Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Spiel
The game does kick off with a strong foundation, and with it, delivers beautiful world that is Belle Époque Paris. It’s filled with in-game cinematic that is often depressing and moody — I might dare call it French movie like — that deserves its own shares of praises. What Clair Obscur doesn’t have, unfortunately, is a strong foundation to keep the combat relevant. For a game that has earned its recognition due to reaction system mixed with JRPG turn-based combat, the statement may sound oxymoron; nonetheless, its unique quality cannot kill the mood so fast.
The combat in Clair Obscur is definitely a refreshing twist for JRPG turn-based system. Reaction system is not original, as far as I could gather, that trophy goes to Paper Mario, but it is well integrated into it. However, it quickly makes all combats grinding experience soon as a player learns the enemy move set. For starter, all incoming attacks can be avoided with well-timed dodges or parries, meaning at no point during the combat you can let your guard down, even during your own it is filled with QTEs. And unlike traditional realtime combat systems, enemies do not make smooth transitions from one pattern to the other; they simply choose a move during their turn. At some point all the QTEs made overall encounters simply too redundant to fight off non-boss enemies.
QTEs are the root cause of the problem for the overall experience. Each characters in Clair Obscur have stats and pictos — something equivalent of armors in the game — but it loses much of its weight in the face of dodges and parries. What’s the point of having RPG stats, if you can simply avoid taking all damages. And the UI for pictos is hardly user-friendly; it’s a wall of small text entries. The game lacks much of the handholding tools that players now expect from JRPG. Lack of mini map, for example, makes navigating overworld painful. And as beautiful as it is, too many times my characters got stuck on an incline, only to find out they decided to jump over an incline that is less than an inch high.
As I have said in my Metaphor: ReFantazio Spiel, delivering a hybrid experience is not a guarantee for quality, especially for individual mediums. In the case of Clair Obscur, its obsessive use of film-like deliveries were often filled with monologues that are either vague or repetitive. Neither particularly helps to support its weak finale, and the profound philosophical question therein seems to be consciously ignored or refused to address it.
Conclusions: Good Cinematic, Overall Under-delivers
This is the first time I ended up lowering the difficulty for a game from normal or recommended difficulty. I wanted to see the beautiful artwork unfold. But the combat was not adding anything new by the later half of the game, if not actively preventing me from seeing what the game offers. It also made other significant elements of the game to lose its gravity, as they became nothing short of numbers and texts before the real QTEs. With the rumors of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 getting a live-action adaption, I am curious to see if the overall narrative is more fitting for a film to begin with. It is an edgy game with sharp points, but to be more useful, I believe some polishing would help greatly.