Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

2025-12-15
Clair Obscur is secretly good because it has an Easy Mode. Yes, the incredible music, wonderfully creative story with twists and turns and lovable characters—Esquie, Verso, Monoco mon ami!—yes, the borderline gasp-inducing scenery and visual design, the melted Eiffel Tower. Yes, yes, yes we’ve heard it all and the myriad Clair Glazers online are correct. Even as those same people manifest into a fandom approaching levels of intolerableness previously reserved by Undertale and Hollow Knight sickos. But no, the real reason it’s good is that it has an easy mode.

Because at its core when you remove all the artistic faff spewn from so many very clever French people, and all trad-JRPG gubbins, what you have is a rhythm game like Sekiro. Enemies have a handful of named moves, each with a little rhythm you learn: Ba-ba----BA, Ba--Ba-Ba---Ba, etc. Only unlike Sekiro which forces you to bang your head repeatedly to memorize each boss like you’re learning some fuckin Chopin concerto for recital here we have an Easy mode. It loosens that timing window just enough so people like me, who play games for fun, can do so without needing to spend hours "training". Delightfully it doesn't even make the game easy. You still need to practice a bit for the tougher encounters. Sure, most of the game I was able to intuit enemies attacks but there’s just enough bosses and optional enemies that would absolutely thwomp my ass without some concentration and applied dexterity. In fact, really my only complaint with the Easy mode is why not just make configurable sliders? I honestly just wanted the timing window made a little more lenient for my millennial-ass claws but in turning it on it also makes enemies weaker. Pfeh, I don't need help with your JRPG encounters, I just don't want to practice tapping O or R1 at the right time.

Overall with the help of more lenient timing I had a blast in Expedition 33's incredibly engaging spin on JRPG combat. BUT there are caveats. Far too frequently for my taste they do the really obnoxious thing FromSoft started doing with some enemy attacks--seemingly to keep oldheads like yours truly on our toes--where they fake you out, sometimes repeatedly. The heavily telegraphed attack that acts like it's going to hit you and then pauses for a second long enough to break your nerve and hit the dodge button JUST in time to get smacked in the face. It always felt like the trope of the bully holding a kid's hat just out of reach and pulling away at the last second when they try to grab it. And just like in that scenario I find to be just about total ass and want to smack someone upside the head for doing it.

To be honest for the first two acts I was kind of dragging my heels and felt like the game was a big miss. Sure dodging and parrying is fun but the story felt incredibly slowly paced and boring. All the twists and "tragic losses" felt overly telegraphed and left me feeling cold. The path is almost entirely linear with little side diversions that don't really amount to much. And the mechanical progression and builds felt incredibly gimped by the damage cap. Thanks for the 20 quadrillion Pictos, friend, but I hit the damage cap at like level 20 and now I'm just bored.

Then I hit the third act and two things happened: they removed the damage cap and opened the world up. It felt like they saved the best for last. Suddenly the 500 skill points I've banked can actually be leveraged for some fucked up builds. It is deviously fun to go from hitting for 9999 damage to one shotting a superboss for 400 million damage. And the path to get there meant I did everything, combing over most of the locations on the map. And behind every other door there'd be some new boss[1], or family member, or trial, or music to find. I must have spent as much time in the third act of the game as I did in one and two combined and I was having so much more fun the whole time. Special shout out to the Bennett-Foddy-ass Gestral Beach. Why is there platforming this fun in a JRPG? I don’t know but I’m here for it.

You’ll notice I’m hand waving over the entire story. And to be honest that’s because, as I alluded to, it hit at about a C rating for resonance with me. Like I mentioned, all the big story beats feel so, so overly telegraphed that when a character says “Wait! You’re So-And-So! I can’t believe it!” it got nothing but a big groan from me because that conclusion felt like it was spelled out in a big neon sign hours earlier. Nevermind the third act which, yes thankfully speeds up the story, but also seems to want to focus on the things I care the least about in the story. I want to know about what happened with the other Expeditions and all their little stories and relationships. I want to know about the Painters and the Writers. Not focus on a microcosm of like 4 characters with a fundamentally pretty boring and shallow narrative about loss. I will give it kudos for giving a choice of endings, one of which is so genuinely bad and represents such a terrifically immature perspective on life and death that I couldn’t help but laugh when the creative director said something to the tune of “There’s actually no bad endings!” Ha ha alright, my guy!

All of that is to say that Clair Obscur is fantastic. But for me it has just enough niggling little problems to keep it from the Greatest of All Time conversation like the gibbering masses online. More importantly after finishing I just haven't really thought about it much--it's not a game that's going to stick with me. Everything it's doing is fundamentally excellent but none of it really gripped me. Well, except for Equie. Esquie fucking rules.

1. Side bar: fuck the superboss who heals herself anytime you miss a single parry. They somehow looked at Malenia with her self-heal bullshit, easily my least favorite boss in any FromSoft game and said, yeah let's do that.