull little follow-a-marker-on-a-map fetch quest? They're SO fun here.
* The environment design reminds me of what Final Fantasy 13 was aiming for. That game got reamed by the gaming press at the time for being "one long hallway," and while there's some truth to that criticism, well, FF13's long hallways were never just that. They took a ton of care designing the environments you're running through, and tried to call your attention to them with banter and such. But those environments were rather at odds with the "frantically on the run" story the game was telling; I think players back then were getting frustrated because just dashing down long hallways on the run without stopping to look around isn't very fun, even if it mirrors the character's experiences, and the game didn't put quite enough in the environment to signal "hey, stop and admire stuff here!" (They WOULD try from time to time—e.g., by changing up movement by having Hope pilot some weird mini-mech—but it just wasn't often enough.) Anyway, Clair Obscur is much happier to let you slow down and shout "HEY LOOK AT ME" from time to time, for the better.
* Relatedly: there's no minimap or quest markers in the game. Which did mean I walked in circles MORE THAN ONCE in my dungeon crawling (I am... directionally challenged... in the best of circumstances... haha...), but it never actually frustrated me, because it... felt like I was exploring! (And, yes, they do a good enough job with level design that you're never HOPELESSLY lost. And the environments really are enjoyable to explore, in a pure-visual-splendor kind of way. And that splendor isn't just a specs thing—though, yeah, I was playing on a PS5 and a nice TV and there sure were a lot of pixels, heh—but, just. Choosing to illustrate places that looked cool and gorgeous and not samey and blah? I found these environments a lot more delectable than, say, Final Fantasy 16's, for a recent comparison.)
* There's a few spots in the game where they use a classic trick from the Playstation-era Final Fantasy games: fixed camera angle with a fixed background! because damnit y'all hired some artists and you KNOW how you want a particular scene/environment to look and be looked upon so you can just... force that! It's SO neat even if it's just for a couple side areas.
* I don't think it's too spoilery to say I got hella Final Fantasy 10 vibes from a lot of the characterization choices and overall plot structure.
So, yeah, the game nailed a 10/10 on "bottling up a bunch of highlights from the RPGs-of-a-specific-era into a modern Essence Du Jour." This will probably make me sound either sappy or deranged or both, but I really do feel like it let me share something precious and lovely with my husband in a way that finally got him to enjoy it too, and I'm pretty grateful for that. Sort of like the first time I took him to see fireflies in Kentucky because he, a west coast boy, had never seen them before.
Combat, however—combat is very different than any mainline Final Fantasy game, and it rules, actually.
I've heard people compare Clair Obscur's combat to Super Mario RPG and the Paper Mario series, and those comparisons are apt. Bird Guy's quippy description is "Dark Souls for people with one hand," which is also apt. You don't have to manage 3D movement during combat, and you don't have to do any unexpected fast-reflex-y actions on your turn, but you do need to dodge/parry during your opponent's turn.
(I was worried it would be too intense for me for some reason; it was so totally fine and I had no reason to worry. I started on normal difficulty and actually jacked up the difficulty near the end of Act 2 because I was getting TOO STRONK. Hard is... hard, but appropriately so! feels very satisfying! highly recommend it! And in general the game does a good job of tuning the difficulty so that a tough boss fight will feel IMPOSSIBLE at first, but it'll also motivate you to muck around with your party's skills and equipment, and you'll roll in with some new strategic angle, and... lose again, but less badly this time! And after a few more loops of really learning and practicing those dodges, you'll prevail and shout wildly and it's VERY satisfying.)
The plot's another thing I was a little apprehensive about going in. The premise sounded a little stilted/weird/cheesy to my ear, and the vague rumblings I'd heard about the game online made it sound like it was all going to be some sort of philosophical-dilemma-disguised-as-a-story sort of deal, which is just not interesting in to me. (I very seriously entertained majoring in philosophy; I've taken classes on "what if we were a brain in a vat tho" kind of dilemmas; I get the appeal. I just don't find it as appealing these days :P)
Without spoiling, I'd say it doesn't really demand deep philosophical wrestling any more than, say, Christopher Nolan's Inception does—it's there if you want it and I'm sure forum nerds are arguing about it at we speak (<3 you forum nerds, you are my people), but it's mostly focused on some broader thematic concerns and the attendant characters. I don't think the characters or their world are quite as juicy in terms of their interpersonal dynamics or as fully-fleshed-out-in-relation-to-their-world as, say, the Final Fantasy 10 cast... but they're interesting enough (Verso and Maelle prove particularly chewy), there's good synergy in the ensemble, and the game REALLY leans hard into the light-and-dark interplay suggested by the title. The bright/charming bits are SURPRISINGLY goofy and silly and disarming for it; the grim bits are grim in a PG-13 way but no less satisfying for it.
Okay that's al lthe general stuff. Some more spoiler-y and off-the-cuff thoughts below—no major spoilers but if you're like "I do not even wish to Know The Name Of Potential Bosses In The Game," yeah, here's your chance to stop reading.
* Monolith Renoir is the best fight in the game, probably up there with Metal Gear Solid 3's The End for how much I enjoyed it. I'm sort of pissed they don't let you keep checkpoint saves at specific points in the game, because I'd like the ability to just redo that + a couple other interesting boss battles, with the stats/equipment I had at that time, and that's simply not possible without playing the entire game over again. What a shame.
* In a way I sort of wish they hadn't removed the damage cap at the end of act 2? Part of what made Monolith Renoir such a FUN boss was that I was regularly hitting the damage cap on a lot of my main attacks, so I was having to get aggressively clever in picking my skills to maximize my damage output—multi-hit attacks, even if a little weaker, became MUCH more valuable because 60%*3 is a lot higher than 100%*1. Act 3 onward, it is sort of fun pumping up Maelle's third-level gradient attack so she can land a 8-million-damage attack, but it also felt like once I'd figured out a few core algorithms for maximizing my damage output, the game was more or less "solved" and became a little less interesting. Give me more constraints!
* Bird Guy's favorite part was Act 1; I think I liked Act 2 a bit more overall. I get why the Act 1 love—Bird Guy said it's just really satisfying to slowly discover this world, and it's so well-paced, and it feels like there's something a little new and different in every dungeon. In Act 2, he was getting a little "uhhh why are we following this Verso guy again" feelings, and said the motivations for the characters felt less crystal-clear, and it was clear they were Hinting At Larger Mysteries But Not Revealing Them Yet... and yeah, unsurprisingly I liked Act 2 for all those reasons LOL. They're both really strong, to be clear, it's just interesting to notice the subtle things that draw people in or repel them.
* I really did not love the killing-as-a-mercy angle the game clearly wanted me to agree with at the end of The Reacher. I'm not even sure I disagree with it, but I'm not sure I agree, and I didn't love that railroady feeling. I can bitch about it with more specificity and more spoilers in the comments if anyone cares LOL
oh god also i forgot to mention the soundtrack. straight bangers, every single one of them. i have the sheet music for "alicia" and "verso" sitting on my piano as we speak. truly it is the 90s again and they got their own damn Uematsu lol
Full disclosure, a big reason that I got SO into this game (devoured it in ~2 weeks) was because Bird Guy got into it too, at exactly the same time, and did you know it is VERY fun to blast through a big bombastic game in Your Favorite Genre alongside the love of your life? Highly recommend it. We were heckling each other and swapping strategy protips and speculating wildly about the plot together the whole time; it was SO weeby in our household lol.
We historically have somewhat divergent tastes in video games (he plays FPSes, Soulsbornes, and grand strategy games; I tend more toward turn-based tactical RPGs, narrative-driven RPGs, stealth-action games, and platformers). There's also a lot of places where our tastes overlap (we both love a good puzzle game, hence both of us getting oneshot by Blue Prince a few months back, and we both enjoyed e.g. Breath of the Wild), but up until now I don't think he's ever liked anything in the (admittedly fuzzy) space of "big, bombastic, narrative-heavy 90s/00s-style RPGs."
He's tried a few times! Because, uh, yeah, I do talk about my childhood faves (Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy 9, Final Fantasy 10, etc) frequently enough that he's gotten curious and given a few of them a try. But man, the gameplay of a lot of the older Final Fantasy games was just never going to be appealing to him, and even the ones with more interesting gameplay are showing their age in a lot of ways. I have the nostalgia to help me push past that cruft but I get why he bounced off them.
Happily, this game seems to have been created by a bunch of thirtysomething French guys who were like "we grew up playing 90s/00s-era JRPGs and love that shit, why don't people make stuff in that style anymore, let's do that but with Modern Conveniences and also a more interactive combat system." And goddamn did they ever succeed. A ton of design decisions feel like they were like "let's take [thing we loved from some childhood game] and just bolt that sucker in," in a good way. To wit:
* The overworld feels very Final Fantasy 7 or 8-ish in the sense of wonder it evokes, how satisfying it is every time you get an "upgrade" on your "vehicle" and can travel further and faster, and how fun it is to just poke your head around and explore. Did you know sidequests used to be fun? and had their own little crunchy refreshingly-different areas instead of just being some dull little follow-a-marker-on-a-map fetch quest? They're SO fun here.
* The environment design reminds me of what Final Fantasy 13 was aiming for. That game got reamed by the gaming press at the time for being "one long hallway," and while there's some truth to that criticism, well, FF13's long hallways were never just that. They took a ton of care designing the environments you're running through, and tried to call your attention to them with banter and such. But those environments were rather at odds with the "frantically on the run" story the game was telling; I think players back then were getting frustrated because just dashing down long hallways on the run without stopping to look around isn't very fun, even if it mirrors the character's experiences, and the game didn't put quite enough in the environment to signal "hey, stop and admire stuff here!" (They WOULD try from time to time—e.g., by changing up movement by having Hope pilot some weird mini-mech—but it just wasn't often enough.) Anyway, Clair Obscur is much happier to let you slow down and shout "HEY LOOK AT ME" from time to time, for the better.
* Relatedly: there's no minimap or quest markers in the game. Which did mean I walked in circles MORE THAN ONCE in my dungeon crawling (I am... directionally challenged... in the best of circumstances... haha...), but it never actually frustrated me, because it... felt like I was exploring! (And, yes, they do a good enough job with level design that you're never HOPELESSLY lost. And the environments really are enjoyable to explore, in a pure-visual-splendor kind of way. And that splendor isn't just a specs thing—though, yeah, I was playing on a PS5 and a nice TV and there sure were a lot of pixels, heh—but, just. Choosing to illustrate places that looked cool and gorgeous and not samey and blah? I found these environments a lot more delectable than, say, Final Fantasy 16's, for a recent comparison.)
* There's a few spots in the game where they use a classic trick from the Playstation-era Final Fantasy games: fixed camera angle with a fixed background! because damnit y'all hired some artists and you KNOW how you want a particular scene/environment to look and be looked upon so you can just... force that! It's SO neat even if it's just for a couple side areas.
* I don't think it's too spoilery to say I got hella Final Fantasy 10 vibes from a lot of the characterization choices and overall plot structure.
So, yeah, the game nailed a 10/10 on "bottling up a bunch of highlights from the RPGs-of-a-specific-era into a modern Essence Du Jour." This will probably make me sound either sappy or deranged or both, but I really do feel like it let me share something precious and lovely with my husband in a way that finally got him to enjoy it too, and I'm pretty grateful for that. Sort of like the first time I took him to see fireflies in Kentucky because he, a west coast boy, had never seen them before.
Combat, however—combat is very different than any mainline Final Fantasy game, and it rules, actually.
I've heard people compare Clair Obscur's combat to Super Mario RPG and the Paper Mario series, and those comparisons are apt. Bird Guy's quippy description is "Dark Souls for people with one hand," which is also apt. You don't have to manage 3D movement during combat, and you don't have to do any unexpected fast-reflex-y actions on your turn, but you do need to dodge/parry during your opponent's turn.
(I was worried it would be too intense for me for some reason; it was so totally fine and I had no reason to worry. I started on normal difficulty and actually jacked up the difficulty near the end of Act 2 because I was getting TOO STRONK. Hard is... hard, but appropriately so! feels very satisfying! highly recommend it! And in general the game does a good job of tuning the difficulty so that a tough boss fight will feel IMPOSSIBLE at first, but it'll also motivate you to muck around with your party's skills and equipment, and you'll roll in with some new strategic angle, and... lose again, but less badly this time! And after a few more loops of really learning and practicing those dodges, you'll prevail and shout wildly and it's VERY satisfying.)
The plot's another thing I was a little apprehensive about going in. The premise sounded a little stilted/weird/cheesy to my ear, and the vague rumblings I'd heard about the game online made it sound like it was all going to be some sort of philosophical-dilemma-disguised-as-a-story sort of deal, which is just not interesting in to me. (I very seriously entertained majoring in philosophy; I've taken classes on "what if we were a brain in a vat tho" kind of dilemmas; I get the appeal. I just don't find it as appealing these days :P)
Without spoiling, I'd say it doesn't really demand deep philosophical wrestling any more than, say, Christopher Nolan's Inception does—it's there if you want it and I'm sure forum nerds are arguing about it at we speak (<3 you forum nerds, you are my people), but it's mostly focused on some broader thematic concerns and the attendant characters. I don't think the characters or their world are quite as juicy in terms of their interpersonal dynamics or as fully-fleshed-out-in-relation-to-their-world as, say, the Final Fantasy 10 cast... but they're interesting enough (Verso and Maelle prove particularly chewy), there's good synergy in the ensemble, and the game REALLY leans hard into the light-and-dark interplay suggested by the title. The bright/charming bits are SURPRISINGLY goofy and silly and disarming for it; the grim bits are grim in a PG-13 way but no less satisfying for it.
Okay that's al lthe general stuff. Some more spoiler-y and off-the-cuff thoughts below—no major spoilers but if you're like "I do not even wish to Know The Name Of Potential Bosses In The Game," yeah, here's your chance to stop reading.
* Monolith Renoir is the best fight in the game, probably up there with Metal Gear Solid 3's The End for how much I enjoyed it. I'm sort of pissed they don't let you keep checkpoint saves at specific points in the game, because I'd like the ability to just redo that + a couple other interesting boss battles, with the stats/equipment I had at that time, and that's simply not possible without playing the entire game over again. What a shame.
* In a way I sort of wish they hadn't removed the damage cap at the end of act 2? Part of what made Monolith Renoir such a FUN boss was that I was regularly hitting the damage cap on a lot of my main attacks, so I was having to get aggressively clever in picking my skills to maximize my damage output—multi-hit attacks, even if a little weaker, became MUCH more valuable because 60%*3 is a lot higher than 100%*1. Act 3 onward, it is sort of fun pumping up Maelle's third-level gradient attack so she can land a 8-million-damage attack, but it also felt like once I'd figured out a few core algorithms for maximizing my damage output, the game was more or less "solved" and became a little less interesting. Give me more constraints!
* Bird Guy's favorite part was Act 1; I think I liked Act 2 a bit more overall. I get why the Act 1 love—Bird Guy said it's just really satisfying to slowly discover this world, and it's so well-paced, and it feels like there's something a little new and different in every dungeon. In Act 2, he was getting a little "uhhh why are we following this Verso guy again" feelings, and said the motivations for the characters felt less crystal-clear, and it was clear they were Hinting At Larger Mysteries But Not Revealing Them Yet... and yeah, unsurprisingly I liked Act 2 for all those reasons LOL. They're both really strong, to be clear, it's just interesting to notice the subtle things that draw people in or repel them.
* I really did not love the killing-as-a-mercy angle the game clearly wanted me to agree with at the end of The Reacher. I'm not even sure I disagree with it, but I'm not sure I agree, and I didn't love that railroady feeling. I can bitch about it with more specificity and more spoilers in the comments if anyone cares LOL
oh god also i forgot to mention the soundtrack. straight bangers, every single one of them. i have the sheet music for "alicia" and "verso" sitting on my piano as we speak. truly it is the 90s again and they got their own damn Uematsu lol
Major Clair Obscur spoilers in this comment!
I did enjoy Verso's reaction to that moment at the end of the Reacher, though. I'm glad the game acknowledged that Maelle could have at least given him a chance to say goodbye, and apparently it just... didn't occur to her?
Thinking about it, it feels like Maelle's failure to register the real weight to Alicia's life and Verso's relationship with her is actually weirdly reflective of the story's attitude to the people of this world in its ending, but I'm going to sit on my hands to keep myself from getting into my issues with the ending choice; I've talked about that enough on my own blog!
Re: Major Clair Obscur spoilers in this comment!
The conclusion of The Reacher bothered me more than the conclusion of the game itself (though I have a bugbear about that one too; I'll get to it in a bit). It's possible I missed something (I think they were going for "REALLY understated dynamics" wrt Alicia, but it left me mostly confused haha), but I didn't understand (1) why Alicia wanted to be killed, (2) why she wanted Maelle to be the one to do it, and (3) why we, the player, were supposed to feel... some kind of melancholic peace at this?
I chatted with a friend after who was like "oh, see, the thing with Alicia is that The Paintress could've painted her any way she wanted, and she painted her with the same burn scars / physical mutism she has in real life, and she hated existing that way + with the permanent physical knowledge that Her Mother Doesn't Love Her." And I'm like... mildly more sympathetic to the "your very existence being a reminder that you are Unloved" angle than I am to the "well obviously someone with physical disfigurement would simply Prefer To Not Exist" angle (the latter is pretty fucking yikes to me!), but I don't think either angle feels good to me. Like if a friend came to me and was like "I bear this physical reminder that my mom hates me every day and I want my life to end," I wouldn't be like "oh, that's sad, I respect your wishes & will help you kill yourself," I'd be like, "yo FUCK your mom, you can be so much more than she ever dreamed you'd be, c'mon let's go be badasses together." Like come ON.
I'm not an absolute hardliner on "all assisted suicide is morally wrong" (though I'm probably much more skeptical of it than the median person, to be fair—no judgment on people who have different feelings, just, my own feelings are pretty complicated), but this isn't even a particularly hard case I don't think? Like you could maybe at least get me to grant the game was Trying An Interesting Thing if they'd done some footwork to concretely demonstrate that Life Is A Prison in some way very unique to painted!Alicia, but so much of the other stuff in the game (Gustave, Lune, Sciel) seems to be demonstrating that these painted people exist in their own right and thus can grow, change, and surprise each other and themselves in all the ways that ordinary humans can. So you really have to show me why the avenues of grow/change/surprise are somehow closed to Alicia in some way, or show why her suffering is so profound that it may override those possibilities. idk.
and then when Verso kind of sighs, after the fight, "at least she's free now," and her last words were "send me to my family"... I didn't get either of those? painted!Alicia was purely a creation of The Paintress; once she's gone she's gone, there's not a family she's going back to. (VERSO IS LITERALLY RIGHT THERE. HE IS FAMILY. COME ON.) and "at least they're free / at peace" has always rubbed me the wrong way when people talk about death—they may be free of suffering, but unless you believe in an afterlife—which none of the characters in this game ever reference—like... freedom/peace seem like things you can only experience while you exist, right? (admittedly Verso's comment is at least in-character, so i get it as "a thing you say when you're trying to cope with this fucked-up thing that happened," but again, I sorta felt like I was getting "the game is telling you this is how you're supposed to feel" vibes from it and i felt Annoyed and Encroached Upon lol.)
and, yeah, just clicked through your blog to read your annoyance at the ending and basically +1 to all that lol. i actually minded it less in the ending context because the situation felt contrived enough that i'm just kinda like "ah, i see, they're ginning up a Mages vs Templars-style conflict so all the nerds have something to argue on forums about afterwards"—"let the canvas exist, just don't be literally addicted to it" is a fine compromise option, and i totally get that the tragedy is that these characters cannot make that choice, but it also makes me more comfortable being like "ok both these choices suck, i get that the game is trying to guilt me more heavily for one of them but like, they do both suck and no amount of Authorial Intent can change that" lmao. i chose Maelle because i was like "wouldn't deleting the world now basically amount to a genocide, that seems worse than one family having a really fucked-up situation, even if that doest indeed suck for that family, so Maelle it is." and then you're immediately treated to Verso breaking down and repeating "I don't want this life" over and over and it's like ohhh I see lmao sorry bud.
i only recalled after that technically the only created humans still around were Verso/Sciel/Lune, which does call up squicky/weird questions—"if you hit the 'undo' button on a genocide in this universe, are the people who are recreated the same people, or totally new people," e.g. is the fact that the world already got wiped out the kind of error it's impossible to recover from? (i suspect the game was trying to foreshadow this by mentioning that the reborn Noco wouldn't be Noco?) but that all gets very pseudophilosophical very fast (it sure feels like the game was making an argument "look, these painted people are real people, with their own hopes and dreams," which would imply an ethical obligation to me?) and isn't really the kind of question i'm interested in wrestling with. so like, as a way to gin up drama between Maelle and Verso and put them on believably opposite sides, i'm fine with that, but as soon as you think about "okay what are the actual ethics of this decision," shit falls apart fast lol. it's fine; it is what it is. or at least, fine compared to the fucking REACHER dungeon lmao
wow sorry this turned into a wall of text i hope you meant it when you said please bitch away LOL
Re: Major Clair Obscur spoilers in this comment!
It's so bad! I got distracted by other elements of the ending when I was talking about it, but I really disliked Maelle's 'well, of course I don't want to leave the canvas and go back to my WORTHLESS REAL BODY, I'd rather just stay here and die' talk at the end, too. As much as I love this game, there's a really unpleasant 'well, obviously this Tragically Disabled person would be better off dead' undercurrent to parts of it.
I'd be like, "yo FUCK your mom, you can be so much more than she ever dreamed you'd be, c'mon let's go be badasses together."
God, this would have been so much better. Maybe Alicia's problem is actually that she's at the top of a tower, isolated from everyone! Bring her to the gestral village and let her make some friends!
(VERSO IS LITERALLY RIGHT THERE. HE IS FAMILY. COME ON.)
Exactly! Alicia is part of the painted replica of the family; her family is Verso, who is within the painting! Being erased will take her away from him, and it won't bring her any closer to the original family either.
you're immediately treated to Verso breaking down and repeating "I don't want this life" over and over and it's like ohhh I see lmao sorry bud.
Sorry, Verso! But, hey, everyone else wants their lives, so... hopefully the fact that your existence is helping to preserve theirs can be some consolation?
"if you hit the 'undo' button on a genocide in this universe, are the people who are recreated the same people, or totally new people"
Hmm! There's some interesting scope for unsettling fanfiction there, where the people Maelle has repainted don't quite feel like the people they're supposed to be. After all, they were originally painted by someone else, and no two painters have quite the same style.
(Maelle turns out to favour cubism, with disastrous results? Maybe not.)
Re: Major Clair Obscur spoilers in this comment!
During that part of Maelle's ending, Bird Guy actually shouted at the screen, "Maelle, most major depressions only last six months!" and like... he's right lol. I absolutely understand why she's upset, and that is fine I think, but... I don't love that the narrative seems to put a finger on the scale as to what we're to make of that fact, instead of, y'know, the rather obvious possibility of "she has been through A Fucking Time & thus isn't well equipped to see a non-doomed version of her present situation," for one, haha.
...also omg, Alicia hanging out in the gestral village would be SO cute. if there's any group of people ready to love on A Totally Badass Warrior & call her one of their own, immediately & thoroughly, it'd be those lil gremlins <3
There's some interesting scope for unsettling fanfiction there, where the people Maelle has repainted don't quite feel like the people they're supposed to be
this really would be interesting & chewy; a lot of angles you could take with it. they don't specify in the game much of the "how" behind painting; tons of room to play with "how much does intentionality actually have to do with the result," "is it frustrating to interact with your own paintings vs other people's paintings because you, of course, see the flaws in your own work better than everyone else", etc... food for thought...!
Re: Major Clair Obscur spoilers in this comment!
I do think.....Maelle could have chosen better even if she was determined to enslave Verso's remaining soul for her own purposes, by *not repainting Verso.* But that's very "wow a sixteen year old sure is a bad choice for a god, isn't she" in keeping with the rest of her, like the "well I'll just kill Alicia" (and I have a complicated feeling about the disfigurement too; Aline's journal talks about how she cannot even look at Alicia but then she repainted her the same way as....punishment for whom? But also like Maelle's now spent sixteen years being able to move and talk and she doesn't want to go back to NOT having that, which I can understand, but that could have been framed way better and wasn't.
Re: Major Clair Obscur spoilers in this comment!
Re: Major Clair Obscur spoilers in this comment!
Re: Major Clair Obscur spoilers in this comment!
Re: Major Clair Obscur spoilers in this comment!
Re: Major Clair Obscur spoilers in this comment!
Re: Major Clair Obscur spoilers in this comment!
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you *can* turn off the damage cap break, though! And you can change settings to lower it again at flags. (I, a scrub, played on story and found it mostly appropriate for my averaged-out ability; on a good day I could almost certainly handle Normal or Hard but on a migraine day even story could be tricky, so.)
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in particular, in *theory* every single battle in this game is doable starting from level 1, right? if you parry literally every time and never ever miss, you will always win, but... the battle will take so long.
a lot of the postgame enemies have SO MUCH hp that it would cross over into "unfun" territory if you were limited to 9999 per blow, because the battle would take forever even if you were in fact parrying at a high enough level to demonstrated you'd "mastered" that enemy. so what i really want is a damage cap that's higher than 9999 but low enough to force me to be creative, AND/OR some other mechanism to force some other combat strategies to be the "optimal" strategy in any given encounter. (right now my strategy on every fight is "get gradient bar to 3/3, buff maelle, maelle does her 3-cost gradient attack, rinse and repeat." i'm pretty sure (?) this is the biggest bang-for-your-buck, damage wise, pretty much everywhere, but i want to be forced to do Other Things Sometimes haha.)
(i don't actually know a perfect solution to this problem; balancing a lategame where you have given gamers ALL the tricks is really hard! but i can grouse about it lol)
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Yeah that Maelle trick is, uh, basically how you cheese an optional boss that is otherwise--like, it's *possible* to fight him the long way around, and I did in fact grind through part of the fight that way, but then I got frustrated and quit lol.
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- Monolith!Renoir does rock, big fan of the character in general, although I think he comes off as a bit too reasonable it hurts other parts of the narrative, like having him have experience with getting lost in a canvas and Aline coming during the final boss fight validate a lot of his arguments for destroying the canvas. There's still an element of "patriarch trying to hold onto control" patronization, but I feel like his flaws could have been sharper
- My biggest critique for the ending is that Maelle should have been the one to make either choice. I went with the Verso route bc despite the ethical implications, I was more allured by resolving family drama than actually attached to Lumiere or the world. If the game didn't care about its implications, I couldn't bother to care. But the fact the only way to express that decision was by another man putting down an overly emotional/delusional woman who can't be expected to indulge in escapism safely is not a good look. Even taking into account the overall themes of suicide/self-destruction, this game really has an attitude of "ppl will only walk away from the ledge if they are forcibly pulled back" which isn't super respectful to anyone!
- I did overall like the game, but I have wanted a space to bitch about the current critical darling to ppl who get it is still doing cool things.
to anyone reading: potential clair obscur spoilers ahead!
heh, yeah, i thought Gustave's death was effective and worked fine, but i was a little surprised how some ppl seemed SO surprised / taken aback by it... it seemed obvious to me from fairly early on that Maelle was the "real" main character (why else would she have the cool special visions / nightmares etc), and i'm like "ah yeah ok you gotta kill someone The Characters Actually Care About to make the stakes Real," but i didn't think it was The Most Surprising Or Affecting Thing or anything like that
> re: renoir:
they do a lot of things right with Renoir in terms of vibe, harmony-with-worldbuilding, etc (his intro is so effective because all we need to see is "he's old" to be like. wait holy shit none of these people have seen an old person in literal decades, this is crazy), but there's a limited amount of... "there" there? we just don't see quite enough of his personality, characterization, etc for him to exist as more than a "vague patriarchal figure designed to loom over Verso and then Maelle." like he's an archetype rather than a real person. which admittedly if they had fleshed him out more it may have limited his appeal (the nice thing about an archetype is everyone can project whatever they want onto it; also i'm very much not the Median Consumer in my tastes so catering more to me may lose you money lol)
this tho:
> There's still an element of "patriarch trying to hold onto control" patronization, but I feel like his flaws could have been sharper
i'd read that fic about the patriarchal control angle. def agree game didn't bring it out enough
> this game really has an attitude of "ppl will only walk away from the ledge if they are forcibly pulled back" which isn't super respectful to anyone!
astutely observed; i agree yeah. and it's interesting how much that dovetails with the main thing that bugged me, the whole "oh but sometimes when someone decides they want to die you just need to accept that immediately and uncomplicatedly," like... okay so when are we pulling people back from the edge or not. and what does that say about what we value. not the best lol
> I did overall like the game, but I have wanted a space to bitch about the current critical darling to ppl who get it is still doing cool things.
my blog is ALWAYS a safe space for bitching no matter how much i like/dislike any given thing, lol, it's always fun to hear what other people think in this lil space of lovely ppl (yourself included haha)