Surely Horii would never do this...
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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
- Thread starter Bongo
- Start date
R.R. Bigman
Coolest Guy
At this point, I don’t believe Dragon Quest 12 exists as anything more than ideas. Aside from these “fine” remakes of the first three games, the series is practically dead.
This game sounds neat. The big focus on Timed Hits has me feeling wary. Mario & Luigi: Brothership (remember that game?) ran me through the wringer with it’s brutal timing. That game also ran at a terrible frame rate, so that could have been a factor.
This game sounds neat. The big focus on Timed Hits has me feeling wary. Mario & Luigi: Brothership (remember that game?) ran me through the wringer with it’s brutal timing. That game also ran at a terrible frame rate, so that could have been a factor.
4-So
Spicy
For the most part, the timed hits are easy to achieve, I haven't seen anything that chains together more than two hits. Moreover, the timed part is (usually) to get a little extra oomph on the attacks. I haven't seen an attack outright fail (yet) because you don't hit the Perfect timing. So it's a little different than M&L in that respect. Standard atacks, which are not timed hits, can also do a relatively high amount of damage depending on the weapon, character stats, and Picto/Lumina setup.
You can toggle a setting to fully automate the offensive QTEs (haven't tested it so I don't know if it completes them at "Perfect" efficacy or what) if you want to; it's the defensive dodging and parrying that's the more mechanically important and impactful skill-gating. But that has degrees to it too, in that Story Mode makes it very difficult to die even if you miss your timings, Standard still allows for much leniency, and Expert (what I'm playing) demands learning every enemy's tells as a matter of course.
Late Act I mechanics anecdote:
It's not that game-breaking, as I'm sure the developers set it all up, and there are definite counters to it. Sure is very powerful--to the extent that I'm "not playing" most regular fights and some bosses--and extremely funny nonetheless.
i kind of stumbled into a game-breaking strat, which i'll try to make legible out of context. basically: mage character generates elemental charges with her spells; her ultimate giga-spell requires four different ones in stock to cast. she has another spell that hits four times and generates each of the four elements, but only if the respective hit crits. there's a passive that gives a character a 100% crit-rate if they're fighting alone, so to engineer that: equip the niche gimmick passive "auto-death" on the two other characters, so they die upon each battle start (as a bonus, also equip "death bomb" which has them literally explode as they do, for damage so big it sometimes ends the battle on its own). equip a whole mess of other solo-character passives to buff the mage and keep her alive for the one turn she needs to survive to set-up her big spell, and then on turn two every battle will be over--used it on a boss and she one-shot it. it is one of the funniest coalescings of rpg mechanics i've seen, especially in the rhythm of exploration: one character carrying on as normal, the other two perpetually at 1 hp, resigned to exploding at every enemy (characters dead at battle end still gain partial exp so they don't fall behind too much)
maybe the game will catch up to this nonsense, but it would be funny if it didn't
maybe the game will catch up to this nonsense, but it would be funny if it didn't
It's not that game-breaking, as I'm sure the developers set it all up, and there are definite counters to it. Sure is very powerful--to the extent that I'm "not playing" most regular fights and some bosses--and extremely funny nonetheless.
Violentvixen
(She/Her)
I love this.
Just rolled credits in the game. Hard to overstate how much I loved this game, top to bottom. I haven't been this invested in a video game story in... possibly ever? The writing and the performances are so goddamn good. The narrative is so compelling and beautiful, full of huge swings and insane moments but with incredible character writing to ground the entire thing in reality. It really does not pull any stops, and the game really sticks the landing at the end. Just incredible.
I have a lot of thoughts about the gameplay. I don't know how much I love parrying and dodging, but, I will say it felt really fucking good to pull off. Dodging being easier and more forgiving than parrying really was such a smart design decision -- you can stick to dodging, which has a MUCH more generous window than parrying, until you learn the fight well enough to start parrying. The game even tells you when you "perfect" dodge to inform you when you've nailed the timing to start parrying. And you definitely want to parry if you can; it gives you such a huge advantage in battle.
The game has no shortage of optional enemies that will beat your ass into the ground, but the game ALSO has about a billion options for customizing your characters and a very nice satisfying exponential power curve towards the end to let you lay the hurt down on all those big bads that previously wiped the floor with you. Lots of the side content in this game consists of incredibly tough enemies, so as powerful as your party gets, there are enemies that will still challenge you.
And holy fucking SHIT, the MUSIC IS SO GOOD. It does not QUIT, even up until the last of the credits roll.
I can't say enough good things. Really incredible game.
I have a lot of thoughts about the gameplay. I don't know how much I love parrying and dodging, but, I will say it felt really fucking good to pull off. Dodging being easier and more forgiving than parrying really was such a smart design decision -- you can stick to dodging, which has a MUCH more generous window than parrying, until you learn the fight well enough to start parrying. The game even tells you when you "perfect" dodge to inform you when you've nailed the timing to start parrying. And you definitely want to parry if you can; it gives you such a huge advantage in battle.
The game has no shortage of optional enemies that will beat your ass into the ground, but the game ALSO has about a billion options for customizing your characters and a very nice satisfying exponential power curve towards the end to let you lay the hurt down on all those big bads that previously wiped the floor with you. Lots of the side content in this game consists of incredibly tough enemies, so as powerful as your party gets, there are enemies that will still challenge you.
And holy fucking SHIT, the MUSIC IS SO GOOD. It does not QUIT, even up until the last of the credits roll.
I can't say enough good things. Really incredible game.
I just started dodging more.
4-So
Spicy
I almost never dodge. Doesn't feel right.
Sarge
hardcore retro gamin'
That's what I've done - as the patterns have gotten trickier, I'm doing more dodging to start with. For ones that I get the perfect dodge down, I start shifting to parries. One of the optional enemies I fought basically only had two combos - a long one that's like six hits, and a short one that's three, and I could consistently parry the latter. The former I probably could, but decided to stick to safety because if I missed it I'd get absolutely wrecked.
Turns out this game's soundtrack is the #1 selling album on Bandcamp right now.
lacedrecords.bandcamp.com
Also, bandcamp friday is tomorrow, if anyone is thinking of picking it up!
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Original Soundtrack), by Lorien Testard
154 track album
lacedrecords.bandcamp.com
Also, bandcamp friday is tomorrow, if anyone is thinking of picking it up!
Sarge
hardcore retro gamin'
I've come across a few cheese strats with Maelle that seem to work really well to keep her in Virtuouse Stance and keep her almost always topped off with AP. And there's an optional boss I was having a rough time with, but absolutely wrecked the second time around because I managed to survive the patterns long enough to rip off several insane damage combos (turns out Sciel can unload in the right circumstances, too).
One thing I'm seeing here, though, is that you could probably get through some of these faster if you're willing to stop and grind or do exploits, or you can brute force your way through with pattern recognition and good parrying. I definitely haven't been min-maxing at all, but I am having to start pay attention to keeping stronger stat-boosting Pictos on to make a few fights more survivable while I learn.
I am in the cleanup phase, though. Still really enjoying it - it's been a long time since I've gotten this engrossed in a JRPG.
One thing I'm seeing here, though, is that you could probably get through some of these faster if you're willing to stop and grind or do exploits, or you can brute force your way through with pattern recognition and good parrying. I definitely haven't been min-maxing at all, but I am having to start pay attention to keeping stronger stat-boosting Pictos on to make a few fights more survivable while I learn.
I am in the cleanup phase, though. Still really enjoying it - it's been a long time since I've gotten this engrossed in a JRPG.
4-So
Spicy
Well, I'm at a point where even doing 200,000 damage per attack is essentailly chip damage, such are the HP levels of bosses. But I've heard tale of people reaching millions of damage per turn so... I dunno. Again, either underleveled for what I'm doing or there's some synergies that have completely flown over my head.
You didn't fix 'em all.
Sarge
hardcore retro gamin'
Sounds like I might be encountering some even more insane bosses, then. 200,000 is a *lot* for my current level, ha.
4-So
Spicy
I just deleted the post. It's not that important. Fuck it. I cannot be bothered.
4-So
Spicy
Ha, watching a streamer in the same area I'm in but he's a good 25 levels above me. Maybe that's a hint. He appears to be just... two shotting everything except for bosses.
Edit: I was able to buy a physical copy for PS5 from Gamestop so I think I'm going to wait to finish the game; just restart when that comes in. Gonna have to spend another 50 hours playing an excellent game. Oh noes. (Think I might dig into Lunar first, though. Finally play Eternal Blue.)
Edit: I was able to buy a physical copy for PS5 from Gamestop so I think I'm going to wait to finish the game; just restart when that comes in. Gonna have to spend another 50 hours playing an excellent game. Oh noes. (Think I might dig into Lunar first, though. Finally play Eternal Blue.)
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Sarge
hardcore retro gamin'
There have definitely been some enemies where if I barely see the HP bar move, I'm like... nah, I'll come back later. I probably need better weapons and more levels. But if it looks like I can chip in a reasonable period of time, I'll spend some time learning the pattern and beat them a little bit earlier than intended. Parries speed things up a lot if you can get 'em down versus those tough enemies, but it does require a *long* period of focus - I was pretty bushed after a 20+ minute fight where missing the dodge/parry meant eating dirt.
I think I'm one of the few people on the Internet that prefers the Sega CD version of Eternal Blue to the PSX remake. It's still good on PSX, but there are some wonky balance things from expanding enemy and player movement ranges. And on-field enemies sounds good, but you can rarely avoid them because you have a limited-use dash mechanic that barely stays ahead and they also tend to form choke points in dungeons that weren't really designed to accommodate them.
I think I'm one of the few people on the Internet that prefers the Sega CD version of Eternal Blue to the PSX remake. It's still good on PSX, but there are some wonky balance things from expanding enemy and player movement ranges. And on-field enemies sounds good, but you can rarely avoid them because you have a limited-use dash mechanic that barely stays ahead and they also tend to form choke points in dungeons that weren't really designed to accommodate them.
Violentvixen
(She/Her)
I was not aware they were doing orchestra session videos. So good.
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Having a blast with this! I see a lot of people in comments on reviews grumbling about the timed parries system, but as somebody who enjoys turn-based RPGs, rhythm games, and even the occasional Soulslike, I love it to bits. Executing a counter against a five-hit combo is so very satisfying, and you've got the Dodge option for practice before you commit to that.
The parkour challenges, though ... uh ... I'm doing them, but the devs whose idea that was need to sit in the corner for a spell. XD
The parkour challenges, though ... uh ... I'm doing them, but the devs whose idea that was need to sit in the corner for a spell. XD
MrBlarney
(he / him)
I just started playing this earlier tonight, and the premise laid out in the Prologue and opening cutscene of Act I are very compelling. I actually watched a streamer play through the Prologue before buying and starting the game myself, but it was very worth taking the time to go through it again. Beyond just the absolute dreadfulness of the general situation that Lumiere has been put in, there's something even more mysteriously horrifying about the fact that (I probably don't need to spoil this, but whatever) Expedition Zero was the only one that returned with any survivors, put they also mapped a path to the Monolith? Something must have happened after that initial expedition to cause all subsequent missions to fail, I'm hoping there's something in the story to address if some major change happened after or due to that first expedition.
I've actually settled into the dodge and parry mechanics of defense fairly well, though I was consistently dodging late during the Prologue. I actually lost one of the Prologue fights due to that. But I actually popped an achievement for a damageless victory against a (mini-)boss in the opening area of Act I against the Chromatic Lancelier. Since it was just a big version of the basic enemy, it wasn't too much of a step to use parries to counter its attacks. I did die the first time I fought it, though -- every hit was a one-shot down on either of my characters. The window for parries is not as strict as I feared it to be, but it's still tight enough that I still want to use dodges to learn the proper timings first. Seems like there's an opportunity to punch up a little, or at least get through areas with minimal grinding, once the parry timings have been mastered.
Still only at two party members, but I'm expecting to like how every party member has their own mini-game for how they conduct themselves in combat. I get the feeling like Gustave might end up getting benched if his very standard Limit Break mechanics are less exciting to string together than later party members' mechanics.
I've actually settled into the dodge and parry mechanics of defense fairly well, though I was consistently dodging late during the Prologue. I actually lost one of the Prologue fights due to that. But I actually popped an achievement for a damageless victory against a (mini-)boss in the opening area of Act I against the Chromatic Lancelier. Since it was just a big version of the basic enemy, it wasn't too much of a step to use parries to counter its attacks. I did die the first time I fought it, though -- every hit was a one-shot down on either of my characters. The window for parries is not as strict as I feared it to be, but it's still tight enough that I still want to use dodges to learn the proper timings first. Seems like there's an opportunity to punch up a little, or at least get through areas with minimal grinding, once the parry timings have been mastered.
Still only at two party members, but I'm expecting to like how every party member has their own mini-game for how they conduct themselves in combat. I get the feeling like Gustave might end up getting benched if his very standard Limit Break mechanics are less exciting to string together than later party members' mechanics.
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So in Act 2, they introduce Persona-style Social Links. No idea what they do, if anything, but the scenes accompanying them are just delightful, bringing some levity into what has otherwise been quite a dark story so far. These characters are so good.
During Gustave's burial, there's a shot where you can see a tear cut through the grime on Maelle's face, and I was marveling at how good it looked to the point that it distracted me from the emotional impact of the scene a little bit. And there were only 30 people on the dev team? That's wild.
Finished. The game doesn't count cinematics/menu time/being paused/whatever, so the in-game clock was just over 70 hours, which is still a slow player do-all total. I will talk about the game openly under the spoiler tab, and probably adopt a point/counterpoint format for doing so, both for being on theme and because that's generally how a lot of things about this shook out for me.
Clair: it's not uncommon for people to express a desire for an RPG cast populated by adults, if one's primary context for the genre is through games mostly starring adolescents or even children. Clair Obscur fulfills that premise through its own story hook, in that the more regular folks of the party cannot be older than 32 and for the most part occupy that cusp, and the more supernatural allies are also depicted as younger adults regardless of their immortality or what have you.
Obscur: in practice, this ostensible shake-up to genre convention doesn't really accomplish much--it only serves to limit the cast's diversity through its own contrivance. Everyone in the chief playable cast is equivalently able-bodied (Gustave's "cool" arm prosthetic is treating disability as a power-up as video games like to do), conventionally beautiful and handsome as an universal basis, attired in the same gold-trim-on-black uniforms, and indeed occupying a similar age range (with one teenager present) according to the game's setting tenets. This artificial narrative limit prevents anyone older than media-sexy adults in their prime being focal to the story, so the writing takes on the same kind of tenor largely independent of who you're interacting with because people's contexts and lived experiences are often so corresponding. There is no particular "mature" imprint put on the characters or their dilemmas, except a superficial exterior treatment--the writing still moves according to genre expectations, archetypes and stylings.
Clair: it's visually a very stylish and flashy game. A lot of the environmental 'oomph' is achieved through extensive post-processing, from lightshafts and bloom to ambient particles. Degrees of scale are played with as the monument-oriented topography can be experienced through an on-the-ground POV, or seen how it slots into the miniature abstractions of the world map, which still preserves relative scale to other surroundings the best it can.
Obscur: I did not actually enjoy the art direction much holistically. Character design issues I mentioned, but a similar homogeneity exists in the environmental work where the worldbuilding premise of the Fracture leads to an entire game of shattered landscapes suspended in frozen time as you navigate your way through the floating rubble. It's as if the setting's nature as a painted world conceived by an artist as their personal reprieve lead to the developers using that as license to produce a number of "surreal" and arresting environmental themes but paid no mind to how they string together or make up the whole of the world, because it is by nature "whimsical", invented within the fiction and adrift in a sea of symbolism. This kind of creative direction needs a really strong anchoring to work, but the game leaning on tired and blunt "huge statuary and faces everywhere" architectural residue intermingled with fragments of early 20th-century Parisian cityscapes doesn't really engender much of an intrigue about the world beyond variations on the same wallpaper pattern.
Clair: it's cool that every playable character comes with their own sub-system and combat resource to shape their play with, making preference calls in who you like to field a little more multifaceted in mechanical terms.
Obscur: it feels cool only until it becomes clear that they're all the same basic design principle tweaked just enough to seem different. The game doesn't utilize things like cooldowns to regulate skill use with, but it applies a skill rotation rhythm to every single character where you build up a resource to power up the big damage payoff moves, whether it's Stains, Foretells, Stances, Perfection or Mask Upgrades that are the medium through which you accomplish that task. In effect it leads to highly rote play in any instance, with no regard paid to what you're actually fighting, because the strategies are almost always identically efficient once identified; the only difference from just-press-attack RPG combat design is you have more hoops to jump through. The game's signature move as a whole in its battle system is illusionary choice--far less of it matters than it would like you to think.
Clair: there's some pretty good stuff in the camp conversations throughout the game; the game's writing voice works best when the character interdynamics are in play through quiet conversation, and the voice actors have material to play with that doesn't consist entirely of grim drama as the main narrative spends most of its time on. There's a comedy bone in the game that manifests the clearest through VA delivery, facial expressions and body language, and it's no small feat to land as many gags as the game does. If I cared about these characters, it happened in these private contexts, through Lune and Sciel's stargazing bonding (one of the vanishingly few woman-to-woman interactions of significance in the game), Sciel being able to speak of her suicide attempt, or Verso affirming his love for both Esquie and Monoco.
Obscur: this is the most heteronormative bullshit in the genre since Xenoblade 3. It's not a game that abstains from romance at all; it's full of hetero relationships of all kinds from ex-lovers to estranged spouses to loving couples to flirts and sex-friend flings. Queer people aren't involved in any of these because queer people don't exist, and people other than handsome white folks barely do either (Lune is there, and the only black person with an exceedingly minor speaking role dies thirty minutes into the game). The game further sidelines half of the party from narrative spotlight as the story and the entire world the game presents comes to be unveiled as the staging grounds of the internal conflict between the Dessendre family of artists, of whom Maelle and Verso are part of and thus integrally involved and consequential to the story's main thrust, with everyone else having to play support, or resign themselves to accepting their existence as constructs who ultimately do not have say in what the game is about in its supposed exploration of familial grief.
Clair: exploration in the game in terms of mechanical incentives and rewarding itemization is pretty consistently impactful. Almost everything you fight drops something new, whether an entirely new weapon or Picto, or upgrading their levels if you're below their loot table value in what you currently possess, and the level design's small offshoots and side paths similarly hold some new treasure or another to discover.
Obscur: is it really discovery when you always know what to expect? The game's design language seems terrified of "wasting" the player's time with any space or corner of the world that isn't mechanically justified, so every corner of it is absolutely filled with literal shinies to keep compulsively picking up in an unchanging, unbreaking rhythm. It's "gamified" spaces masquerading as environments that simply exist, and that sense of artifice isn't helped any by its aggressive borrowing from Souls conventions in shaping itself, from level design loops and unlockable shortcuts to bonfire respawn points where you charge up your explorational resources for another go at the wandering mobs of a dozen parried sword guys. The roteness and derivation of navigation is only made worse in that to play the game, you have to go through those motions since it's patently evident how the bulk of its reward loop is tied to it. The very occasional platforming bit serves as the highlight of the game's explorational tissue, because it's just enough off-skew from type and requiring at least some kind of tactile skill instead of following static button prompts to scale topography.
Clair: Gustave's an interesting protagonist to start off with, even if I'm not fond of the manner of his introduction (Sophie walking to her death gives lip service to presenting interactions from her perspective before the end, but ultimately the scene and the game's opening is more invested in how it affects Gustave going forward, and by extension the player as the one inhabiting him). Charlie Cox gives a subdued performance for a person who has a tendency to fade into the background despite his leading role, and the contrast works to the extent that you might not pick up on the signaling done toward his inevitable demise.
Obscur: the protagonist shift from Gustave to Verso is absurdly comical in how it juxtaposes narrative tragedy with functional expendability. The first piece of media I took note of was a line-up of the major characters, and my first thought was "why does this game star the same guy three times over?" Verso and Renoir end up being related, but Gustave as part of that trifecta is so literally replaced by Verso so utterly comprehensively and immediately upon death that I could not do anything but laugh when the game strived to shock me. He is the same kind of beardy handsome guy, he becomes the protagonist despite having no dynamics within the group he swoops into, he shares the basic skills that Gustave possessed in his limited early-game utility, he inherits all of Gustave's weapons (only with now passive abilities unlocked), and he develops the same kind of sibling relationship with Maelle that Gustave had, even before they're revealed as actual siblings. What is the point of a shift like this if you don't feel the loss in narrative or mechanical terms at all?
The very simple number-go-up relationship system in the game also unlocks between Verso and the rest of the party, and it's through there that the game's compulsive heteronormativity also wakes from the abyss as the player can choose to have a sexual relationship with either Sciel or Lune, with the unopted-for woman even half-jealously quipping "it could've been great" as if to tantalize the player with what they missed out on. While the interactions between Verso and Monoco can be adorable in how vulnerable they can be with each other, most of it takes on a kind of pissing-contest supremacy bonding tenor that I'm hesitant to claim as a particular dynamic of their own, because for all I know it's how the writers would've leaned into man-to-man exchanges in general if the game had more of such relationships to explore. There's Esquie, but he's the same bundle of airheaded joy with the entire cast in ways that aren't particularly gendered.
Clair: like the skill rotation enforced by the battle system's makeup, dodging and parrying exist as defensive actions with the design intent that they're meant to imbue a turn-based experience with more variability and player expression. If you're good enough at the timing component, you can fight opponents that statistically you're not "supposed to", and that's always an incentive in RPGs to explore their systems and push them to their limits. It also feels great in spectacle terms to see the entire team synchronize a counterattack against a blow that otherwise would've knocked everyone out, and those flourishes are the capstone for internalizing and executing against the trickiest of enemy patterns.
Obscur: parrying ultimately does little else except expose the game for the shallowness of its RPG systems. It wholesale makes all defensive statistics irrelevant from the jump: defense is not an attribute that ever impacts play, and vitality only potentially does at the very beginning of Expert difficulty play when any mistake is a wipe and you don't have other options to negate damage while you're still learning the game's general tells. The game constantly introduces new passives to learn and equip for the characters, but despite their seeming specificity and build potential, raw power is always the optimal and efficient answer, and it is not achieved through tricky set-ups and shifting battlefield conditions--just a simple pile-on of all available damage up passives suffices, until you're doing damage in the hundreds of millions at the end of the game and one-shotting even the superbosses. It's a game that almost certainly has been influenced by genre works that have a reputation for being able to be "broken" in the player's favour, but it simply does not push back enough or make that process involved enough to feel like one has earned it through understanding of its mechanics--simply playing the game "normally" brings you to that point regardless. What you're left with are a host of reaction tests full of delayed and mixed-up combo timings as the game's actual system of interaction, removed of their action game contexts which have other factors like positioning that do not matter here, while the numbers grow and grow in size without ever actually elevating your interactions with the game's systems. If anything, as the game goes on it compresses around itself into an experience that barely ever feels consequential to play.
Clair: Act III being a sprint to the final boss with maybe a half or third of the game's potential runtime devoted to optional content ran well with what I liked most about the game, in just poking around the world to see what there was to find and charting the extent of the explorational boundaries at each juncture of the story. Existing within that overworld is the game at its presentational best, as you get your old RPG abstraction jollies while getting to take in the large-scape geography of the Continent. I felt more about seeing Lumière and the twisted Eiffel Tower looming over it from the outside in than I ever did strolling its streets, and the same goes for the Paintress's giant frame in the horizon, rather than confronting her up close. Distant imagery is usually the game's strong suit in crafting environmental drama.
Obscur: Act III does not work as a piece of game design if you're concerned with narrative and mechanical aspects cohering. Either you spend an excess amount of time doing the optional things and experience the final dungeon and boss as a trivialization, or you go straight for it and experience an intended power curve... only returning to do the rest of the game after a very, very definitive climax after which the many sidequests narrative elements don't settle in naturally anymore. The ending is also framed in a very manufactured, bogus way, where a sibling stand-off between Maelle and Verso is contrived so there can be a dramatic choice to be made in whose perspective to support: Maelle for preserving the Canvas world, Verso for erasing it and laying the real world Verso's memory to rest. I don't buy the disagreement from the perspective of pitting these two against each other, as two children who have spent the entire game suffering the consequences of their parents' violent conflict. I also don't care for the highly stark "bad end/good end" contrast between the two endings, with supporting Maelle's perspective netting you a haunting portrait of denial and escapism that ends on a literal jumpscare if you didn't catch on to the negative framing, while Verso earns the game its actual tonally appropriate ending, with the Dessendres reconciliating and beginning the healing process over Verso's death, and all the inhabitants of the Canvas waving goodbye to Maelle as she resolves to live in the outside world. If the game had been committed to sympathizing and favouring each character and viewpoint equally, this kind of off-balance presentation for the endings wouldn't hang over them and they could exist as equally valid codas for the game and its themes. As it stands, there's only one "real" course for the story to take and more fool you if you didn't pick that side. It felt like the decision mirrored in uncomfortable ways the dynamic between Renoir and Aline, where each is ostensibly not in the right or wrong in their conflict... but you end up seeing and hearing a lot more from the former in person in how the game's written and presented, so his perspective inevitably matters more to the story as a result, while Aline is left mostly to be spoken of by others.
Obscur: in practice, this ostensible shake-up to genre convention doesn't really accomplish much--it only serves to limit the cast's diversity through its own contrivance. Everyone in the chief playable cast is equivalently able-bodied (Gustave's "cool" arm prosthetic is treating disability as a power-up as video games like to do), conventionally beautiful and handsome as an universal basis, attired in the same gold-trim-on-black uniforms, and indeed occupying a similar age range (with one teenager present) according to the game's setting tenets. This artificial narrative limit prevents anyone older than media-sexy adults in their prime being focal to the story, so the writing takes on the same kind of tenor largely independent of who you're interacting with because people's contexts and lived experiences are often so corresponding. There is no particular "mature" imprint put on the characters or their dilemmas, except a superficial exterior treatment--the writing still moves according to genre expectations, archetypes and stylings.
Clair: it's visually a very stylish and flashy game. A lot of the environmental 'oomph' is achieved through extensive post-processing, from lightshafts and bloom to ambient particles. Degrees of scale are played with as the monument-oriented topography can be experienced through an on-the-ground POV, or seen how it slots into the miniature abstractions of the world map, which still preserves relative scale to other surroundings the best it can.
Obscur: I did not actually enjoy the art direction much holistically. Character design issues I mentioned, but a similar homogeneity exists in the environmental work where the worldbuilding premise of the Fracture leads to an entire game of shattered landscapes suspended in frozen time as you navigate your way through the floating rubble. It's as if the setting's nature as a painted world conceived by an artist as their personal reprieve lead to the developers using that as license to produce a number of "surreal" and arresting environmental themes but paid no mind to how they string together or make up the whole of the world, because it is by nature "whimsical", invented within the fiction and adrift in a sea of symbolism. This kind of creative direction needs a really strong anchoring to work, but the game leaning on tired and blunt "huge statuary and faces everywhere" architectural residue intermingled with fragments of early 20th-century Parisian cityscapes doesn't really engender much of an intrigue about the world beyond variations on the same wallpaper pattern.
Clair: it's cool that every playable character comes with their own sub-system and combat resource to shape their play with, making preference calls in who you like to field a little more multifaceted in mechanical terms.
Obscur: it feels cool only until it becomes clear that they're all the same basic design principle tweaked just enough to seem different. The game doesn't utilize things like cooldowns to regulate skill use with, but it applies a skill rotation rhythm to every single character where you build up a resource to power up the big damage payoff moves, whether it's Stains, Foretells, Stances, Perfection or Mask Upgrades that are the medium through which you accomplish that task. In effect it leads to highly rote play in any instance, with no regard paid to what you're actually fighting, because the strategies are almost always identically efficient once identified; the only difference from just-press-attack RPG combat design is you have more hoops to jump through. The game's signature move as a whole in its battle system is illusionary choice--far less of it matters than it would like you to think.
Clair: there's some pretty good stuff in the camp conversations throughout the game; the game's writing voice works best when the character interdynamics are in play through quiet conversation, and the voice actors have material to play with that doesn't consist entirely of grim drama as the main narrative spends most of its time on. There's a comedy bone in the game that manifests the clearest through VA delivery, facial expressions and body language, and it's no small feat to land as many gags as the game does. If I cared about these characters, it happened in these private contexts, through Lune and Sciel's stargazing bonding (one of the vanishingly few woman-to-woman interactions of significance in the game), Sciel being able to speak of her suicide attempt, or Verso affirming his love for both Esquie and Monoco.
Obscur: this is the most heteronormative bullshit in the genre since Xenoblade 3. It's not a game that abstains from romance at all; it's full of hetero relationships of all kinds from ex-lovers to estranged spouses to loving couples to flirts and sex-friend flings. Queer people aren't involved in any of these because queer people don't exist, and people other than handsome white folks barely do either (Lune is there, and the only black person with an exceedingly minor speaking role dies thirty minutes into the game). The game further sidelines half of the party from narrative spotlight as the story and the entire world the game presents comes to be unveiled as the staging grounds of the internal conflict between the Dessendre family of artists, of whom Maelle and Verso are part of and thus integrally involved and consequential to the story's main thrust, with everyone else having to play support, or resign themselves to accepting their existence as constructs who ultimately do not have say in what the game is about in its supposed exploration of familial grief.
Clair: exploration in the game in terms of mechanical incentives and rewarding itemization is pretty consistently impactful. Almost everything you fight drops something new, whether an entirely new weapon or Picto, or upgrading their levels if you're below their loot table value in what you currently possess, and the level design's small offshoots and side paths similarly hold some new treasure or another to discover.
Obscur: is it really discovery when you always know what to expect? The game's design language seems terrified of "wasting" the player's time with any space or corner of the world that isn't mechanically justified, so every corner of it is absolutely filled with literal shinies to keep compulsively picking up in an unchanging, unbreaking rhythm. It's "gamified" spaces masquerading as environments that simply exist, and that sense of artifice isn't helped any by its aggressive borrowing from Souls conventions in shaping itself, from level design loops and unlockable shortcuts to bonfire respawn points where you charge up your explorational resources for another go at the wandering mobs of a dozen parried sword guys. The roteness and derivation of navigation is only made worse in that to play the game, you have to go through those motions since it's patently evident how the bulk of its reward loop is tied to it. The very occasional platforming bit serves as the highlight of the game's explorational tissue, because it's just enough off-skew from type and requiring at least some kind of tactile skill instead of following static button prompts to scale topography.
Clair: Gustave's an interesting protagonist to start off with, even if I'm not fond of the manner of his introduction (Sophie walking to her death gives lip service to presenting interactions from her perspective before the end, but ultimately the scene and the game's opening is more invested in how it affects Gustave going forward, and by extension the player as the one inhabiting him). Charlie Cox gives a subdued performance for a person who has a tendency to fade into the background despite his leading role, and the contrast works to the extent that you might not pick up on the signaling done toward his inevitable demise.
Obscur: the protagonist shift from Gustave to Verso is absurdly comical in how it juxtaposes narrative tragedy with functional expendability. The first piece of media I took note of was a line-up of the major characters, and my first thought was "why does this game star the same guy three times over?" Verso and Renoir end up being related, but Gustave as part of that trifecta is so literally replaced by Verso so utterly comprehensively and immediately upon death that I could not do anything but laugh when the game strived to shock me. He is the same kind of beardy handsome guy, he becomes the protagonist despite having no dynamics within the group he swoops into, he shares the basic skills that Gustave possessed in his limited early-game utility, he inherits all of Gustave's weapons (only with now passive abilities unlocked), and he develops the same kind of sibling relationship with Maelle that Gustave had, even before they're revealed as actual siblings. What is the point of a shift like this if you don't feel the loss in narrative or mechanical terms at all?
The very simple number-go-up relationship system in the game also unlocks between Verso and the rest of the party, and it's through there that the game's compulsive heteronormativity also wakes from the abyss as the player can choose to have a sexual relationship with either Sciel or Lune, with the unopted-for woman even half-jealously quipping "it could've been great" as if to tantalize the player with what they missed out on. While the interactions between Verso and Monoco can be adorable in how vulnerable they can be with each other, most of it takes on a kind of pissing-contest supremacy bonding tenor that I'm hesitant to claim as a particular dynamic of their own, because for all I know it's how the writers would've leaned into man-to-man exchanges in general if the game had more of such relationships to explore. There's Esquie, but he's the same bundle of airheaded joy with the entire cast in ways that aren't particularly gendered.
Clair: like the skill rotation enforced by the battle system's makeup, dodging and parrying exist as defensive actions with the design intent that they're meant to imbue a turn-based experience with more variability and player expression. If you're good enough at the timing component, you can fight opponents that statistically you're not "supposed to", and that's always an incentive in RPGs to explore their systems and push them to their limits. It also feels great in spectacle terms to see the entire team synchronize a counterattack against a blow that otherwise would've knocked everyone out, and those flourishes are the capstone for internalizing and executing against the trickiest of enemy patterns.
Obscur: parrying ultimately does little else except expose the game for the shallowness of its RPG systems. It wholesale makes all defensive statistics irrelevant from the jump: defense is not an attribute that ever impacts play, and vitality only potentially does at the very beginning of Expert difficulty play when any mistake is a wipe and you don't have other options to negate damage while you're still learning the game's general tells. The game constantly introduces new passives to learn and equip for the characters, but despite their seeming specificity and build potential, raw power is always the optimal and efficient answer, and it is not achieved through tricky set-ups and shifting battlefield conditions--just a simple pile-on of all available damage up passives suffices, until you're doing damage in the hundreds of millions at the end of the game and one-shotting even the superbosses. It's a game that almost certainly has been influenced by genre works that have a reputation for being able to be "broken" in the player's favour, but it simply does not push back enough or make that process involved enough to feel like one has earned it through understanding of its mechanics--simply playing the game "normally" brings you to that point regardless. What you're left with are a host of reaction tests full of delayed and mixed-up combo timings as the game's actual system of interaction, removed of their action game contexts which have other factors like positioning that do not matter here, while the numbers grow and grow in size without ever actually elevating your interactions with the game's systems. If anything, as the game goes on it compresses around itself into an experience that barely ever feels consequential to play.
Clair: Act III being a sprint to the final boss with maybe a half or third of the game's potential runtime devoted to optional content ran well with what I liked most about the game, in just poking around the world to see what there was to find and charting the extent of the explorational boundaries at each juncture of the story. Existing within that overworld is the game at its presentational best, as you get your old RPG abstraction jollies while getting to take in the large-scape geography of the Continent. I felt more about seeing Lumière and the twisted Eiffel Tower looming over it from the outside in than I ever did strolling its streets, and the same goes for the Paintress's giant frame in the horizon, rather than confronting her up close. Distant imagery is usually the game's strong suit in crafting environmental drama.
Obscur: Act III does not work as a piece of game design if you're concerned with narrative and mechanical aspects cohering. Either you spend an excess amount of time doing the optional things and experience the final dungeon and boss as a trivialization, or you go straight for it and experience an intended power curve... only returning to do the rest of the game after a very, very definitive climax after which the many sidequests narrative elements don't settle in naturally anymore. The ending is also framed in a very manufactured, bogus way, where a sibling stand-off between Maelle and Verso is contrived so there can be a dramatic choice to be made in whose perspective to support: Maelle for preserving the Canvas world, Verso for erasing it and laying the real world Verso's memory to rest. I don't buy the disagreement from the perspective of pitting these two against each other, as two children who have spent the entire game suffering the consequences of their parents' violent conflict. I also don't care for the highly stark "bad end/good end" contrast between the two endings, with supporting Maelle's perspective netting you a haunting portrait of denial and escapism that ends on a literal jumpscare if you didn't catch on to the negative framing, while Verso earns the game its actual tonally appropriate ending, with the Dessendres reconciliating and beginning the healing process over Verso's death, and all the inhabitants of the Canvas waving goodbye to Maelle as she resolves to live in the outside world. If the game had been committed to sympathizing and favouring each character and viewpoint equally, this kind of off-balance presentation for the endings wouldn't hang over them and they could exist as equally valid codas for the game and its themes. As it stands, there's only one "real" course for the story to take and more fool you if you didn't pick that side. It felt like the decision mirrored in uncomfortable ways the dynamic between Renoir and Aline, where each is ostensibly not in the right or wrong in their conflict... but you end up seeing and hearing a lot more from the former in person in how the game's written and presented, so his perspective inevitably matters more to the story as a result, while Aline is left mostly to be spoken of by others.
That's about it. Music didn't really fit into the give-and-take schema above, because while I think it's also a little too reliant on piano-and-violin dramatism, it's also such a giant piece of work that you're likely to find at least a handful of tracks that really work for one's own tastes, and as such it's the element of the game I'm the least conflicted about. From just looking at what I had to say about the rest by volume, it would be fair to say I lean towards a negative assessment overall.
Unless taking an extremely literal stance of who's part of the team at Sandfall, this game was never made by that amount of people. Dozens if not hundreds worked on it, including folks like the Korean gameplay animation team whose contributions are integral to what the game is.