5/5 ★ – ChucklesBiscotti's review of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

Confidence is something a lot of developers end up lacking, but it's what makes Clair Obscur one of the best games I've ever played. After all, naming your game "Clair Obscur: Expedition 33" consigns your creation to a dark fate if word of mouth and reviews can't overtake one of the worst titles I could ever conceive of for a game. Many RPG creators seem to have a fascination with trying to gatekeep the genre with impossibly bad titles for their games, and even if the name makes sense after you play it, it doesn't mean it's a good title -- and I don't think this is just some french thing I'm missing either, this is endemic to the genre. Anyway, I think a lot of people would think to compare this to FF7 or FFX as landmark games for the genre, but I ended up feeling it was more picking at a lot of what worked so well about The Last Of Us. TLOU is another game that had supreme confidence in its vision, to a degree where it ends with one of the ballsier endings you can do in a video game of that type. This review will essentially be devoid of spoilers, but I will say there's that same sort of belief in the story they're telling here, and they're full speed ahead with it at all times. And while there's maybe one or two excessive twists in the plot to get there (again, RPGs can't help themselves), the story and conclusion are very satisfying. There is always a risk in delving into well-trodden tropes and archetypes, and this game is full of the RPG usuals -- amnesia, being the chosen one, trauma, grief -- but I've always been a believer that if I were a high-level creator that's the sandbox I'd play in as well. Tropes and the like exist because they work, but you need to be talented and confident enough to put your own twist on them. Making something entirely new is special as well, but I would say as long as you have the "new" idea, then it's easier to reach a level of quality in video games that you otherwise might not get credit for reaching in a well-known genre. There is a great risk in trying to play up the vibes of some of the most cherished RPGs -- and the themes that go along with them -- but 33 shows it's worth the risk if you nail it. The confidence carries into the gameplay and the moment-to-moment beats with the characters. This is a game that would have crashed and burned if it didn't lean into the melodrama. This is an opera, and the wild swings in emotions -- from humor to grief to playfulness -- would not work if they didn't go for it 100 percent. To give it credit for how it differs from some other classic RPGs, this is a game that really does not have filler. I don't consider there to be any true filler arcs in the main story (again, maybe it doesn't need every twist and turn but that's not filler in this case), and yet that doesn't take away from the discovery in any way. Around almost every corner there is some item, or mystery, or new enemy type, but I got through this game in 35 hours (you can get through it in much less time if you don't play on Expert) and A LOT happens in what's a pretty tight window. It's also one of the few RPGs where I not once even thought about going on the internet to look up one single thing. The act of discovery in this game is so enjoyable whether in the unique "toy soldier" open world map or in the smaller sub-worlds you descend into (though both could probably use a mini-map) that I think it would cheapen the game in any way to try and use a guide to take away from that discovery. It's a game that trusts you to be able to put most of the pieces together before it lays it all out for you in the final hours, and playing on Expert it's a game that forces you to play with the mechanics in a way where you're not going to simply get by via creating "broken builds" unless you just level well past the point of it mattering -- this is something that can unfortunately happen in the final hours if you delay the conclusion. This is not to say you can't play the game a variety of ways because you can. There are a lot of builds you can make, there's lots of weapons and skills and powers to combine in various ways. And then you can also tie the characters together to play off each other in a multitude of ways to create sick combos. However if you can't dodge or parry, you're going to get smacked around a ton until you maybe find some late-game combos that are eventually undeniable once everyone has powered up -- you can create some insane damage combos that kill most enemies very quickly after a certain point if you tweak things enough (or likely use Google/YT). To say more about my love for the turn-based combat, I love parrying. I say in many of my reviews it's my favorite gameplay mechanic, and I parried in this game every time I could. I never used the dodge button, and so I had to be close to perfect for minutes on end at times. The intensity and sweatiness that builds into the biggest boss battles, and even some normal encounters, is what makes it enticing to want to grind common foes -- it's just that enjoyable. Still, I also wanted to maintain that high level of challenge, which I think the creators seemed to anticipate in some regards as well. The parrying and "hard but fair" nature of the gameplay is what puts it well above something like FF16's combat where, even if you love it (and I do enjoy the depth that combat has even if you don't have to delve deep into it because the game is so easy/forgiving), Clair Obscur will punish you for failure. If you die on minute 12 of a boss fight, you're going back to minute one. In FF16, some of the boss battles took 30+ minutes, and so I think there was a concern with not wanting to put people back at square one if they failed 27 minutes into them, but it also took a lot of the stakes out of the gameplay by being so generous with checkpoints. To put it another way, the structure of the game is brilliant, especially by RPG standards. A lot of the "side stuff" really doesn't become available until extremely late in the game, and so I think their vision is they want you to get to the end credits and then go back and really dig deep into every corner of the game to see what else is there. It's actually quite an elegant solution to something I think a lot of RPGs struggle with where there's this pull to want to do everything on the side path first before completing the main quest. Being a deeply french game, the style is something else that could have maybe gone awry for some audiences if it weren't nailed, but I love the art style, the music, and characters, and besides the 15+ crashes I had on PC, the beauty of the game is also technically impressive on my top-end system. The crashes on lower-end systems probably would have me feeling way more negative, but because the game has a great auto-save feature and my SSD kept the load times essentially non-existent, the crashes really only usually took 20 seconds to deal with (the game never really crashed during any major combat parts or cutscenes, it was usually only during idle times at save points for whatever reason). I want to end with the voice acting because it is what ties it all together. Again, this an opera, a melodrama, and you better have good voice acting in your game to be able to pull something like that off. Everybody voice acting in this game brings it. You have greats like Andy Serkis and Ben Starr to do some of the heavy lifting, but Charlie Cox, Kirsty Rider, Shala Nyx, and Jennifer English all crush it as well. This carries over to characters like Esquie or the gestrals, who gave me some of the deepest belly laughs I've had in a video game, which is obviously ironic in a game that's ultimately about cycles of grief. I'm worried about leaving something crucial out of this review because I really do want to explain why I think it works so well in so many ways, but ultimately if a game can combine the things I love about Sekiro with the things I love about Final Fantasy, then you've more or less created my ideal version of video game catnip.