An Abandoned Expedition
Spoilers for the prologue and first arc of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
This is a WIP. I have an outline to incorporate this into an essay about “art” vs media.
For now though? Let's talk Clair Obscur:
I played it nonstop for 8 hours for the course of a single after work session. I recruited Lune and Maelle. I made it to the Gestral village. I beat a few optional high difficult enemies. I played the game on normal/medium difficulty
I had some fun with the game but i'm not going back.
I dislike the story and characters.
The Villain (JP from Street Fighter 6) is mysterious and old!
Of the party Neither “legally distinct Robert Pattinson” or “Cool Asian Sorceress” or “Vanille (FF13) + Rikku (FF10)” interest me visually or with their personalities. Everyone is so wispy and thin and lithe.
I, as evidenced by everything else i play, including TTRPGs, prefer physically strong characters. A heft, bulky, front line character. Give me a warrior with a big two-handed weapon or a monk who fights with their bare fucking hands. FFX gave me resident grown man Auron. Golden Sun had Garret and Piers. Octopath 1 has Olberic. FF13 has Chad Kroeger Snow Villiers and Fang. Metal Slug Tactics has Ralph fucking Jones.
Instead I'm forced to play with a party that contains only the characters i would usually merely tolerate. There is no big guy, no angry girl, no striker, no heavy, no knight. Just a sad guy, a wary barefoot mage, and a spunky teen fencer.
Sigh. Where's the frontliner?
I looked up Monoco the Gestral, the eventual 4th character. His design isn't cool enough for me to look forward to. Counting him, I'm 0/4 on “that looks like a character I am excited to play”
There were a couple of cool black guys in the prologue. A couple of guys in the prologue had cool two handed swords. There was an energetic girl in the prologue. A cheery drunk too.
As is my luck, all of the characters I hoped I would get to play die immediately in the first scene of Chapter 1, leaving me with “important” characters who are already disappointing because I've been taunted by who I could have gotten to play if the writers had deemed them important.
It immediately put a bad taste in my mouth: “we have these designs NaClKnight likes, but they don't matter, they're already dead. Look at our IMPORTANT TRAGIC CHARACTERS instead.”
The prologue establishes the dreary, morose world with a torrent of proper nouns. Paintress. Gommage. Expedition. Pictos. The very nice girl looks ready to be someone's sepia- toned love interest from the first moment we meet her; she promptly obliges by getting Thanos-snapped by the Paintress so she can dissolve in Robert Pattinson's arms and give him something to fight for.
The prologue let me know what kind of story i was in for.
I enjoyed the gameplay for the dodge/parry system and the builds, but the cutscenes consistently bored me. Everything is so wispy and regretful and dramatic and it demands a gravitas that i refuse to give it. I ended up skipping cutscenes cause they all move. so. slowly.
The music is profoundly unenjoyable to me. The “Humming and chanting” soundtrack fell flat.
But it's not all bad!
Finding/Trying badges and their badge points system was fun! I liked customizing builds looking for synergy. I played on normal difficulty and really enjoyed learning enemy timing. Customizing gameplay styles is always fun for me. Learning how a combat system works is always a delight. The game gave me a bunch of that to digest. But I found myself only enjoying the fights. The walk between them was a slog. The cutscenes were worse.
The badges “pictos and lumina” system combined with the dodge/parry mechanic, convinced me that it resembles nothing so much as “Paper Mario gameplay dressed up like Final Fantasy 10 or 13.”
I liked all of those games. It reminding me of them is good.
But 8 hours in/Gestral village i realized I'd gotten what i wanted/needed out of the mechanics but was unlikely to get anything else out of additional time with the story or characters, so i'm dropping it.
It's a very artistic game and those generally do very little for me. This is an Expedition i will not complete.
Find shorter thoughts at https://c.im/@NaClKnight