Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

[Paul le Fou]

Started this!

Story, setting and world, visuals, and music are all strong as hell. I'm impressed with the characters, the drama, the unique setting. I do wish they hadn't designed the characters with a uniform that makes it...not harder to tell them apart, really, but definitely less visually distinct.

There is a LOT going on with the mechanics right out of the gate. Pictos and Luminas and skills and stats to level up freely all kind of get thrown at you. I'm glad they provide at least a few respec items so you don't feel as much pressure right away, but I still worry that I'm allocating my stats poorly and I haven't done anything with like, shifting pictos around after mastering them. But I only have like, six of them right now.

There's also a TON going on with the battle system. Lune's stains and spell chaining alone seems like it'll take the whole game to master, and that's just one character, and that's without worrying about how OTHER characters interact with her stuff (like consuming a mark), and that's without each of the other characters and their unique mechanics in their own right!

I do, in fact, suck at dodging and parrying, but I might be getting used to it a bit more. I'm not entirely sure I won't end up dropping the difficulty down at some point to just focus on vibes and being powerful and not get frustrated when I miss yet another dodge/parry for reasons I can't quite discern.

I REALLY wish they included a minimap or an area map because I was having trouble telling where I was going despite the relative lack of complexity. The aesthetics are great but they don't make for clear and unambiguous navigation. Who knows, maybe that's on purpose to evoke the feeling of being lost on and exploring a strange and fantastic continent. It works to do that...but doesn't feel great.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

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.

Yeah this rhetoric I think is probably misleading at best. Maybe the core programming team or something at their HQ is 30 but it really gives me deja vu for other such claims I’ve seen regarding media in the past.

 

[gorha]

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.

Ah, OK, that makes a lot more sense. I guess it really does take a village to make a video game... or something.

 

[Kalista]

I REALLY wish they included a minimap or an area map because I was having trouble telling where I was going despite the relative lack of complexity. The aesthetics are great but they don't make for clear and unambiguous navigation. Who knows, maybe that's on purpose to evoke the feeling of being lost on and exploring a strange and fantastic continent. It works to do that...but doesn't feel great.

Yeah, this is something I've grappled with too. Overall I've come down on the side of liking it, though. I think because I often, in RPGs, MMOs, open worlds, etc. have found myself wishing I could turn off quest objective markers and HUD pointers and such -- the hand-holding has gotten so heavy in game design that it feels patronizing. (Borderlands 3, oh my god. If you don't spot the thing you need to shoot to complete a puzzle within ten seconds, an NPC starts screaming the solution at you.) So it's been refreshing, playing a game that lets me get turned around and accidentally re-traverse an area a couple times before I find the critical path.

 

[4-So]

I don't mind the lack of a mini-map because each area is relatively straightforward. Even side paths tend to loop back to spit you out in a place that is on the "beaten path", somewhat akin Dark Souls navigation. What I would have appreciated is some kind of on-the-map list that popped up whenever you entered an area, so I can tell at a glance if there's bosses/mini-bosses I did not defeat yet, number of Pictos or Lumina not found, etc. I gave up after about an hour of trying to find a side boss I had skipped but I couldn't remember where it was located.

Another minor quibble, and it's not unique to this game by any means, is that low-level enemies will still try to attack you if you go back to earlier areas. There's no level scaling here that I can see so it's a waste of time. My kingdom for Earthbound low-level baddie mechanics in more RPGs.

 

[Paul le Fou]

Yeah, after I finished the second zone I managed to find my way back to the first zone to pick off the extra/side baddie there that had wiped the floor with me the first time... and I paused at the zone door because I really just didn't feel like navigating my way back through the zone again, then turned back. Maybe next time.

I'm maybe starting to figure out pictos and luminas, and skills. Only six skills already feels so limiting! Ack! I want mooooore

 

[Bongo]

I don't want a minimap, but I would love a compass.

 

[Peklo]

A compass is always displayed on the world map, and within areas you can pull it up with triangle/Y along with the other party status overlay information.

 

[Sarge]

A compass is always displayed on the world map, and within areas you can pull it up with triangle/Y along with the other party status overlay information.

Over 40 hours in and I'm just learning this now. Thanks!

I haven't had massive issues with navigation, but there have been a few times where having a compass would have helped me get my bearings relative to somewhere I was trying to go.

 

[MrBlarney]

There were plenty of "End of Act I" spoiler blocks in the other online communities I frequent, and yeah, I got there.

Spoiler: Seriously, End of Act I

There were a fair amount of metagame reasons to expect Gustave to make an exit at the end of Act I, so it wasn't that surprising, but it was nice of the game to have Verso step in immediately without any disruption in activity. The amount of fleshing out of Verso's kit compared to Gustave's is quite welcome, as midway through the Act, Gustave ended up on a build focused on Aim and Basic Attacks instead of his abilities, and later in the act was, as I expected, on the bench with the Solo Pictos/Luminas as a last stand.

I'm getting a lot more comfortable with using parries instead of just dodges now, I've realized that hitting earlier is more reliable than whiffing late. Having some points in Vitality and Defense actually goes quite a long way towards smoothing out making defensive mistakes in combat. (I've been allocating one point to Vitality or Defense, and two across Might, Agility, and Luck on most level-ups.) I've also gone out of the way at the start of Act II to try and take down a few of the optional encounters around the map, and I like that I've needed different strategies or compositions for handling them. Not so fond of the busywork in shuffling my Luminas and other abilities around in order to set up those strategies, though.

Story-wise, I still can't really predict where it's going to go or how to interpret the white haired-woman(Alicia?)'s words in one of the camp cutscenes prior to the end of Act I. I expected humans living in the lands of the continent would be immune to Gommage, but I didn't expect them to be from the first Expedition Did the survivors of Expedition Zero who returned to Lumiere include any members of Renoir's faction, or were they completely split? If the latter, why wouldn't the Lumierans know about the folks who stayed behind? Or was there a concerted effort among those survivors to return to the continent, which is why there aren't any Expedition 9x journals to find? Maybe there is some kind of duplicate real/fake beings thing going on, especially with the similarities between Maelle and Alicia, or Gustave and Verso. There's still plenty of game left to go, so there'll hopefully be some kind of explanation from Act II onwards.

EDIT: I just remembered, there was also an event at camp where I built up a relationship point with Esquie? I didn't expect Social Links / Heart-to-Hearts to be in this game. Also, another note I wanted to mention, is that I hope I find a damage limit break Picto soon. Maelle's been rubbing against the 9,999 limit for her single-target attacks in some cases, and I'd like to get full value out of those meaty hits.

 

[Kalista]

I am just getting to the point where going all-in on Might or Luck is biting me in the ass. Can't pull off Maelle's fancy guaranteed 9999 damage Percée if she never gets a turn because her Agility is a third of anyone else's. XD

 

[Paul le Fou]

I like how high damage Percee is just a universal experience among people I've talked to. I liked opening up with a first strike + augmented first strike + the sword that starts you in Virtuose stance Percee and just baleeting enemies. Too bad said sword has been outclassed by a few levels now and I can't upgrade it enough yet, so I've been doing a burn build with the fire sword, but she's still got the lowest current weapon level out of my group. Wait no, the character who just joined (5th in my party) has one lower still.

I really appreciate how this game isn't afraid to be goofy and funny at times. Like everything about Esquie. The Gestrals, the 5th character to join (The "There's going to be a lot of fighting..." conversation), the Grandis fashion designer wearing a huge beret whom you have to beat in a poetry competition to unlock outfits... Verso knows magic to just cut himself in half and walk both halves around?? What?? They really hit that Final Fantasy mix of seriousness and melodrama combined with goofy fun asides.

If I had one complaint it's that the early game at least feels a little padded - there are a lot of sidequests whose only function appear to be to give you another dungeon/area to go through, not to serve any actual forward plot momentum. I dunno, I guess that's normal, having to go through a cave between two towns just 'cause, especially in classic FF games etc. Something about it here just strikes me as a bit more noticeable though.

Oh and I still suck at dodging and parrying, but luckily that hasn't made it too rough difficulty-wise so far, which design I'm thankful for.

Now to figure out how to fit new skills into my arsenals and design new skill rotations and such. Differently for each character, of course. There's certainly no lack of complexity or battle mechanics to engage with. (They keep introducing new ones too! Dodge and parry weren't enough, you have to jump too, and then there's a whole new gradient counter. And just now they introduced gradient attacks too, just 'cause!)

 

[Sarge]

Rolled credits. I don't know if I'm going to do the hardest boss or not. I did almost all the optional content, though. Some small quibbles about the end, though:

Spoiler

I think Act 3 could have been handled better. They let you go ham on optional content, which is pretty cool, but it also trivializes the endgame to a laughable degree. They had a better example of how to handle this in Chrono Trigger, which lets you do optional quests before facing Lavos, but in a lot of ways they're not really optional at all - you'll get smoked by Lavos if you try to go for him too early. It should have been similar here.

Also, the endings were a gut punch. Both of them. It's apparent which one is the true ending, but it doesn't make it any easier. In a lot of ways, the game deals a bit with themes like To the Moon did, and I honestly hated how that game glossed over creating a fantasy instead of confronting reality as it was. Here, at least, you get that option, and the alternative shows the dangers of escapism.

Anyway, overall, I think it was a fantastic time. I'm leery giving it all-timer status - I think I'll need to stew on it longer before I put it in that category. But that it's even in consideration is certainly a feather in the dev team's cap.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

I think Act 3 could have been handled better. They let you go ham on optional content, which is pretty cool, but it also trivializes the endgame to a laughable degree. They had a better example of how to handle this in Chrono Trigger, which lets you do optional quests before facing Lavos, but in a lot of ways they're not really optional at all - you'll get smoked by Lavos if you try to go for him too early. It should have been similar here.

I haven't played this game yet, but I watched most of it being played via a stream. The thing the streamer I was watching did to maintain a decent difficulty was to just, on his end, was to basically just nerf himself. Take off OP equipment/skills or whatnot, so that the difficulty could be maintained.

The power scaling did seem completely ridiculous, but I've noticed in general, a tendency in the Gaming Discourse to have these kinds of discussions around end-game power creep with RPGs. And it honestly kinda blows my mind. A lot of gamers seem to want a consistent or increasing difficulty as they play, and get upset at RPGs where when you overlevel, the difficulty becomes trivialized. And to me that's like... the entire point?

The whole point of assigning numerical values/levels to a character's abilities/personal growth, is to make the abstract concept of a character growing stronger into something more concrete. And the reward for the hard work of growing stronger is that you can defeat stronger foes that previously would have wiped the floor with your butt. I think there's something to fine tuning/calibrating your growth curve so that things don't be come laughably easy/trivial, especially to undermine whatever dramatic story of conflict and struggle you're trying to tell. But growing stronger than your enemies through hard work is part of the story. And if your enemies grow at the exact same pace you do, pegged to your character's levels, all you've done is completely trivialize/nullify the point of having levels to begin with. Just go full Zelda at that point and remove levels all together, because you've effectively made them pointless.

It's really weird to me to watch people demand that a core aspect of RPGs be essentially nullified and removed from the experience all together. To me, it's like playing a first person shooter, and demand guns be taken out of the game.

 

[Sarge]

Spoiler

Yeah, I don't disagree. Honestly, I kinda knew going in I probably short-circuited the challenge. I know that power-leveling for some players is very much a thing, and for me, I wanted to experience as much of this content as I could before it ended. Which speaks highly for the game for sure! I was expecting there to be a large bump up in the endgame power level required, though, something where maybe if I waltzed in I'd get pasted and think... huh, maybe I should poke around a bit more. And while part of me wanted a little more drama, there is also part of me that was relieved that I wasn't going to have to learn some insane patterns to make it to the ending. Which, uh, I did with one of the hardest optional sub-bosses that heals for over 500,000 HP if you miss a single parry.

Now, do I take on the *hardest* boss in the game? I might just cheese that fight - I've seen one-shot builds flying around, and I can see a lot of Picto synergies that I could probably suss it out without following a guide.