Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 - Final Fantasy/Persona inspired FRPG

It's finally done. 100%'d the game. Took around 80 hours on expert while avoiding one-shot builds and blatantly busted stuff. Here's some non story-spoiler notes for people who enjoy the challenge presented by the game.

I strongly reccomend playing on expert if you enjoy learning bosses. This also goes without saying, but avoiding one-shot builds if you like engaging with the parry system and learning the bosses is a must.

At the start of act 3, go DIRECTLY to the final dungeon. Do not go sidequesting, do not do character relationship events in camp, and most of all do NOT do any optional dungeon. Completing even a single dungeon in act 3 will radically overscale you for the final dungeon. You can mitigate this somewhat by respecing to be statted around level 50, unequipping the damage cap break, limiting pictos to level 16 and below, and limiting luminas to whatever you feel appropriate, but there are a lot of super muddy personal judgement calls when doing this and I still felt I was too strong doing this.

Simon is going to beat your teeth in if you don't go for a one-shot build. He is a superboss designed for my fellow masochists who don't mind running our face into him over and over. He is not easy to learn due to his mechanics actively preventing logevity on your party members. This means it's hard to sit there and just practice parrys. I finally got him after 9 hours of play over 2 days on expert. My personal notes on the fight just read "fuck you" for the name of phase 3. Once I finally dropped him without cheese though it was an incredible feeling of acomplishment I haven't felt since my first sekiro playthrough.

Great vidya. Might drop some story thunks that I've thunk in the future if something subtantial to add to the conversation pops into my head. Overall the story is worth the asking price of the game by itself imo.

If you're on the fence, just scoop it. It's totally worth it.

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Iselda said:
Once I finally dropped him without cheese though it was an incredible feeling of acomplishment I haven't felt since my first sekiro playthrough.
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What's your definition of cheese?
Simon getting nuked from orbit, before he can do his gay move seems only fair, considering ALL the gay ass shit he's doing in that fight.

On a side, I'm also interested in discussing the story and ending, after I let it sit some more. My brain is still chewing all the info and I'm organising my thoughts.

dustnight said:
This might be the best release this year, it's been two weeks and still hovering around 100k.

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I'm responsible!
Finished the game and I've already started a new save.
What else am I gonna play? No really, rec me some good shit.

Chapalapachapa said:
that
motherfucking paintress second phase
is ass raping me
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Don't even remember the fight that much lmao.
Just dodge at the sound, bro, you'll make it eventually.
 
Estate said:
What's your definition of cheese?
Simon getting nuked from orbit, before he can do his gay move seems only fair, considering ALL the gay ass shit he's doing in that fight.

On a side, I'm also interested in discussing the story and ending, after I let it sit some more. My brain is still chewing all the info and I'm organising my thoughts.
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As far as I'm concerned, most strats are fair as long as they don't insta-delete the boss. So cheese is just another way to say "one-shot".
The reason I draw a distinction is because the experiances of a person who one-shots a boss and someone who engages with it fully are so different that they share little ground for dicussion of a shared experiance. Skipping phases through high dps may widen the gap in two people's experiance, but it doesn't invalidate the shared experiance aspect because both parties still engaged with the boss at some point.

@Chapalapachapa
The boss is one of the few that has a easy tell for a bunch of it's attacks. It's been a few days so I don't remember it's moveset perfectly, but a general rule I followed to shortcut learning phase two is below.
Watch the glowing tip of the paintbrush any time she does an attack where she swings it. Once it starts to move foward, press the parry button. Also, I distinctly remember sound cues being important for her non brush attacks.
 
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Waffle Iron said:
If everyone was just a puppet for alicia and the mom to play with to escape reality, I can accept Verso's ending. But Lune and Sciele and others are far beyond what. Renior doesn't even try to counter their arguments and agrees they have a point. It's one thing to want to blow up an illusion and face reality, it's another when the painting world is an actual living breathing world.

They could've made it that the maelle ending has her keep her promise and leave the painting, while also keeping it alive for the people inside. Eventually as she grows up she gets over the loss of verso and returns less and less until she eventually becomes an absentee god that only a few remember. The painting is kept alive for the people that fought for it in the expeditions, but it is just a memory hidden in the attic for everyone in the real world.
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Not to go into the whole class commentary sort of thing, but it is interesting that the Dessandres treat Lumière the way the European elites did with the lower classes during the Belle Époque era. In the end, none of the Lumière's inhabitants really mattered in the grand scheme of things.
 
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jje100010001 said:
Not to go into the whole class commentary sort of thing, but it is interesting that the Dessandres treat Lumière the way the European elites did with the lower classes during the Belle Époque era. In the end, none of the Lumière's inhabitants really mattered in the grand scheme of things.
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I appreciate how they made the antagonists of the game in a way where there is genuine nuance behind their actions and not just obnoxiously evil Saturday morning cartoon villains. Grief is a central theme of the game with brief moments of velity, and it's an interesting angle to tackle the subject matter with.
 
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I looked into this game because I see a lot of people saying how good it is, and I do like RPG's. But I saw it uses UE5 and I kind of have a personal rule to avoid games that use UE5 as an engine since STALKER 2 turned out to be such a mess. Also because of the reputation of UE5. If it drops down in price I might try it. If it's UE5 slop, I can always just refund it.
 
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BradeRunna said:
I looked into this game because I see a lot of people saying how good it is, and I do like RPG's. But I saw it uses UE5 and I kind of have a personal rule to avoid games that use UE5 as an engine since STALKER 2 turned out to be such a mess. Also because of the reputation of UE5. If it drops down in price I might try it. If it's UE5 slop, I can always just refund it.
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any engine can perform well if used properly and the people here did just that so it does well
 
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Iselda said:
As far as I'm concerned, most strats are fair as long as they don't insta-delete the boss. So cheese is just another way to say "one-shot".
The reason I draw a distinction is because the experiances of a person who one-shots a boss and someone who engages with it fully are so different that they share little ground for dicussion of a shared experiance. Skipping phases through high dps may widen the gap in two people's experiance, but it doesn't invalidate the shared experiance aspect because both parties still engaged with the boss at some point.
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Fair enough.
I doubt a lot of people nuked him from 100% to 0% so I'm fairly sure almost everyone enjoyed the Simon experience.
No other nigger invalidates so many builds and mechanics like he does and no other nigger made me waste 3h banging my head against a wall and having to build my pictos and lumina specifically for him.
On the bright side, I did get to enjoy the music for so many hours.
 
Yeah, like I told you all, I don't even know why I sniped about this game's setting. Somehow it completely flew by me (I mean, I don't follow games journalism at all, but I do make a habit of scrolling Steam), but it looks very interesting.
 
For once they got celebrities for a video game that were not terrible at all. I'm shocked. Delighted. But shocked. And I also mean it in the 'they're phoning it in' you got from people like Peter Dinklage, Mena Suvari, Megan Fox, and the entire Fantastic Four 2005 cast.
 
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Iselda said:
At the start of act 3, go DIRECTLY to the final dungeon. Do not go sidequesting, do not do character relationship events in camp, and most of all do NOT do any optional dungeon. Completing even a single dungeon in act 3 will radically overscale you for the final dungeon. You can mitigate this somewhat by respecing to be statted around level 50, unequipping the damage cap break, limiting pictos to level 16 and below, and limiting luminas to whatever you feel appropriate, but there are a lot of super muddy personal judgement calls when doing this and I still felt I was too strong doing this.
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Damn, I already made progress into the post game. Wish they did the thing where the final boss is level scaled.

One thing that really annoys me about the parrying is the "I'm not touching you" attack where bosses basically plays chicken with when they are going to hit rather than have a specific timing. It feels really fucking annoying, and Elden Ring did this shit too way too much.
 
Just finished Act 1, and whoof. Definitely a keeper, this game.

Been leaning heavily on Maelle (who doesn't like starting off with Epeen and 2.5k damage to kill a non-boss enemy almost instantly) but Sciel also beats ass in the rare moments I remember to use her instead of the main trio which you get initially. Will have to figure out how Lune ticks properly; she's consistent but doesn't burst reliably.
 
A bit of a open-ended question at the end:

In the Maelle ending, what’s stopping Renoir/Clea from eventually jumping back into the painting and kicking Alicia out? It’s shown that 1.) They are far more skilled painters than Alicia, 2.) Clea probably knows where the painting is, and 3.) Aline rentered the painting even after she was kicked out as the Paintress, to briefly lend support to your party against Renoir.

I guess the ending’s only really definite if Alicia is going to die soon since she needs to now support the entire painting, Clea doesn't care (I don't think this is true), or if Alicia has total control over the canvas now and is significantly more powerful within that reality since she's the one painting now instead of Verso?
 
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dustnight said:
This might be the best release this year, it's been two weeks and still hovering around 100k.
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i have no idea why i was quoted in this thread but oblivion remake is peaking at 81K.
Bongo Cat is a "game" that is peaking at the 170 000's.
Banana is peaking at 120 000's.
so it seems for some people it is officially a gaming drought and it's a good time for indies that want to make people have fun to be released right now.
what a lack of games do to mf's especially since AAAslop isn't being released in current window.
 
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jje100010001 said:
Not to go into the whole class commentary sort of thing, but it is interesting that the Dessandres treat Lumière the way the European elites did with the lower classes during the Belle Époque era. In the end, none of the Lumière's inhabitants really mattered in the grand scheme of things.
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While playing I thought the forgotten battlefield implied some kind of WWI reference. Seeing how the Belle Epoque ended with WWI. The reveal would be something like the Paintress using her paint magic to try and revert the world from before WWI happened. With painted Renoir and Verso being veterans (scarred and weary). I was totally down for a magical post-apocalypse so I was a bit disappointed with what we got. I'm not surprised if they did have some intent of alluding to the elite seeing the commoners as disposable
 
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Rebel Wilson said:
its with the reality tear attack and the doom countdown with the orbs. When your riding on top of Esquie
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I also struggled with this until I realized the attack travels out and then turns toward the party. Just dodge when it makes the turn.
StacticShock said:
i have no idea why i was quoted in this thread but oblivion remake is peaking at 81K.
Bongo Cat is a "game" that is peaking at the 170 000's.
Banana is peaking at 120 000's.
so it seems for some people it is officially a gaming drought and it's a good time for indies that want to make people have fun to be released right now.
what a lack of games do to mf's especially since AAAslop isn't being released in current window.
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Both Oblivion and E33 are on Gamepass, so Steam numbers aren't a great indicator of active players in either.
 
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