Game Review: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

The following is a re-post of a review originally posted to Letterboxd during the brief amount of time the platform had this game listed. The listing of course has since been deleted, as Letterboxd does not actually specialize in video game reviews. It has now been posted here for posterity.

Original post date: May 8th, 2025

SPOILER-FREE:

I don't know why there is a Letterboxd listing for this game, but given I've been using this platform a lot more frequently as of late, I'm gonna take advantage of it and gush about it.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was a gaming experience I haven't felt since I was a teenager (I'm 39 now). In a time where I would come home from school or have weekends free or had a summer vacation to blow on a PlayStation, I spent so much time so immersed in games like Final Fantasy IX, and frankly I have not felt that way hardly at all since becoming an adult. That could just be me being old and jaded (very likely), and yet somehow this game brought it all flooding back.

I don't know why people in my social media feeds are fighting over whether it's a "JRPG" or it's an "improvement" of the genre or whatever. Turn-based RPGs from Japan are good, which is clearly why Sandfall Interactive made it the way they did. And as a devout follower of Final Fantasy and their development teams, I can see exactly where they pulled pieces from. You can see FFVIII in the world map (and in certain character designs), the whimsy of FFIX as well as its way of learning abilities, the weighted narrative and QTE battles of Lost Odyssey, hell, even sharing a lead voice actor with FFXVI--everything I have spent all my life obsessing over and loving has been packaged together by people who loved those same things and wanted to make something of their own resembling what they love.

I put something like 55 hours into the game before deciding I was ready to go into the final battle. After having done a significant amount of the side content, I was definitely way overpowered facing the final boss. But my level grind-loving heart wouldn't have it any other way. I could probably still get back in there and do some more. They really packed this world with content and super bosses.

Sometimes you get stuck on the environment a little, hovering awkwardly on top of a rock for a few seconds, but it's largely not game-breaking. The idea of an entire world inspired by a painting creates a design aesthetic that is painfully gorgeous, juxtaposed against some really cruel death and violence. There's some real French art film moments to be found here. There's times where the game makes a decision to change to a 4:3 aspect ratio and switch to black-and-white, really trying to make you see and feel something different. I don't often get impressed by graphics at this point since I don't think there's much farther game graphics can improve in a way that would make my jaw drop. However, I did find myself impressed with this game, where it let me put my characters in goofy little French outfits and swimsuits, and then just walk into a cutscene and have it play at incredibly high fidelity that to me is virtually indistinguishable from a pre-rendered cutscene.

Did I mention it's French? It's very French. All the mimes and the baguettes and the warped Eiffel Tower and the "mon ami" and everything--it is very unapologetically French. And it definitely has no need to apologize, it's great.

That soundtrack didn't always get me, but when it got me, it GOT ME. Especially with a couple of those endgame tracks, as the rock guitar and gnarly vocal duet kicks in, that's what finally sold me on the soundtrack. The composer is nearly ten years younger than me, and started composing for this game five years ago. Ha ha, what am I even doing with my life?

Despite how much of a downer the game can be, there are moments of joy and levity. Esquie is a character I would die for. Monoco has the kind of humor that feels aimed right at me. Also, Monoco is named after the development team's dog and is referenced all over the place, and you can tell everybody just loves that dog. Then there's the goofy Gestrals, references to real world memes, crazy parkour stuff, goofy minigames--the amount of stuff you can find to distract you from your bummer of a mission is numerous.

And despise the fact that I over-leveled myself for the end boss, that doesn't mean the game is necessarily easy. For so much of it, even with maxed-out attack and defense, if you let yourself get hit by enemies, you could STILL be one-shotted. There's kind of a steep learning curve of trial and error when it comes to dodging or parrying attacks. And although you can land hits with the guidance of a QTE symbol, the same can't be said for defending yourself, so you just have to do some fights several times to figure out enemy patterns. If I had one critique of this game, it's that I wish there was an accessibility feature that let you turn on QTEs when defending yourself.

Well, okay, the only other critique would be that the PC version suffers from a fair number of fatal errors that crash the game. More than once I found my game crashing in the middle of a tough fight that I would have to do all over again. I had others tell me this happened to them during cutscenes, which I can only imagine was infuriating and I would hate to have had that happen to me, and I guess I'm fortunate it didn't.

I can imagine myself returning to this game again later and reliving the experience. All the hype was well worth it. The people making it into some competition with Japanese games are all wrong. It's not in a competition with them. It loves them dearly, just like I do. I hope not too many people have been turned away by that fight people have been having online, because this game was never trying to pick any fights with anybody. It's just a development team that clearly put a lot of love and care into their work and wanted to share their love with the world. If turn-based RPGs have ever gelled with you, this is your game, just like it was mine.