Clair Obsur: Expedition 33 Review - As A Gameplay First Player, This Story is PEAK

Preface

Not much of a preface this time! Lots of stuff written in the main body I would’ve put here normally.

Introduction

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a breakout Turn Based RPG that is in all the best ways, very French. It was developed by Sandfall Interactive as their first game, and published by Kepler interactive. There’s a whole lot to talk about with Expedition 33, and I’m not honestly quite sure where to start. When the game first released, I knew right away that I’d really like the game. However, due to circumstances going on in my real life, I decided to pick the game up later. I wasn’t even sure I was going to play it in the same year, but after a lot of poking and prodding from my friends, I took the plunge and played the game. Now, before I played the game, I had not seen a single trailer, and all the gameplay I saw from people streaming seemed like quite a standard JRPG with Quicktime Events. I didn’t think it was going to be a game of the year kinda game.

Oh boy was I wrong.

I picked it up at the behest of my friends Taloriann and Vekz, who were both decidedly not turn-based game people. And well, once I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down. I finished the game within 2 weeks while focusing on university, and I have a lot of things to really say about the game. I think that most of the things they do aren’t actually super innovative, but it is refined to the point that it feels fresh and new.

Clair Obscur is an absolutely phenomenal game with a strong story and world, as well as engaging and fun combat, which I’ll expand more on later in the video. I also really appreciate that the game has multiple difficulty settings, with the story one being very accessible and has allowed me to indoctrinate friends who are more on the casual scale of gaming.

For context, I myself played on the hardest difficulty. I grew up on a lot of Final Fantasy games so turn based systems come to me quite easily, and I play a lot of Souls games nowadays so I figured that the combat was going to come easily to me. And you know what, it did, but not because of Souls games. Parrying in this game is basically royal guard from DMC. The timing feels about the same as the DMC5 royal guard, and considering that the director of the game has a youtube channel dedicated to absolutely clowning on Vergil, that makes sense.

As always, I will be using footage from early parts of the game in order to avoid spoilers. Unlike my other videos though I don’t think I will use NG+ footage, as I don’t know how it handles spoiler gameplay stuff and I still haven’t done post launch content on my save so I don’t wanna go ahead to NG+ yet. It’s okay though, since that means I can actually experience the normal difficulty and see how it feels! I think something I’ve noticed while writing this script was that the game actually made me take notice and focus on a lot of stuff I usually don’t go too deep into.

Story and Presentation

Let’s talk about the story and presentation.

Clair Obscur is set in a fantasy version of France, in a city named Lumiere. Lumiere is an island on the edge of the map, and has been for a long time. In the far off north a massive monolith stands, with a number painted on it. Every year, the paintress, wakes up and paints a new number, one lower than the previous year. Everyone who is that age or older dies, in universe, this is known as the Gommage. Lumiere has been living with this existential threat for 67 years, with the number having started at 100.

The tone of the story is somber and emotional, and the presentation is absolutely phenomenal. We play as Gustave, an inventor from Lumiere. This is the first day of his last year, and he, along with many others, have decided to join this year’s Expedition in order to attempt to stop the Paintress from ever painting again. The introduction to the game lets us get to know Gustave himself, Maelle, his adoptive sister who is joining his expedition early, and Sophie, a former lover of Gustave. You learn a bit of why they broke up, how they still cared about each other, among many other things. There is a lot that you can do in the intro, and it sets the tone and character relationships up very well. I’m not going to go into more detail on the story, since I think it will be best experienced yourself. It was the best introduction to a game that I’d played in years, and I knew that whatever journey the game was throwing us into, I wanted Gustave to succeed.

Let me introduce all the other party members here, since I’m not going deeper into the main story. The main party members are Gustave, Maelle, Lune and Sciel, though I’ll cover Esquie a bit too.

Gustave as we know is the inventor who invented the Lumina Converter which allows for the party to harness Chroma from defeated enemies to strengthen themselves. He’s a pretty straightforward character who wants to protect his sister and defeat the paintress for the good of Lumiere. He has moments where he loses his nerve, which considering everything going on, is quite realistic.

Maelle is his adopted sister and a young girl who never fit in with Lumiere. She decided to join the Expedition in order to leave to explore the world since she didn’t feel she belonged in Lumiere. I love the siblings’ dynamics, and the amount of little sister energy she radiates is so entertaining to see.

Lune is a researcher from Lumiere, and was the one who charted the path for the Expedition and the one who now is most focused with their objective in stopping the paintress. She definitely feels like the logical anchor of the group, sometimes at the cost of ignoring the emotional aspects.

Sciel is the final expeditioner to join the party, and was once a teacher and farmer. She is the one most at peace with everything going on, and is the emotional anchor of the party. She lightens the mood when necessary, and is a very noticeably empathetic person who is generally very pleasant to see and interact with everyone.

Esquie is a giant marshmallow who is absolutely overpowered but is a lazy boy so he doesn’t actually do any fighting for you. He does act as a mount of sorts and will clear the way for you in the open world segments, and later even swim and fly. Story wise he’s a legendary figure in the world who is enlisted by the party in order to travel across the ocean, and being a giant marshmallow provides a lot of emotional support over the course of the story.

Can I also just mention the White Haired Man, the one we see as the antagonist from the moment that they land? The White Haired Man’s introduction itself was absolute cinema, and every time he shows up he demands your attention. The sound of his cane hitting the ground as well as the visual aspect every time he shows up, are just absolutely amazing. I love his guy, and I genuinely think he’s one of the coolest antagonists in recent years.

I think that this cast is absolutely phenomenal. They bounce off each other well and have fantastic chemistry, and they all have a lot of backstory with each other. I’ll go into the gameplay aspects of each character later since there’s a lot to talk about on that front.

In overall terms, I think everything about the presentation is what really hooks me into the game. The actual story itself I feel is actually relatively predictable. I was able to predict almost every twist, but I don’t honestly think that’s a bad thing because the execution was so good. I actually originally had like double the length of this segment with what I wanted to say, but it veered too hard into spoiler territory, so I decided to cut it short. Just realize that if I’m writing this much about the story of a game, it’s something special. We all know at this point that I’m a gameplay first kind of player I think, so that really shows how much the story resonated with me.

Visual and Sound

In terms of visuals, the game is absolutely gorgeous, with an amazing artistic direction that makes you feel like you’re in a dream. The environmental design is extremely varied and is consistently fantastic the whole way through. I adore how much the whimsical design of the different areas in the world contrasts with the realism found inside of Lumiere.

The enemy designs for Expedition 33 are extremely good, with a lot of significant enemies having strong symbolism relating to the story weaved into their design. I adore a lot of these enemies, and I think that they’re really cool.

I think the biggest point in favor of the game for me, and there are a lot of points in favor honestly, is the music is absolutely phenomenal. I can just pick a track out of the soundtrack album and find something that’s an absolute banger. Of course, there are a few standouts that I just absolutely adore, but just take a listen to a snippet of the opening and you'll get my point.

I cannot stress how amazing some of these songs are. Even if you don’t end up clicking with the game, the music is absolutely phenomenal. I have listened to these songs on repeat to the point I think I actually know the lyrics despite not knowing the language at all. On that note, please DO NOT look up the lyrics of the songs unless you have finished the game, it hints very clearly at a lot of the twists present in the story.

Speaking of language, let’s talk about the voice acting in the game. To be completely clear, my whole first playthrough was in English because I’m a huge voice actor simp and I adore Ben Starr and Jennifer English’s voices. Their performance, and everyone else’s performances, were absolutely amazing and the only nitpick I could come up with is that the lipsync is not quite perfect. That’s it.

In the playthrough I started to record the footage, I did play in French. I will be honest, since I do not understand the language and honestly have not heard enough of the language, I cannot say if the voice acting is good. However, it’s pleasant enough to listen to and I have no complaints, though I would always lean into the English voice acting just because they were such fantastic performances.

Before we move on, I just wanted to mention that we get a lot of different costumes and hairstyles for every character. It’s not a major part of my footage since they don’t give you too many options early in the game, though later you’ll have a lot of options to customize if you’d like. Be warned though, if you use some of the sillier customizations it can make the cutscenes look really goofy and kill the mood sometimes.

Gameplay

Oh boy, another gameplay segment that’s going to take up half the video. Hi, that’s me!

Let’s get started quickly since we have a ton to talk about. I’ll start on combat and go from there. Combat is actually a pretty standard ATB Gauge turn based RPG system. This means that each character’s turns come up separately rather than as a party. The UI for it here reminds me a bit of how Honkai has it set up with the turn order on the top left, character stats and such on the bottom, and all that jazz.

During combat, you have a resource called AP which is required for utilizing skills and shooting. Generating AP is done through attacking and parrying mainly, though you can unlock passives that generate AP through other means or boosting AP generation through the standard methods.

The AP you generate can be utilized for skills and shooting. Skills are pretty self explanatory, and are essentially just bigger attacks that do more and engage with mechanics. When you use them, you’ll need to complete a Quicktime Event that boosts the damage and potency of the skill. These are pretty simple, and I think reminds me a lot of the Gunblade mechanics from FF8. I’ll expand on skills later since there’s quite a bit unique to each character. On the other hand shooting will consume 1 AP, though not the turn so you can actually still keep shooting, then attack or use a skill. Shooting is just extra damage targeted at what you aim at, meaning you can hit weak spots, and depending on the passives you have equipped it can also have other effects.

In terms of defense, you have three options. The first one is dodging. Dodging is easily the safest option for making sure you do not die. It has the biggest window of safety compared to the other options. The second option is parrying, which is the counterattack option if you manage to parry every hit in the enemy’s combo. The timing is tight, but if you manage to do it your counter will help cut down the enemy’s HP by a lot. The third option is to jump, and this is specific to some attacks only. Not much to say on this one, you just get a free hit in as well.

I wanted to slide this bit in, but past where I stopped recording footage, you get access to a Limit Break style mechanic called Gradient Attacks, which provides a ton of damage and setup for the unique character mechanics and an extra turn to follow up on the setup. When you get access to this, you also get access to Gradient Parries, which allow you to parry Gradient Attacks from enemies. Essentially the same as normal parries, just for these attacks. I think that this rounds out the basic combat system quite well.

Let’s go into each character’s unique mechanics. I’m actually super impressed at how unique every character is from a gameplay perspective. I’ll be talking specifically about the four characters we get access to at the start, though you can get access to two more characters later in the story with their own mechanics. These two characters also have really cool mechanics, though unfortunately there’s a lot of spoiler stuff surrounding them so I’m not going to talk about their stuff.

Gustave, our leading man, is a pretty standard fighter archetype with his sword and his gun. His unique mechanic is his mechanical arm’s charge, which builds up whenever he hits an enemy, dodges or parries. When the charge is filled up, he can release all the power with his Overcharge skill, which does a massive amount of damage and can break the enemy if their meter is filled. He’s not too complex and is a fantastic character to start with since he is the first you get access to.

Lune is a relatively standard mage archetype. Her unique mechanic is her elemental stains mechanic, which generates elemental stains based on the skills that she uses. With specific elemental stains on her weapon, each skill can be boosted as well, leading to a pretty rotational flow to her gameplay. You can actually build her in multiple ways, both for offense or as a support, since her skillset is so versatile. She’s also able to hit every elemental weakness with her spells, so she fits in well with every team comp.

Maelle is a stance based duelist, and each stance provides different bonuses. She has three main stances and all her skills will shift her into a specific stance after she uses them, however, she cannot shift into a stance she’s already in. If you use a skill that would shift her into a stance she’s already in, she will become stanceless, which is to say no bonuses. Offensive stance increases the damage that Maelle does and the amount of damage she takes on getting hit. Defensive stance halves the damage taken and increases the amount of AP you gain from parrying. Virtuose stance increases the damage Maelle does by 200%. Everything around Maelle is focused on doing damage, which makes some of her skills (like taking damage for her allies) feel out of place and like they meant to give her more variety but maybe didn’t quite have the time to flesh it out or decided against it.

Sciel is a jack of all trades, with a unique mechanic that buffs her skills based on what she previously used. Her unique mechanic is the Day, Night and Twilight mechanic. Her Day skills set up stacks on the enemy, which are utilized by Night skills. Using both puts Twilight buff on her, which boosts skills from both Day and Night. She can provide a lot of buffs from her skills and can push her allies’ turn order up. She also has a lot of damage potential, though it requires quite a lot of setup compared to other party members. Her gameplay flow can be quite rotational, but she has a lot of options for which role she wants to lean towards during the rotation, allowing her to adapt during moment to moment gameplay.

Moving on to the enemy part of the equation, it’s quite a standard RPG I would say. Enemies have HP, and a break meter that you can fill and proc to stun them. In general, the enemy design on the gameplay end is pretty good. The telegraphing is there, though there are some Elden Ring level delays that can be quite tricksy. The sound cues do help a lot, though with how tight the timing is and how short the sound cue is, I do struggle to get the timing for each enemy right until I’ve fought it a few times. One point of complaint I do have is that attacks that can be jumped feel a bit inconsistent. It feels a bit weird, but it’s not a super major complaint since attacks that can be jumped do have a huge symbol shown as it’s coming out.

Now to go into the meat of this game’s complexity, buildcrafting. There are a lot of moving parts to this, so let’s start with what I would consider the core. Weapons in this game tend to form the core of each character’s build, and determine the stats that the character’s damage scales off of. Each weapon generally has 3 passives that unlock at upgrade levels 4, 10 and 20, with the exception of starting weapons since those do not have any passives. These passives are massively powerful and can really change how each character feels to play as, as well as synergizing with different parts of their kits.

To go deeper, we also have three slots to equip Pictos for every party member. Pictos have two components to them, first being the stats provided by the Picto, and second being the Lumina, the passive associated with the Picto. The stats are going to be the main deciding factor by the time you get to lategame, as once you’ve fought four battles with a Picto equipped you can actually equip the Lumina on anyone in the party as long as you have the Lumina points available. Each Lumina costs a different amount of Lumina Points and any Lumina that gives the same effect tends to stack but costs more Lumina Points as you get the higher tier ones. You can also increase each character’s Lumina Point cap through the use of Colors of Lumina back at the camp. Colors of Lumina are generally found in the world or through side quests and bosses.

The system is complex, with a lot of moving parts, but I really adore it. The biggest complaint that I had initially was that there were no presets so each time you changed a build, you’d have to try to remember everything you had equipped to return to the old one. However, there was a patch between my first playthrough and this one that I did for the recording which has added presets. I haven’t utilized it as it was too early and the options were limited, but it’s there, so no more complaints here.

An example of some builds I utilized with the options available in the recordings, are as follows.

Sciel would act first, and with Energizing Start 1 and 3 (I forgot where 2 was), she would immediately be able to cast All Set and apply Rush, Protect and Powerful to the whole party. She would then keep the team’s damage up through Marking Card or attacking with Exposing Attack equipped. If there is enough AP, she can also use Intervention to immediately push Maelle’s turn up for more damage. Another option I actually thought about while writing this was Fortune’s Fury, which could have doubled Maelle’s damage too if the turn order didn’t require Intervention.

I built for Lune to apply and maintain Burn stacks to enemies using Wildfire (or Immolation if I’m fighting a boss), and had Healing Light on hand to keep the team healed and regain AP through Thermal Transfer as needed. She also had Rebirth equipped just in case I screwed up my parries and someone died.

This would lead into Maelle’s setup, where she would start in Virtuose stance and have enough AP to immediately use Fleuret Fury for high damage off the bat, then maintain it with Mezzo Forte, which gives her back some AP and keeps her current stance. If she is stunned or dropped out of it somehow, Lune’s burn stacks allow her to immediately hop back into Virtuose stance with Swift Stride, and I just have to maintain the loop.

Which brings us to Gustave. He was my back liner, and would only show up if my main team died. In the recording I did for this review that actually was never, though I did bring him out to play around with the build in the footage a bit. Since he was always solo, I gave him all the “If Solo grants X” effects so he always had Rush, Powerful and Protect applied, as well as a big damage boost and 100% crit chance. The setup was essentially that he’d start with enough AP to use Lumiere Assault, which would put him right on the threshold to use Overcharge. Being solo, he would get targeted by every enemy so he’d always have AP as long as I didn’t screw up the parries. From there on, I would just rotate between Strike Storm and Overcharge for massive damage.

The friends that got me into the game, Taloriann and Vekz, actually managed to basically break the game through the buildcrafting system, with them managing to basically one shot most enemies by the end. I was not actually engaging super much with the system and just equipping what felt like it made sense, since I was streaming the game and I didn’t really want to spend too much time in the menu just figuring out some galaxy brain build. I figured the struggle is more entertaining to watch than the menus. I will say though, that that approach I had made the gameplay feel extremely smooth difficulty curve wise, up until the endgame.

Honestly, considering everything, I don’t think that Expedition 33 actually does anything new for the genre, but it refines everything that’s already there and pulls relevant stuff from other genres. This makes the game flow and feel amazing, and I really respect that, since I don’t think every new game needs to invent a whole new system to stand out.

Moving on to the open world, I think that it’s done absolutely fantastically. The open world reminds me a lot of the old Final Fantasy open worlds where everything is scaled down a bit while you’re scaled up and you can wander everywhere. Even with the scaled up characters we have, the world still feels quite massive through the visual design. The design is pretty standard, with paths being blocked until you hit certain progression thresholds and upgrades.

On the world, there are different dungeons and minigames that you can partake in.

The dungeons are pretty standard design, with a lot of branching paths that lead to treasure and loop back into the main path, and of course the main path leads to the boss. I’ve heard that the main path is always lit up by lights while the optional paths are not, but I couldn’t figure it out if it was true to be honest. If it is, I think that’s fantastic design, but from my replay for footage at least, I didn’t really notice it even when looking for it. One complaint I do have about dungeons, though this doesn’t apply to early game much, is that some dungeons are just arbitrarily split up for no reason? Like instead of just walking in and using the first flag to teleport to the place I want to be, sometimes I’ll have to teleport to one, walk through a door, and then teleport again. It feels weird because I don’t understand why they did it, but I’m assuming there’s some reason in the backend that made them need to do it.

The Gestral Beaches are essentially areas that have little minigames that you can play to unlock swimsuits for the characters. The minigames themselves are a bit hit or miss for me. I didn’t really enjoy them, but they’re there if you want the swimsuits. I did them all just to have the costumes, though I didn’t really change their costumes since I wanted the vanilla story experience

Conclusion

So, what do I think? Well, considering I just spent the last, probably 15-20 minutes sucking on the game’s dick, I think that the verdict is that it’s an extremely high recommendation. The story is absolutely sublime, the gameplay is a fantastic set of mechanics that just flow together very well, and honestly I don’t think I have any major complaints for the game. Everything I’ve complained about has been either pretty minor or optional.

If you’re a story focused player, I think that this game is absolutely for you. If you’re not good at game mechanics, just play on the easiest difficulty. It’s there for a reason, enjoy yourself.

If you’re a gameplay focused player, then this game can be for you depending on how much you like to spend time figuring out builds. If you’re willing to engage with the bare basics of buildcrafting in this game, you will probably enjoy yourself. If you’re willing to spend a lot of time in the menus, the level of power you can get is absolute insanity. If you’re not willing to menu at all though, this game may not be for you.

If you’re an old Final Fantasy fan who has been lamenting the shift to real time combat in the main series, look no further. This is the game you’ve wanted since the shift happened.

I hope that this review has provided you with enough information to decide if you want to pick this game up or not. If it has, I’m glad I helped! And if not, please let me know below what’s missing so I can fix it for whatever I’m currently working on next. Thanks for joining me for this video, and I’ll hopefully see you next time!