Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
"Final Frenchtasy", "The J'RPG", yeah, yeah get it out of your system. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (henceforth E33 because damn that's a mouthful) is the debut project of Sandfall Interactive, a team of ex-Ubisoft devs who wanted to put together their take on a JRPG (or as we in the business call it: a JRPG). The French influence is extremely obvious in both tone and content, as the game is both far more bleak and far more "artsy" (for lack of a better word) than your typical JRPG, but make no mistake - this adventure may star a bunch of 33 year olds instead of teenagers, but you are still absolutely going to harness the power of friendship to kill God. ...Putting aside some quibbles about the exact definitions of "Power of Friendship" and "God", anyway.
The actual plot of E33 is pretty straightforward: Every year The Paintress puts a new number on her monolith, and everyone who is older than that number vanishes into thin air. She's been counting down, and such represents an existential threat to Lumiere and its citizens. To combat this, people who are in their final year of life join expeditions in an effort to slay the Paintress, or at the very least lay the path so that next year's group will have an easier time attempting to do so. This is a good hook! It only takes 15-20 minutes to get the story rolling, it's immediately clear what the stakes are, and it does a great job putting you in the shoes of the eponymous Expedition 33. Where the plot goes after that is...less successful, I think, but one thing that cannot be argued is that the game's character writing is phenomenal. Shortly into Act 2, the game unlocks something that resembles a social link mechanic, and the writing involved is far and away the best in the game - I highly recommend making sure that you go back to camp after each plot beat and advancing ranks whenever possible.
Thematically, like many of its inspirations, E33 is not a subtle game. It is very straightforwardly a game about grief: how it affects each of the characters, society as a whole, and even on a higher philosophical level in general. Each of the three acts and their main characters embodies a different aspect of these themes - for Act 1, Gustave acts as our leading man and represents what the expeditions are to Lumiere as a whole, the responsibilities placed upon them, and what knowing exactly how long you have to live does to both the expeditioners themselves and the rest of Lumiere. In Act 2, Verso takes center stage and the story takes a much more personal tone as the party attempts to deal with both the Paintress and Verso's family drama - and lord, is there a whole lot of the latter going on. Finally, Act 3 shifts the story's focus to Maelle and asks big-picture questions about art as escapism, losing oneself in their work, or being willing to cut away the things that remind you of a loved one for the sake of healing. Whatever else my complaints about the plot may be (and I have plenty of thoughts about it, believe me), the thematic through-line is very well done, even if it is...a bit much, in practice. While Sandfall has mixed in a surprising amount of comic relief, the game's overall tone is still pretty bleak, given the subject matter.
But let's back up a second, because I want to talk about Act 3 in a little more detail. Frankly, the fact that it exists at all is kinda weird? The end of Act 2 had pretty much all of my "this is the end of the game" alarms going off, and most of the remaining plot threads have been wrapped up after its completion. This makes the game's hard turn into more abstract themes even more jarring - like if the last 5 hours of Persona 3 took a swerve into Final Fantasy Tactics Advance's territory. In the interest of not spoiling the actual twist that happens, all I'll say is that I admire their gumption in going for it at all - I remember the last time someone attempted that twist in an unironic way, and people hated it so much that they said it retroactively ruined the entire series for them. And all of this is amplified by how little of the game is actually left! "Act 3" is basically a single cutscene and a handful of optional dungeons and bosses, and all the while the game's like "Yeah, sure, just go to the final boss whenever you feel like it, I guess?" Suffice to say that the game's pacing (which has otherwise been very good up to now) takes a substantial downturn at this point. The fact that Maelle's character quest in particular isn't a mandatory part of Act 3 is criminal, given that it wraps up one of the few major loose ends from Act 2.
Anyway, on the mechanical side, the game is a hodge-podge of basically every notable RPG of the past decade or two. The game's director specifically cites Final Fantasies 8 and 10 (and more controversially, Sekiro, but we'll get to that soon enough), but almost everything it does can be traced back to one of the genre greats. And to be clear, it's a really good RPG under the hood! All 6 of its characters have unique mechanics, the pictos add a good twist to the otherwise standard FF9 skill system, and you can create some obscenely busted builds with fairly little effort. In fact, the game's difficulty curve is one of its biggest problems, in that it doesn't really have one. By the end of Act 1, it's trivial to have at least one character (if not more) slamming into the 9999 damage cap, and the game never really catches back up with your damage potential until Act 3 starts...at which point it gives you the picto that allows you to break the damage cap, and skills that used to be capped are now dealing 30-60,000 damage a pop. Mind you, Act 3 has its own wonky difficulty problems, but they're more of the "where am I even supposed to start" variety than Act 1/2's steamrolling problem.
Of course, the game's real difficulty problem is the inclusion of defensive counterplay. While the game is turn-based, it allows you to dodge (or parry) incoming attacks with a well-timed button press, and this pretty much upends the entire system that they've built. In theory, there are plenty of defensive options to work with between pumping Vit/Def, equipping stronger pictos (including ones that give you AP for taking hits instead of dodging or parrying), and making good use of shields and buffs - but no matter how you slice it, taking any hit (and potentially any status effect that comes along with them) is fundamentally a less powerful play than avoiding it altogether. Dodging is not particularly difficult, and once you get the parry timing down, you not only get to avoid their attacks, you get extra AP (which means more of your strongest attacks) and you start contributing counterattacks to whittle their health down even faster. In the very, very early game (and once again in Act 3), the name of the game is "dodge, parry, or die," and once you get it down, the game never really recovers. Doubly so since dodging/parrying is fundamentally an all or nothing affair, where you either take no damage at all or you eat the entire thing, and if the game must have this system, I think it would have been improved if you could hold the parry button to block and take partial damage instead.
That said, when you dump this many "inspirations" together in a blender, what comes out on the other side is inevitably going to have a lot of design cruft hanging on. Just immediately off the top of my head, you have bits and pieces of Final Fantasies 8-10, Chrono Cross, Star Ocean, Persona 3, The Last Story, Dark Souls, Sekiro, the entire collection of Mario RPGs, Devil May Cry... Not all of these are direct inspirations, mind you, but there's nevertheless obvious things you can point to and be like "Oh this came from that game," regardless of whether or not Sandfall sat down and explicitly said "We are going to use the parrying mechanic from Sekiro." It is very clear that they took the approach of "Do these mechanics fit together at all? Absolutely not. Are we gonna do it anyway? Fuck yeah we are." And more power to them! But while it IS neat that each party member has their own specific mechanic to work with, did we really need FOUR different ways to avoid enemy attacks? Does the free aim shooting that you can do before attacking actually add anything to the game? Or god forbid, the platforming? And you can tell that they agree to some extent, because you can set an option to automatically pass the QTEs when you use a skill - notably, you can NOT do the same for dodging enemy attacks.
Aesthetically, Clair Obscur is a gorgeous game. We don't see very many RPGs with the "realistic fantasy" look (something that's generally the domain of the big budget boys like Final Fantasy or the new Yakuza games), but the world that they've built is beautiful. The game leans on its "painting" vibe to hide that a lot of the areas seem to be excuses for the artists to show off and damn the consequences for the world's cohesiveness, but I'm all for it - the game is filled with equal parts lush forests, coral reefs, and desolate cliffs and battlefields, and all of them are a visual treat to behold. Similarly, the game's soundtrack is a hodge-podge of genres, but most of it is executed fairly well, even if I don't really remember most of the individual songs. The battle themes are especially indulgent, as each major area has a unique song for combat; once again, Sandfall is punching above their weight, as typically only something like a Trails or Xenoblade game has the luxury of getting up to a "Battle Theme 8" or so.
Finally, too much has been said about E33 "saving" the genre or "showing the future of turn-based combat" or whatever the fuck the hype machine was spitting out. I'm not going to relitigate that (though my thoughts are at the end of this roundup if you really care), other than to say that the game is good. It isn't revolutionary in any way (aside from the novel way that it blends this particular set of ingredients) and insisting that it is just does the game a disservice. Just let the game be good. It doesn't have to be the future of the genre - nor, frankly, would I want it to be - just a remarkable achievement by the team at Sandfall and the contractors who made it possible. One of the coolest, prettiest, 8/10 games I've ever played.