clair obscur: expedition 33 retrospective
Jul. 8th, 2025 03:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaOkay, 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
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Date: 2025-07-08 11:43 pm (UTC)