| Platform | OVERALL |
|---|---|
| PC | 9.50 |
| Overall | 9.50 |
|
It’s rare for an original game from a small new developer to come out the gate with an instant classic, but that is exactly what has happened with Sandfall Interactive and the current front runner for GOTY, Clair Obscur Expedition 33. What initially piqued my interest in this game was the impressive graphics and the focus on turn-based combat but with a heavy emphasis with added timing inputs for dodges and parries. Never did I think it would become one of my favorite RPGs of all time. Expedition 33 oozes with love of the JRPGs of old, it feels like a long lost, very French, Final Fantasy game. The combat screen borrows heavily from FFX, including a vertical bar which shows the order in which players and enemies will get to act. This game/s fusion of classic turn based strategy with elements of hardcore action game dodges and parries is what makes it stand out. Yes button inputs for added/reduced damage has been done many times before, the Mario RPGs being the most well known example. This isn’t like a Mario RPG though, the timing of the enemy attacks and how important it is to actually avoid damage has more in common with Sekiro. The button presses are not optional, it is not a bonus. If you do not dodge or parry you will die extremely fast. It also plays a huge part on offense as each skill your characters can use has an AP number, you generate AP in many ways, but mainly from parrying There are options to make the defensive timing more forgiving but no option to remove it as it is tied to the core concept of the gameplay, your defense stat is a small component, more of a fall back plan if you mess up your timing as a player. As an action game fan this level of skill needed to excel at the combat was thrilling and kept me engaged in every fight, even low level enemies. For others this might be a huge turn off though I think there are ways to make it much easier so you can still enjoy all the other elements this game offers. They already had me with the excellent dodge parry system, they didn’t stop there. The way each character has unique combat abilities is just brilliant. There are a lot of elements that I am reminded of from FF6 (one of the all time greats), like that game many team members had combat elements completely unique to them. There are only 5 team members so that does make it easier for the devs to differentiate them all, still it’s just how great each character is that is so impressive.Take Lune for instance, she is a magic focused character who has this floating four orb container which fills with different elemental magic depending on what skill you use. Say you use a fire attack, that generates a fire orb to fill her container. Every skill she has can absorb the opposite orb to enhance that skill. This creates a sort of planning so that one skill will feed into the next and build as the fight goes on. There are add on weapons which can manipulate how many orbs are generated and when, this and many other perks can be combined to maximize her usefulness. Another character Maele has multiple stances, each skill she uses ends with her in a difference stance. There is an offensive stance which gives you more power but you take more damage. A defense stance which reduces damage but limits damage output. And a special stance which deals 200% damage. Once again skill management and planning to use specific skills to reach the stances at the right time, with the right amount of AP points to use the skills becomes its own game within the fight. There is another character who has a ranking system taken right out of DMC, the more attacks you do without getting hit the higher your ranking which increases damage to crazy levels, plus gives major bonuses to your skills. There is a character which by killing enemies you gain their abilities, hardly an original type of character but hey I always love the team member that absorbs the enemy attacks. Excellent dodge/parry system which makes every battle intense, check. Every team member is unique and has their own battle system which makes it a joy to switch between them, check. Thats already a great combat system, but they didn’t stop there as the most impactful element to combat is the pictos and luminas system which allows you to stack many many perks to create builds that could eventually break the combat system wide open. You will find about a hundred pictos around the world, each character can equip three at a time. These will give massive stat bonuses to one or two stats, the grand majority of your base stats will come from the three pictos you have equipped. This means your leveling up and attribute distribution of points is not that important, in fact, attribute points should just be used to scale weapon damage which gets a bonus from three different stats depending on the weapon. For example if I have a sword that gives me S bonus for HP and an A for speed scaling I should max out those attributes as I level up and ignore the rest. A pictos can give you 700 defense points with one slot, if you put in 99 points into defense you will not get close to that 700 defense. So it's odd, leveling up and your base stats don’t really matter much, it's about pictos management. Now the most important part of pictos is an added bonus that each has, which after four combat wins is “learned” and becomes lumina, a perk ANY character can use. One pictos can say “gain 50% break damage”, once that attribute is learned it then can be equipped as a lumina for all party members, each attribute comes with a cost, the more beneficial the bonus the higher the lumina cost. Lumina points and pictos are found all over the world, as secrets found in levels and mostly bonuses for battling the hardest bosses or side quest enemies. You will have hundreds of lumina points for each character and nearly a hundred different attributes to attach. Here is where it gets really fun to create builds, these attributes can stack and stack and stack until you make an absolute wild build which can kill super bosses in one or two hits. Now thats the end game, i’m getting ahead of myself, for most of the campaign the evolution of pictos, luminas and characters skills is so well balanced; I can’t think of many RPGs that had a power creep as well paced as this one. At each level of the story elements of the combat system opens up more and more. It introduces characters at a great pace, each one being so unique that alone makes for great variety but the way the luminas impact how you build your squad for enemy encounters takes the strategy to a different level. For the majority of the game damage levels are capped, this frustrated me for a while because I felt I reached the limit too easily around act 2 and this forced me to find attack with multiple hits rather than trying to have one big hit for max damage that would be capped. It was only after act 2 when the game breaks open and they remove the damage cap that I realized why it was there in the first place. The cap allowed all the combat systems to shine, to force the player to think strategically on every aspect of the battles, battles that would be LONG, that would require many rounds of perfect parries and sweat-inducing close calls. That cap made you use luminas in different ways, more defensive, more team oriented. It was guided in a way, the good kind of guidance where the invisible hand of the developers were making sure the best of the gameplay was coming out. During these first two acts new elements would be added like a break meter and gradient attacks (think limit breaks). Enemies were a huge part of why the combat system works so well, it could be easy to just make them all sort of the same and call it a day but no, many of them have unique strategies where the combat is a little puzzle, especially with bosses. There is another combat skill, free aim, which allows each character to shoot at an enemy, many of which have weakpoints. Each shot costs an AP, AP which is needed to use your skills, this adds more strategic elements where a player must make a choice of firing a shot or saving up for a powerful attack. What I loved though is when bosses would have floating elements around them and having to shoot them down can stop their attack or lower their defenses. It gets fun when these things are floating around and moving while you aim, some become a sort of game of simon, having to shoot in a certain order. Some bosses can’t be hurt until stunned by filling the break meter, plenty of skills are break focused and luminas can add break damage to all attacks. Every battle has all these elements to them where all the pieces of the combat system are coming into play. It's simply brilliant. In the final act of the game events happen where the damage cap is removed and the game breaks wide open from a build perspective and an exploration basis. Act 3 is very different, you can basically rush to final boss immediately and end it BUT the majority of the world opens up allowing you to try a breadth of optional content. This content involves special side missions for each team member which unlocks their ultimate limit breaks and gives a great side story for each of them. The majority of the optional content is challenging battles; bosses that are far harder than the final boss. To defeat these optional bosses you must drastically change your lumina strategy to now focus on pure damage output. It is best to stack every single attribute which can multiply your damage, honestly it felt more like a math game than party building at the end. It’s fun when you are slowly figuring out the right combinations, the right weapons and skills to use. Finally destroying that boss which wiped you out in one second earlier in the game is a great feeling. That said the END END combat basically just becomes exploiting a few moves over and over that do millions of damage. Also defense, dodging and parry stops mattering. Healing doesn’t matter, hell half the team stops mattering. The best strategy for the toughest enemies is kill them in one or two hits before they can hit you, which is almost certain to be an instant death. I feel the combat lost something there, the chase to get to that power level is fun but once you reach it I feel so many of the best elements of the combat system got left behind. I hope in future games they can keep more of a balance to the optional super bosses. A big word of warning, do not do all the optional combat before fighting the final boss. I would say just do the character side stories and then do the final boss, that way you are at a proper level to enjoy the combat. I sadly went into the final story segment as a god and absolutely destroyed everything in the final level, it felt anticlimactic gameplay wise. Do not make my mistake. When FF entered the PS2 era it decided to do away with the overworld, I love overworlds. Part of why FFX was not a favorite of mine is the lack of overworld, why did going to a new gen mean we couldn’t do fun overworlds anymore? Well the devs once again took from the best of RPG past and gave us the best overworld map in decades. This is the traditional overworld where your characters walk around a small recreation of the world, like literally walking the globe, and when you reach a point of interest you go into the actual level. The way this overworld opens up is so good, starting with simple walking around and eventually getting the ability to swim and ultimately fly through the skies. I loved seeing a floating island early on and wondering what will be there when I finally get the chance to reach it. There were random doorways hidden in the world which transport you to mysterious mansion. Giant creatures roam the overworld allowing you to test your might; early on you will be humbled but when you eventually return to enact your revenge, it’s so perfect. There are multiple combat arenas, beaches with small mini games to earn costumes, and hidden merchants which supply some great weapons. It is the type of world that is being begged to be explored while not being gigantic, it is big enough to give you a sense of wonder and never feel bloated. There are no side quest markers or 3 of the same activities repeated over and over. It is a world open for you to discover on your own. Most of the discussion around this game will be the story, for good reasons because it is one of the most interesting unique stories I’ve seen in gaming. In this world humans are stuck on an island, protected from a deadly outside world. Across the sea on a giant mountain a god like figure named the Paintress paints a huge number on the mountain, that number is the age which will wiped out in a year. Every year, counting down, an entire age group is Thanos snapped out of existence. It started with the oldest, it has been going on for 60+ years and they are now reaching everyone age 34. A large party of the next age group to be eliminated go on an expedition out into the dangerous world to try to kill the paintress and end the horror before they become extinct. You are part of expedition 33, and this will be the first expedition to discover the truth about the world and the Paintress. The premise instantly hooked me as did the excellent characters who are voiced by many industry greats including Andy Serkis. There are wild twists and turns, major moments that shocked me, left me emotional. This story hits on every level, though the key theme is grief and the difference on how we deal with it. I loved the party, Gustave, Maelle, Luna, Verso, Sciel and Monoco all great characters with distinct personalities that are explored during the story. It never reaches the levels of Bioware team building and I wish they did more with the exclusive side stories for each. A lot of the team bonding happens at camp where you get very static cutscenes. Still with those limitations I still felt attached to every one of them. The most surprising character of all is Andy Serkis as Renoir, our lead villain who goes through as much of a journey as our characters. I won’t spoil anything, just that its a story where you can see everyone's point of view is right in their own way, like life there sometimes is no right answer. The ending is powerful, there are two of them, both very thought provoking which had me running to a forum to discuss immediately after. This is a story that will stay with me for some time. The artistic quality doesn’t stop there, the graphics, art direction and especially the music just shows that even a small team can craft something that rivals the biggest of games. True artistry comes from passionate developers working together with a vision to create a game they would love to play, not some focus tested corporate monstrosity. This game is gorgeous, using UE5 it looks better than many AAA games, mainly because of the artistry on display on the design. It’s sort of surreal with floating debris, a shattered world with mountains buildings blown to pieces but also frozen in time. NPCs come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, it doesn’t really fit any traditional RPG design. It is all very French as well, there is certain imagery that comes from their culture which fits this world so well. The main city isclearly supposed to be an approximation of Paris, it’s citizens French, a twisted Eiffle tower at its center. Sometimes foreign games try to chase American trends and leave their culture behind, not so here. There is some limitation to what this small team could do, noticeable in the character models and animations, it ain’t ND level motion capture… so what. Yeah the cutscenes don’t look like a perfect recreation of the emotion of the actors playing them, the voice acting quality and strength of the writing more than makes up for it. It is still astounding how beautiful this game is with such a small team. Out of everything the aspect that might deserve the most praise is the incredible music. Please read up on the story on how the composer was found, it’s such a cool story, honestly it’s a miracle that all these people met and were so talented and ambitious to create this game. This is one of the best video game soundtracks of all time. It hit multiple genres with ease, going from melancholy operatic singing to rave techno beats. Every location has its own vibe to it which is enhanced by the music. The battle themes of which there are many all hit in exactly the right way, even the fun joke style fights with their circus like melody. I don’t know what they are singing most of the time because the majority of the vocals are in French, it doesn’t matter, I was singing along regardless. It’s one of those games where I can’t separate the game from the music, it would be a different game without this music. There are some negatives to point out, I will just list them all here. For one the level design in most areas is pretty basic. It follows the sort of action game layout with a main path that has a few branches that lead to the “secret item”. As the game goes on there are some more winding levels that have shortcuts that open. A few offer some platforming though in general anything involving platforming in this game is pretty bad. I love mini games, I like my RPGs to have fun diversions, there are a few around the game world but nothing really interesting. RPGs tend to have cities and towns to visit and in reality this game has two, if you can even call the tutorial area a city. For as great as the overworld was, it felt like just a world of game levels and not lived in places that you get to learn about and explore, there are narrative reasons for this but still I like having breaks from the usual level/dungeon crawling. The menu system could use some better sorting options and overall streamlining, especially luminas. Sorting through a hundred of them gets annoying, and trying to change a build to better fight one enemy is too time consuming, especially if you want to go back to a more traditional build after. Being able to save sets of pictos and luminas for fast switching would be a godsend. I think I covered the difficulty and build issues with the final act already, this would be an area I believe could be improved. I had multiple crashes during the middle of playing this game, it was fixed after a patch, so hopefully that is no longer a concern. Honestly I just wanted more, not bloated more but more ideas, more variety in activities and so on. It is always good to have something to build toward for their next game. Clair Obscur Expedition 33 is an absolute classic, for this to be a first entry by a new team is unfathomable. There are so many moments where all the elements are working so perfectly, in sync to create such memorable highs. From breathtaking story moments where my jaw is on the floor, I am feeling all kinds of emotions and the boss strolls in, the music goes into high gear, attacks come flying in while I desperately try to stay alive. As the battle rages when all the planning comes together and I start nailing all those parries for big counter damage, I just want to scream “YEEAAAH” as I go for that final blow… that is gaming, that’s why this medium is the greatest entertainment medium in the world. This is a game I hope the entire industry learns from, it’s not about the biggest budget or chasing the latest trends. Find people who have a vision, who are passionate about that vision and never waver until they have made something they love before sharing it with the rest of it. Score: 9.5 |
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Posted by Dvader Sat, 31 May 2025 22:57:17
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