I sometimes feel like my entire life is playing RPGs: by the time I finish one up, there's another one I want to play lined up and waiting for me. I'll sometimes force myself to take a break, to play another genre or stop playing games altogether for a bit. But I almost always enjoy whatever massive RPG I pick up next.
The latest entry for me is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which I received courtesy of my brother for my birthday (thanks, Andrew!). I've been hearing about this game for a while, including from a co-worker who said it's her favorite RPG of the last several years, and I've been looking forward to experiencing it for myself.
MINI SPOILERS
The one-sentence summary of Expedition 33 is basically "A French JRPG". It has a lot of the game structure and feel of a Final Fantasy game. Your main character and party members are all predefined characters. At least thus far in the game, there aren't any dialogue choices or branching plot points. You assemble your team into an active party of 3 combatants, and face off in turn-based battles against 1-3 opponents. You fight enemies to gain XP and money ("chroma"), level up your characters, pick abilities, get weapons and equipment.
But, everything about the game's style oozes French: the haircuts, the clothes, the art style. Accordion music everywhere you turn. You fight mimes, for crying out loud! The characters aren't accented, but most of the proper words are French: Gommage, Petank, Lumiere. About the only thing missing is characters taking long drags on cigarettes.
After playing the game for a while, though, I've been surprised to learn that a lot of it actually feels more like Elden Ring than anything else. (Though this may be more about Dark Souls influencing the RPG landscape in general.) Some examples:
"Bonfire"-style save mechanics. You can discover Expedition Flagpoles, which work similarly to Sites of Grace in Elden Ring. If you choose to rest at one, it completely heals you and refills your consumables, but also respawns non-boss enemies. After you've unlocked one it becomes available for fast-travel, although in Expedition 33 you can only fast-travel from a Flagpole to another one in the same zone (there isn't an Open World or the ability to fast-travel from anywhere).
Consumables regenerate, which is great - no more saving 99 mana potions in your inventory because you might need them one day! Like Elden Ring there is a healing potion ("Tint"), as well as one to generate AP and another to revive a fallen party member (revive was not relevant in the single-character Elden Ring). You also upgrade them similarly, discovering materials that you can use at the Flagpole to increase the potency or quantity of your potions.
Petanks are like Teardrop Scarabs: they aren't necessarily tough, but you have to take them down quickly to acquire their treasure.
Finally, but most importantly and most surprisingly, combat is like Elden Ring, despite being squad-based and turn-based. In particular, both games have combat that heavily relies on Dodge and Parry ability. The actual flow of combat is turn-based, with you issuing commands to attack, use an item or use a skill; but during the animation, you can intervene to change the outcome. For your party's abilities, you can press A at a certain point to increase the strength of the attack (or heal or whatever). More importantly, when an enemy attacks, you can press Dodge or Parry at the right instant to evade the attack and completely avoid any damage. So there's the same sort of "git gud" philosophy as in Soulslikes: you're learning enemy attack patterns and timings and animations, and if you can reliably dodge or parry at the right times, you can whittle away any enemy or even boss, regardless of your level. And, like in Elden Ring, if you're having trouble with a particular boss you do have the option of going elsewhere, grinding XP and resources, getting more HP and attack power, and then coming back with more of a buffer to soak damage during the battle.
I should hasten to note that this game isn't as hard as Elden Ring, though one of my few complaints is that difficulty varies wildly during the game: you'll be in a zone where you can just brain-dead take down all opponents and shrug off any damage, and then face an optional enemy who can one-shot your entire party and who takes fifteen minutes of flawless execution to defeat. I haven't yet resorted to looking up mechanics online (except for one "Tricky Shot" attack that was giving me conniptions), so if I fail a fight a few times in a row I'll just make a mental note of where it was and move on.
Oh, and back to dodge and parry: early on I was focusing on parries, which are strictly superior to dodges: in addition to avoiding damage, you also execute a free counter-attack, which is incredibly helpful. However, the timing required for parries is significantly harder, so I've given up and just focused on dodges. I'm decent, not great, at them. Each enemy has their own distinct timing to learn, so there isn't one universal cue to look for. Usually after a few attack rounds I get to the point where I can reliably dodge, and probably a bit more than half of the time get a "perfect" dodge; with the 1-point "Dodger" Lumina equipped, you gain an AP on a perfect dodge, which is a nice advantage. My understanding is that the window for a Perfect Dodge is the same as the window for a successful Parry (with a Perfect Parry being a further subset), so if I ever get to the point where I'm reliably hitting that Perfect Dodge I may switch back to parrying.
For my team: it's been a pretty slow process of gathering my party, with just Gustave for a while, then adding Lune, then some time later Maelle, and more recently Sciel, so there hasn't been a whole lot of choice in party composition thus far. I've been equipping new Pictos on whoever seems like they might synergize with it or who has open slots; at some point I'll buckle down and do a proper optimization pass with all the Lumina I've learnt, but for now I just periodically revisit that when I reassign Pictos.
I've been loading up Gustave with Free Aim-related Pictos and Luminas; I don't know if he has any particular advantage with them, it's more that I wanted to focus those abilities on one character and he happened to be it. Early in the game I would often do a combo to open battles where he would Mark enemies and then Lune would unleash a fire attack on them for some extra stacks of Burn. For most trash mob fights he plinks away at enemies and we win before he can charge up his arm. For boss fights, I can usually charge it, then need to do basic attacks for a round or two to get enough AP for the lightning attack; this usually finishes off the boss (probably with a good amount of overkill, though I'm not sure if there's a way to track that.)
Lune feels like a caster/mage type, with a much bigger collection of abilities than Gustave. Her abilities revolve around environmental damage: Earth, Electricity, Fire, Ice. These are all pretty different. Earth tends to be more for AOE attacks and healing. Fire inflicts DOT Burn status effects. One consistent aspect of Expedition 33 is that you are strongly encouraged to rotate between attacks instead of just spamming a particular ability. For Lune, the incentive is to essentially create "combos" from multiple abilities; in a departure from how much games work, though, combos aren't triggered by status effects on the target, but rather on the caster. If you cast a Fire spell, you'll gain a Fire "stain"; some other (non-Fire) abilities will then consume that "stain" for an additional bonus, which might be more damage, a free attack, a free turn, some healing, etc. I really like Lune's abilities, but she is chronically short on AP, so I end up needing to do Basic Attacks with her a lot of the time. I should do some theory-crafting research and see if there's a better way to use her.
Maelle is probably my favorite combatant so far. Her fighting style revolves around "stances", like Gaichu in Shadowrun Hong Kong. Whenever she finishes a skill, she will end in a particular stance, which will give some bonuses (and possibly penalties) in the following round: Offensive deals more damage but also receives more damage, Defensive increases resistance and AP regeneration, Virtuoso gives high damage. Like Lune, you are strongly encouraged to switch abilities since you can't remain in the same stance for more than one turn. Unlike Lune or Gustave, I never seem to need to worry about AP with Maelle. She has some really nice sequences that alternate between stances, do a good amount of direct and DOT damage, and keep her AP high. Most of her attacks inflict Fire damage, so she can be weak against enemies who are resistant to Fire; occasionally I'll swap her out during a fight like that, but she also has a few abilities that deal Physical damage, as well as a useful one that converts Burn stacks into straight Physical damage.
Finally, Sciel is the most recent person I've picked up. Once again you're encouraged to alternate between skills. In her case, some of her abilities give "Sun Charge" and others give "Moon Charge"; somewhat like Maelle's Stances, each charge gives a passive buff for the following turn. If you get both Sun and Moon, you then unlock Twilight for two turns which gives even larger bonuses. Sciel's straight damage feels a little lacking, but she excels in multi-turn setups. Some of her abilities apply stacks of "Foretell" on an enemy. By itself these do nothing, but subsequent abilities will consume "Foretell". The most straightforward will convert it to damage, which is very powerful; other abilities will convert to AP for your teammates or healing for yourself. Sciel's AP situation is even better than Maelle's, and I'll often start her turns with 9 AP. I'm thinking of turning Sciel into my gun bunny, since she has AP to burn.
Moving on to the story:
One thing I love about Expedition 33 is the almost complete lack of exposition. Nobody ever explains what's going on. You can gradually piece it together from dialogue, which as in all speculative fiction is more rewarding that being spoon-fed the backstory. Here is my current understanding of the situation, though I could definitely be wrong about many things:
I believe this is set in a separate world, not Earth. About 67 years ago, a godlike being called The Paintress removed humanity from The Continent and exiled them to the island of Lumiere. She also created a large clock tower with a number on it, originally 100 and counting down by 1 each year. Each year, everyone that age or older undergoes the "gommage", basically immediately winking out of existence / dying. So the first year everyone 100 or older died, the second year everyone 99 or older, and so on. At the start of this game, the 34-year-olds all died, so everyone left alive on Lumiere is 33 or younger.
Every year, Lumiere mounts an "expedition" to the Continent to try and stop the Paintress from doing this. The expedition is often largely filled by people who are facing the year of their gommage: if they fail in the quest, they will die anyways, so they might as well try. It's up to the individual, though, and lots of people will spend their last year with friends and family.
MEGA SPOILERS
I think that's the main stuff so far. Your particular expedition starts off very badly, with an ambush on the beach that results in mass slaughter. I am a little suspicious about exactly what's going on: characters seem to die, then wake up, which makes me wonder if they might actually be dead / in some sort of afterlife or something.
Life on the Continent is very strange, which I think is largely due to the influence of the Paintress but may predate her. The main life forms you encounter are "nevrons", who are mostly enemies although you run across a couple for side-quests who seem friendly or at least passive. Nevrons all look very different and very strange, sometimes made from geometric shapes and other times more monstrous-looking.
There are also the Gestrals, who are probably my favorite thing in Expedition 33 so far. They're basically anthropomorphic paint brushes, usually about knee-high although some are much bigger. They talk in a weird language that the human characters in the game can understand but I can't; fortunately subtitles are provided. They are pretty childlike: enthusiastic, excitable, kinda dumb. Oh, and they love fighting, and will eagerly engage in a friendly duel at any opportunity. They're also really bad at fighting! I think those are the easiest fights I've had all game, even though you're usually facing them 1-on-1 and not in a party.
END SPOILERS
I just reached the end of Act 1, hence this blog post. I'll likely check in twice more as I proceed through the game. I feel like there's a lot more story to uncover and I'm looking forward to seeing what else is in store.
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