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.

[Shadowdust]

Expedition 33 is one of the most thoughtful games to come in several years. The game play is super fun and it's a nice mixture of several mechanics experienced separately in other games. The way they combine them though makes for unique game play that never really feels boring. Systems are also very much inspired by those who laid down the path before. The music is on Nier or Xenoblade levels of awesome. The story is deep and emotional. The characters are not stereotypical archetypes but are rather unique and relatable. I am currently finishing my fourth New Game Plus. I haven't replayed a game this much since FFX. You can tell that this game was beloved to the team that made it. It's not just some cookie cutter "safe" game. In a drought of original games, this Expedition 33 is an oasis. I do no regret buying this game. I have it on Steam and PS5 and both run just fine. My only issue that I had to fix which is just on all of my modern games is how my threads were processing. Sometimes it would utilize my E-cores and cause severe choppiness. Once I directed the game to run on P-cores in task manager, it ran silky smooth for several hours.

[Sephiroth]

Clair Obscure does a lot of things right and it is definitely already one of my favourite games.

The issue is: As much as people say it is "the kind of RPG that Square should make nowadays" it ust is not. Clair Obscure is a revival of the good and the bad.

I have played through the game excessively.

Argument: "this game was made by just xx people", "you would be surprised how cheap this game was to make"

I noticed. It is noticable. Clair Obscure has lots of technical issues and shortcuts. The world map might be an attempt of bringing back the overworld to an extent we last saw in Type 0 and Dissidia Duodecim but the fact of the matter is, as pretty as it is in design, it looks iike ass. It is blurry as hell, washed out and bright. And I am not even sure if the bright and burry thing was not just done to cover up the fact they could not properly pull it off. In any way it looks worse.

Rendering issues

You can se things on the overworld map, like the water textures load in all the time, in the first area after Lumiere you literally can see a sunray load in step by step. Every single time. I have played worse technically troubled games but the point is, do not act like this game is such a budget achievement when it can be seen where the corner were cut or were the experience was not there.

Story, Interactions and Scene Composition.

The strongest thing this game has going for it are the character interaction and how a scene is crafted. Sometimes the facial expressions in the scenes are more amazing than what I have seen in any other game.

On the other hand, the main story, well ... it is touching, it is even more touching with the score. But it once again is one of those games where you notice the developers had a bit of an idea and then plastered it onto a 40 hour game and then noticed they still had 37 hours left. Clair Obscure has a few key scenes of the main story. And for the rest there is barely anything in the game. This game has the same issues as many RPGs nowadays and back in the day.

What do we gotta do now? Get a stone. What to we gotta do now? Kill two bosses. What do we gotta do now? Get this.

Old FFs also had that but not to the same extent. They had storys and sub sections of stories that were intertwined. This feels more like Pokémon Red. Close to no story - a bit exaggerated now - with a lot of irrelevant quests that are "part of the story." If you want to write a short and condesnsed story that is not too overbloated but also does its job, look at Chrono Trigger. If you want to write a story that has "seemingly irrelevant quests" but that are still intertwined into the overall world and main story which still exists and feels like it is the thing that has the most weight, look at Nier 1 or Stellar Blade. Developers should get their asses up again and think about a better connection of journey and story. Final Fantasy X did that. And this game literally is the French FFX.

Re-skins and other piintless things.

Yes, you can find collectibles in this game. But just so there is exploration there is no meaning in putting in 5 optional dungeons. They are pretty, sure. But give them more meaning. And I do not want to fight the same bosses and reskins of them again. You want to bring back the old RPG feeling? The nonsensical parts of this stuff being brought back is not necessary.

Turn based? More like Active-Passive Combat

This is not really a turn based game. It is turn based in its most obvious meaning. They had a concept of turns. But you are supposed to play in every single turn, even the opponent's. This destroys the point of turnless combat. You can do that in games where it does not get too much attention but you are supposed to full on use it all the time here. Even in games like Yugioh, which also has stuff like "activate effects and trap cards in the opponent's turn" people have had enough of it in the last few years because the way cards got it destroyed the game to the point of "my turn is my opponent's turn as well."

Overall it was a great experience and Alicia is one fantastic character but I do not agree with people tbis is how Final Fantasy should be. Square should put in more effort, that is true. But not like that.