Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is remarkable for what it achieves given it’s budget. A (relatively) small team and smaller price tag brings with it a set of expectations. Some things like high end graphical effects and vocal performances often have to fall by the wayside to keep things within budget. Somehow, Expedition 33 manages to look technically impressive, have full voice acting and combine some aspects of the best turn based Japanese-style RPGs out there into a decidedly French take on the genre. Outside the sheer audacity of what they achieved though, I didn’t really love it in the same way it seems the greater game-liking public that gave it piles of Game of the Year accolades.
The premise is neat enough - people in this world Thanos-dust away at 33 years of age, and every year an expedition of adventurers at the end of their lives are sent out to defeat a mysterious being called The Paintress and rid the world of this short-life curse.
This initial idea is intriguing, but for me at least didn’t really hold my interest. I found myself pushing forward purely because I enjoyed the elements of combat and team building, and overcoming the challenge of bosses and the like. The story did throw some interesting revelations in along the line, but generally I found it wasn’t why I was playing.
That combat is pretty fantastic though. The marquee feature is the active dodge/parry system where in a way similar to the Mario & Luigi games, you can dodge or parry hits with well timed button taps. You’ll absolutely have to get good at doing this, as encounters soon essentially require effective dodges at least as a few hits will be enough to take out your team in a lot of instances. Learning parry timing and tells of enemies, especially bosses, is great fun and creates a great level of engagement and challenge.
The less spoken about aspect of combat (but maybe more interesting to me) is how much you can play characters’ abilities off one another. You can set up certain status effects, and then have another character’s attack improved when certain status effects are in play. Each character has their own system for how their power ebbs and flows - one powers up with every time they attack and dodge, but loses power when they’re hit for example. Another accumulates elemental tokens and cashes them in with other attacks to do more damage or apply extra effects. Building a team of characters with complimentary abilities is immensely satisfying and a huge part of why I enjoyed the game.
I found navigating the world a little problematic. Many areas are so intricately detailed that they’re quite difficult to navigate. Once I entered and left a battle screen, I’d often struggle to reorient myself with where I was going before the battle happened. More than once I pushed forward and found that at some point I had turned around and headed backwards. The environments look technically impressive, but I don’t think they are particularly well designed as spaces to traverse.
The characters too are a bit of a mixed bag for me. None really stood out as particularly interesting. They were mostly on the spectrum between kinda-there and obnoxious. I did not like basically any time Esquie talked.
So yeah, I generally enjoyed the game and did so enough to see it through to the end on a mechanical interest - but the world and characters left me a little cold. Regardless, it’s nice to see success from a relatively small but ambitious team.