Clair Obscura: Expedition 33

[Wolf Kanno]

I've been seeing this game making the rounds among all the old fogey parts of the RPG community as being yet another game showing how you can still have AAA graphics and turn-based RPG combat that is engaging. Since I don't own anything that could hope to play it, I was curious if anyone has and what their thoughts were on the game?

[Loony BoB]

Spoilerless review, let's go!

I played on Xbox Game Pass for PC, so it cost me nothing other than my subscription.

I have some very nitpicky criticisms I could give to it, and I'm not a fan of a certain part of the story, but that only dropped it down from a 10/10 to a 9/10 and I would be absolutely stunned if anything beats it for my personal GOTY.

It has a soundtrack on par with my all time favourites - the likes of Rebirth, Endwalker, XVI, NieR Automata, etc - while still being very distinctive to any other soundtrack I've heard, including the aforementioned.

It has voice acting and direction on par with Firewatch, with characters actually talking over each other in some moments - unlike most games that have "interruptions" be "wait one second after the person mysteriously stops talking and then play the next voice line".

It has a plot that is genuinely unique to me, despite having ~35 years of gaming under my belt. The game is linear-adjacent, in the same way most FF games are. What I mean by this is that you will very rarely go back to previous areas for story reasons, but you will likely discover optional areas along the way as well as having the odd reason to backtrack for gameplay or difficulty wall reasons. I found exploring in both the overworld and the instances to be very satisfying and rewarding, both for 'material' rewards and beauty/lore rewards.

There are some options in the game, but I wouldn't go as far as saying it is a game that is defined as "Choices matter". On the topic of quantity of notable choices, there is probably only one that has a notable impact and it's late game.

The battle system is at times frustating, but overall extremely satisfying. I'm not very good at 0.14 second window QTE parry hitting, and some of the moves are clearly choreographed inconsistently (ie some are slow-mo moves, some are sped up) to make things even more difficult. Despite this, it was actually fun learning each enemy's respective timings and I was able to master dodge my way through many battles.

The character build system (skills, attributes, weapons) is absolutely fantastic. Everything feels engaging and everything seems to matter, but equally you have a lot of options - I would call it a horizontal build system rather than a vertical one for the most part, where one person could build a character up as a healer, and then they could respec them to a tank, and then to a damage dealer. If only it had some kind of way to save your builds so you didn't have to rejig 50 things in act iii every time you needed a new strategy for an endgame boss, it'd be even better.

The platforming can be frustrating at times - the roll along the ground after landing from a running jump has frustrated many people, although it only took me maybe one act to get the hang of how to manage that effectively.

Some people have experienced bugs (and I've seen them on streams) where you can't see an enemy do an attack due to weird camera angling, meaning you have to guess the parry/dodge based 100% on timing, which is genuinely in need of patch. I've never had that experience, though, thankfully.

The characters are fantastic, both playable and otherwise. None of them really felt badly managed.

I've heard people say it suffers a bit from the Unreal Engine 5, but I didn't have any problems on my PC, probably because I don't play games on monitors capable of very high framerates (to my knowledge). The people who had problems noted that these are the same problems they experience on every single UE5 game so make what you will of that.

The people I've watched play the game preferred different outfits and hairstyles to me, I'd say this is a good reflection on the character appearance options.

The minigames are entirely optional, and I finished all of them although I will note that I didn't finish a certain one on the hardest difficulty and I found that particular minigame to be horrible, as have most people I spoke to. However, some have said they found that easy and others much harder, so your mileage may vary.

The UI is incredible because it's basically not there the entire time. No minimap, which is a source of criticism, is fine by me because they justified with "we want people to look at the world, it's beautiful, when people use minimaps they look at the minimap 90% of the time" and I think the world is absolutely beautiful enough to justify their position. It still would have been nice to have a regular map that you could open up full-screen if you wanted to, but oh well. There is an overworld map you can pull up, just not for dungeons. It didn't really cause me a problem, though.

There are massive spoilers out there, so please do everything you possibly can to avoid searching for anything related to the game. This includes the translated lyrics of the songs, which apparently have heavy spoilers throughout. Some even say the music titles are spoilers, so yeah, just enjoy the game and dive into Google etc after you finish.

Overall, I would rate this as one of the best 25 or so video games I've ever played, and probably one of the top 5-10 RPGs. If I were a person who was playing every game based on today's gaming standards (graphics, music, included etc), I would say that it rates as one of the top three single player action RPGs alongside Rebirth (for all it's minigame faults, I love it) and NieR: Automata.