Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, with its typically French "subtitle for a non-sequel" title, took me and many by surprise last year. My first time hearing about it was when Jacob Geller mentioned being impressed with its turn-based combat that called to mind Sekiro (the one FromSoft souls-like I've never actually played). It was relatively cheap (I think 50 bucks) and I decided to get it on a whim, despite the fact that I was not quite done with Lies of P, which I came to a couple years after it came out (and as it turned out, just a couple months before its excellent Overture DLC).
Especially given that I had found myself frustrated by Final Fantasy XVI's complete and total abandonment of any sort of RPG gameplay (especially galling given how beautifully the FFVII remake series has come up with a fantastic blend of action combat with tactical, menu-based gameplay that I think of as being definitional to the series perhaps because I am old), it was really exciting to drop into a turn-based RPG, and one that also glowed with originality.
After beating the game, I found myself pining for a game like Expedition 33, only to lament that, well, there wasn't really anything like it. Now, I'll concede that the gameplay system is arguably not wholly original - I've never played the Persona games, but I'm given to understand that there's a lot of that that inspired Expedition 33. But the world of the game is truly unlike any other, with creature design, world design, and music that I really don't think I've seen anywhere else.
The folks at Sandfall have said that they intend to make sequels, and I can very easily see the "Clair Obscur" series going on to have other entries.
The nature of the game's story, though, makes me feel that it would best make sense to take the Final Fantasy approach and have each entry be connected by themes and motifs but not by plot - perhaps allowing only the "Writers versus Painters" narrative that is vaguely hinted at in E33 carry on.
E33 (yeah, I'm abbreviating it about as much as I can) is a gorgeous game and also one of the bleakest stories I've ever seen in video games. The prologue, which establishes the stakes and the initial premise of the game, is both horrifying and gutwrenchingly sad, but as the layers are pulled back and the truth of what is actually going on comes to light, it gets even tougher. Players are left with a binary choice at the end of the game that inspires a lot of philosophical debate, and basically, there's no way to feel 100% comfortable with what choice you make unless you refuse to engage in any philosophical nuance.
The story, the art direction, the excellent vocal and physical performances, music, etc., are all extremely praiseworthy. The gameplay is also deeply satisfying, but I do feel like I need to place an asterisk here:
This is a game that you can start to break at higher levels. There is a level cap (99, fittingly three times 33, the game's main arc number) but there is no cap on Lumina (wait, did I confuse that with a similar resource in Pragmata or do they use the same word?) The game encourages you to come up with "builds," and while I think early on, when you have very limited lumina and pictos, this is a fun bit of figuring out which bits work best for you (I focused a lot on parrying, and tended to load up on stuff that benefited that) but at the extremes, you start to hit a point where characters are doing insane one-shot combos. Meanwhile, it feels like enemies (especially in the free DLC) are built based on the assumption that that is what you're doing.
Likewise, because dodging and parrying allows you to fully avoid all damage (the only exceptions are undodgeable debuffs that lower your max HP,) late game monsters have such absurdly long attack combos and deceptive parry timing, and hit so hard, that it feels like you need to have those broken builds to beat them (ok, to be fair, this was mainly just Simon in the base game - I was able to beat Clea sort of conventionally by just figuring out the parry timing, and I think she probably counts as the second-hardest boss of the base game).
To be honest, I prefer a game where the potential for power coming from a build is sort of bounded, which then imposes reasonable restrictions on how tough a foe can be (they can still be insanely tough - I have beaten Promised Consort Radahn in Elden Ring - though only once, and after the patch that nerfed him a couple weeks after Shadow of the Erdtree came out).
Still, the experience of the main story campaign, and most of the post-game stuff, was tuned really well, I thought. (I might have made it clear that there was a post-game, as I assumed the game would just end after I finished the main story and so did all that stuff first, except maybe Simon, and was thus way over-leveled for the final boss).
I also recall early on that the tutorialization of specifically Pictos and Luminas was a little confusing. And another nitpick is that I think the weapon upgrade system was a bit flawed - the final upgrade nearly doubles the weapon's power, and given that there are a finite number of items to make that final upgrade, that felt bad. In FromSoft games, which use a similar weapon upgrade system, the final upgrade isn't much more of a jump in power than any other upgrade, and that means it's easy enough to try out a bunch of weapons at just one level below, for which upgrade items are unlimited if you get enough resources (at least in Elden Ring. I think maybe in Bloodborne Bloodstone Chunks were also finite).
I haven't gone back to play through the game a second time - I believe that you can make multiple save files (something I've always lamented you couldn't do in Control, which is a very different game but one that also captured my imagination) but I've been caught between impulses to just start fresh or do NG+. And also, I don't know if I'm ready for the game to hurt me so bad again.
I do hope to see a new Clair Obscur game, and hope it will address some of the gameplay quibbles I have (though I understand that these are more matters of taste, and the folks at Sandfall might not feel the same way). Whatever the story of the next one, I hope we get the whimsical creature design, the over-the-top Frenchness, and I also hope that Gestrals will be the Moogles/Chocobos of the series, showing up in all of them, because I adore the Gestrals.
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