I just reached Act 3 of Expedition 33, so I suspect I'm roughly 2/3 of the way through the game. I'm still loving it. The storyline continues to intrigue: it's answering a few questions but raising even more. I now feel comfortable with the overall combat system and am mostly enjoying it. Overall it's scratching that Final Fantasy itch that I hadn't realized I'd had.
I'm mostly enjoying the game, but I wanted to open up this post by rattling off the things that annoy me about the game, mostly to get them out of the way.
I wish you could mark up the map. From the start of the game you find high-level areas that you aren't yet ready to visit, but 30 hours later it's hard to remember whether you already did The Cliffside Caves or not. I loved the Elden Ring map, where you could drop a few types of icons yourself at any point; I would use one to indicate "There's a boss here that I'm not powerful enough yet to beat", another for "There's a new area here that I haven't explored yet", etc. As another example, when I went through Esquie's Nest the first time I wasn't able to beat two optional mini-bosses, a Mime and a Petank. I knew I wanted to come back, as these often have particularly valuable rewards, but I had to just keep that outstanding task in memory, there's no way in-game to remind myself.
I wish there was a journal or quest log. You get a few random quests, which often are very vague. I know that I've started multiple side-missions, and I know that I've finished very few, and I can't remember where the remaining ones are, who gave me the quest or what they (vaguely) asked for. I think one or two are in the Gestral Village, but there are like a hundred NPCs there spread over a huge and sprawling area. I do kind of like not having the Big Flashing Arrow Telling You Where To Go, but it's annoying to just have a vague idea that someone somewhere needs something. In retrospect I should probably be keeping notes with a pen and paper, but I can't think of the last time I had to do that in an RPG. Elden Ring also didn't have an in-game journal, but it also had a lot fewer quests and only a handful of NPCs in the entire game, so there wasn't the needle-in-a-haystack feeling I'm getting here.
I like the overworld, but map traversal gets a little annoying. Even with the faster movement from your "mount", it takes a long time to move from one side of the map to the other; combined with not being sure about whether I've already visited a place or need anything from there, I feel like I'm burning time in transit. Sometimes I do stumble across a lost Gestral or find a beach I haven't explored yet, but I do wish there was a true fast travel / waypoint system. (Maybe one will come later!)
Zone traversal can also be a bit annoying. Once again, I'm comparing it to Elden Ring, which is unfair since Elden Ring has the best movement of any RPG (or probably any game) I've played. But, for example, sometimes you'll be able to scooch along a narrow ledge around a pillar and find something interesting on the other side, and other times you won't be able to move onto the ledge. You won't know until you try. Sometimes you can climb over chunks of rubble to find a path forward, other times an invisible wall will block you. Again, you won't know until you try. This isn't the end of the world, but it's mildly annoying. I also really wish there was a map for zones like there is in the overworld. Some are fine to navigate, but others get really confusing. Even if you do the whole zone in one play session it can be a bit disorienting and hard to remember whether you've already explored a particular path or not. As the game goes on I'm getting a better sense of the map design philosophy so I have more of a spidey-sense for the best way to traverse, so it's less painful than it was, but still not great.
Pictos are really overwhelming. I do like the "use to unlock" mechanic, that's a neat idea that gets you used to their mechanics, but the sheer number of them are a lot. It also doesn't help that I'm regularly swapping around party members to keep XP gain evenly distributed. I think that if I had a consistent loadout (like Maelle, Lune and Sciel) I could be a bit more tactical, like having one focus on buffing, one on breaking, etc. But over time I've shifted towards having almost the exact same Luminas on everyone: ones that gain AP like Energizing Start, Dodger, Energizing Pain, etc., as well as a few like SOS Shell for survivability. I'm curious if the pace of new Pictos will ever let up, so far it's been relentless.
There are also many skills and too few slots. The limitations make sense mechanically with the gamepad, but kind of kills the joy of leveling up since you're unlocking things that don't fit into your loadout. Some things could be useful with micro-management, like Maelle's shield-breaking attack, which is really useful in a few fights and completely useless in all others. Maybe replaying the game at a higher difficulty level would justify the time to micro-manage skill assignments. But with my playstyle, I've just stopped buying new skills once I have a solid rotation and just let my skill points accumulate. (The only minor change so far has been adjusting from low-AP rotations in Act 1 to higher-AP rotations in Act 2.)
MINI SPOILERS
I have mixed feelings on Monocos' feet mechanic. From a game design perspective, it's pretty brilliant. There's a well-documented tendency towards "stickyness", particularly in RPGs: people tend to stick with their initial party members and rarely incorporate later additions. So requiring Monoco to be in your party in order to unlock new abilities for him is a great way to urge you to get to know him and his unique fighting style. But that ends up meaning you only have two people to pick from to travel with him. For a while he was a bit under-leveled compared to everyone else so it didn't really matter, but now he's at parity with everyone else and will probably soon suprass them. I'll occasionally take him out if I see that we're mostly fighting the same Nevrons over and over again, like in Sirene's hideout.
That seems like a lot of annoyances, but they are VERY minor and not really diminishing my enjoyment of the game, only occasionally making me wish I was playing Elden Ring instead. Let's move on to the things I like!
The camp is great. It's almost identical to what we had in Dragon Age: Origins and Baldur's Gate 3, and it works as well here. Narratively it doesn't make a ton of sense to have the same geography no matter where you set up camp, but the mechanics and convenience are huge. It's great to have a safe area to chat with companions and other NPCs, deepen relations, do some crafting-type activities, and advance the storyline.
I'm so glad that there are romances! For whatever reason I wasn't expecting that, and I'm so glad to see them. I was starting to get that vibe a bit in Verso's conversations with Sciel and Lune but wasn't sure if it was real or not. More romances in all of our games please.
I'm loving the plot and storytelling technique. It's very much "show don't tell"; every once in a while you get exposition from a witness like Verso, but even that may be unreliable. The characters are trying to figure things out, and you as the player are trying to figure out even more things since at the start of the game you don't even know what, like, the Gommage is.
Your characters can get really strong. Maelle in particular is a beast. It's very satisfying to start consistently churning out 9,999 damage per hit in a multi-hit combo.
Combat is fun. I didn't like the idea of quick-time events over pure tactical execution, but it's been really enjoyable. Like in Elden Ring, it feels rewarding to learn attack patterns and git gud. Fights can have some fun puzzle aspects too; there's one Petank fight where you need to free-aim shoot a teleporting orb, which sounds annoying but ended up being a blast.
The gradual unfolding of the Manor is fun. I was kind of thinking you could use it as a crossroads to fast-travel between distant areas; it doesn't work like that, but is still fun to open up more areas of it, always get a couple of nice little upgrades and also get to explore some of it, get some environmental storytelling and build out your mental map.
The humor feels great. This is another thing that makes me think of Final Fantasy, where you'll have some intense melodramatic scenes, and then immediately follow it up with some goofy moogles and chocobos. Here, Gestrals look and sound and act and speak so silly, which is great comic relief to the darkness.
Let's talk about plot!
MEGA SPOILERS
In yet another Final Fantasy-esque move, the story so far has felt pretty impressionistic and ambiguous. At the very end of Act 2 we get a bunch of lore dumps. I'm still rearranging my understanding inside my head; here is what I currently think the story is, but I'm almost certainly wrong about at least some (and possibly most) of this:
The game up until now has taken place in a world-within-a-world, where people think that their reality is real but it's actually contingent on outside forces. (In our own world, this idea has recently gained traction in the "We are living in a simulation" meme, but it's been around for a while, including Berkeley's Idealism, and my favorite example of Neal Stephenson's Anathem.) I'll call the "main" universe "prime". In Prime, there are at least two groups/families, the "painters" and the "writers". We don't know much about the writers yet, but they seem adversarial to the painters. The painters we know are all members of one particular family, including Aline, Renoire, Clea, Verso, and Alicia.
The Painters each have a Canvas, which they can paint on to create their own world. The things they paint within there have their own reality: they don't know they live inside a painting. They are born, grow, love, live, have families, and die. A Painter can choose to enter their Canvas or that of another, but doing so has risk, as they become bound to the rules of that world.
There was an incident some years ago where the youngest daughter, Alicia, foolishly made some sort of contact with the Writers. This resulted in a serious fire; Verso was able to save Alicia's life, but she was permanently disfigured in the flames, and Verso himself died.
This produced a lot of strife within the family, with various people blaming or defending others. This either led to or intensified a major rift between the mother Aline and the father Renoire. In their grief, they took two different responses. Both immersed themselves into Verso's Canvas. Aline wanted to undo her loss and so she painted a replica of Verso into existence. The canvas was already filled with things Verso had created and loved, like the silly Gestrals and the buoyant Esquie and the imaginary friend Monoco.
Renoire was aghast at Aline's seeming to slip into delusions and fantasy, favoring a harsh, cold reality. Where Aline (The Paintress) sought to create, Renoire sought to erase. The two of them have been locked in a struggle for decades. The main sufferers have been the (imaginary) people of Lumiere: humans who were exiled from The Continent. Renoire has been trying to erase them; Aline has been holding him back, but her power grows steadily weaker, so every year more of the people perish.
The people of Lumiere haven't understood this situation, though: they believe that the Paintress is responsible for them dying (their "Gommage"), and so they have been undertaking Expeditions to the Continent to try and defeat her, not realizing that doing so would doom themselves.
After several years of this, Alicia talks with her sister Clea and decides to enter Verso's canvas. I'm not clear yet on exactly why this is; I think she might be trying to get her parents to leave the canvas so they can focus on the threat posed by The Writers, but I'm not sure. Alicia loses control while entering, though: she loses her Painting ability and enters the world as a painted being, a baby named Maelle. She thus begins a life incarnate in this fantasy world.
In the game til now, Maelle joins the rest of the doomed Expedition 33 as they set out to the Continent. They are met there by Renoire who annihilates most of the expedition. I think this is because Maelle as a latent Painter poses a threat that no other Expedition has before. I'm not clear on this yet, but I believe that the version of Renoire we've seen in the game is a fiction that was painted by Aline, and not the real Renoire, so she's channeling her own warped impressions of him.
Maelle, Gustave, Luna and Sciel all survive the initial onslaught. Maelle was rescued by the Curator - I think this might actually be Renoire, but I'm not sure. Together they progress through the Continent, finding the evidence of previous expeditions - fictional from the perspective of the Painters, but real to the members of this party. Gustave is killed by Renoire while saving Maelle, and then Verso rescues Maelle. Verso recognized Maelle as Alicia, but shelters her from the knowledge of who she is; the rest of the party gets very suspicious once they learn that Verso is Renoire's son. But Verso isn't really Verso, remember, this is the illusion of her son that Aline painted.
So, where I'm at now is that Verso and Maelle and the rest of the party succeed in killing the Paintress, but this has broken her protection, so everyone in Lumiere dies, seemingly including Maelle. But even though Maelle is gone, Alicia still exists, coming from a higher plane of reality. And Verso continues to exist as well, I think because he was painted by Aline (whereas I believe the Lumierians were originally painted by the original Verso). I'm expecting and hoping that we'll get to reconnect with Sciel, Lune and Monoco; it definitely looked like the first two at least died in the mass Gommage, I'm curious if there will be some time-travel shenanigans or if Maelle will be able to Paint them back into existence or what.
END SPOILERS
So, that's what I think is going on! It's been a cool story so far, with some head-expanding moments, along with a hefty dose of ambiguity and uncertainty. I'm looking forward to seeing where the game ends up. Since this is the first entry from a new studio, I have no idea at this point if they're hoping to usher in a new franchise or making a one-and-done stand-alone universe, I could see this going either direction.
I'll probably be pounding away at this for a while longer. I'm feeling very compelled to play, mostly because it is fun, but also because Hades 2 just came out and I really want to try it!
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