Playing A Game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 PC

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's makers were clearly fans of Final Fantasy's PS1 era: there was a certain narrative-aesthetic "feel" common to Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, and Final Fantasy IX (not to mention Final Fantasy X) which Clair Obscur studiously, thoroughly replicates.

Its world is wildly fantastical, made of numerous environments each full to bursting with imaginative designs and vivid color. The party shares moments of sorrow and celebration, intrigue and melancholy, as they journey through this wondrous world and explore its metaphysical mysteries ... on their mission to kill a god. There are even some all-but-explicit homages, like occasional fixed-camera exploration screens that evoke the pre-rendered backgrounds from Square's PS1 games.

Clair Obscur also replicates aspects of those older JRPGs that seem, well, old. As pretty as the environments are, they're often frustrating to navigate, and have no in-game map; the overworld teases plenty of optional content, but a majority of it isn't accessible until the game's final act, due to level gates and/or missing traversal abilities.

Character upgrades and customization are bewilderingly complicated. Between the five stats you can increment at level-up, skill trees with level-up unlocks, collectable equipment with varying stats and ability bonuses, equipment upgrades (swords have levels!), equippable accessories that consume upgradeable points (and the accessories also have levels!) ... most RPGs would choose two or three of these mechanics, but Clair Obscur implements all of them.

There are so many options and possible combinations, with intricate combat impacts - oh yeah, each character's combat tactics are completely unique!, reminiscent of Final Fantasy VI - and many upgrade choices turn out to be worthless, or even objectively harmful. The staggering complexity discourages experimentation; once you find a configuration that "works," screwing with it doesn't feel worth the effort.

And unfortunately, this leads to the combat itself becoming intensely repetitive, especially as battles get more frequent in the game's 2nd and 3rd acts. Both from overlong dungeons with the same enemies copied-and-pasted over and over again, and from gaps inbetween level expectations -- but like I mentioned earlier, "a majority of [optional content] isn't accessible until the game's final act", so keeping your levels up with the story more-or-less requires some grinding.

I really wish that Clair Obscur's parry and dodge and attack-timing interactions could make that combat more interesting, but these mechanics are confounding in their unpredictability. Enemy "tells" aren't very clear or consistent, enemy attacks include way too many hits, and the timing requirements are incredibly narrow. Much like I once wrote about Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story:

Learning an enemy's patterns can be a crapshoot. Some enemies have a large number of attack patterns, and what looks like Pattern 5 may end up being a surprise! Pattern 6, whose defense is totally different.

In many cases, the timing window for a successful defense (or attack) is astonishingly small. They're just really hard to do.

I'll confess that I played through the whole game in "Story" difficulty, because otherwise I wouldn't have survived occasionally missing a defensive reaction.

All this may sound like I'm down on Clair Obscur's gameplay, and, well... I am. As the first act's tight narrative pacing begins to loosen up, an increased focus on combat exposes the tedium of its over-complex character sheets and over-difficult timed inputs. By Act 3, I was really ready for the game to be over.

Clair Obscur succeeds as art, aesthetically, thanks to outstanding visuals and especially thanks to a moving and memorable soundtrack.

As an interactive experience, it's weighed down by archaic game designs that don't respect the modern player's time. But if you're as enamored by late-90s-early-00s Final Fantasy as this game's creators evidently were, maybe you'll enjoy the time-sinks of grinding levels and customizing your characters; maybe that's just what you've been looking for.

Better than: Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story
Not as good as: South Park: The Stick of Truth
I didn't know where else to mention: the lip sync is wack. The voice performances are pretty great, though.

Rating: Good