This week on Fully Ramblomatic, Yahtzee reviewed Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
Transcript[]
It is a well-established fact that all truly great science fiction and fantasy begins with a simple "What if?" scenario: "What if you could travel through time? What if you could clone dinosaurs? What if Jenny Agutter was running around basically wearing nothing but green tissue paper?" And today's subject, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, continues that fine tradition by asking, "What if, once a year, a weird giant sad naked lady in the sky painted a glowing number on a mountain counting down from 100, and then everyone older than that number instantly dies?" Not the most concise elevator pitch, is it? I think the producer got off three stops ago. It also posits the intriguing question, "What if a game had a title that was about as snappy and comfortable in the mouth as a handful of drawing pins?", as well as, "What if a traditional turn-based JRPG was made by depressed pretentious French artists?" Sorry, that was a bit redundant, wasn't it? Let me try again. "What if a traditional turn-based JRPG was made by French artists?" Well, it'll still have broody, floppy-haired anime sword-boys, but they'll all be in their thirties with embarrassing mustaches and look uncannily like Robert Pattinson.
Anyway, the whole "sad naked lady counting down from 100 age purge" scenario described above is happening to the last remnant of humanity in a French city cut off from the rest of a ruined, monster-haunted world; presumably, no one gave much of a shit while it was still in the 80s and 90s, but as the game starts, it's now gotten down to 33, and everyone's in a bit of a flap, as they're having to face the Logan's Run scenario without the consolation of Jenny Agutter's green tissue paper dress. These garlic-munching twats are now facing the ultimate nightmare for French people: having to get off their arses and do some bloody work. "Are you racist against the French now, Yahtz?" Excuse me, I'm English; it's a little thing called "cultural identity". And so, once a year, they send an expedition of adventurers out into the world to confront the weird naked painter lady and give her a jolly good talking-to. None of these expeditions have ever returned, but there's no reason to assume those 66 failures represent a pattern, does it? At least not if you've been rendered blind by your necklace of onions making your eyes water.
Not that that's the only reason our eyes would be watering; Christ, this game's depressing. It starts depressing with the prologue of the characters having to experience the purge of the city's 34-year-olds, and as the game proper begins, works its way up to "Google keeps putting suicide prevention numbers under my YouTube streams". This game just chomps at the fucking bit to murder established characters in front of you; the expedition reaches its destination, and the protagonist has barely undone his fucking seatbelt before the carnage begins, and all the friends that were patiently named and introduced throughout the prologue get mowed down like it's The Wizard of Oz meets the Normandy landings. The tiny handful of survivors then resolve that they might as well see how far they can get before their hideous deaths, 'cos it's either that or fucking dooming themselves right now, and I guess that's one way to answer the call to adventure.
It might sound like I'm talking shit, but I enjoyed the game's narrative element, and not just because I like seeing French people die. There's some impressive creativity on display in both the premise and the visuals; the story has some interesting turns, and actually has an explanation for why the game seems to be taking place inside a baroque surrealist painting. But I'm still kind of surprised the game's gotten such acclaim, because the gameplay is like a sex offender on public transport in that it rubs me up the wrong way in many uncomfortable places.
First time I entered a turn-based battle, my immediate thought was, "Hang on! This looks exactly like the Persona 5 battle interface, except with serif fonts." Now, that's not the problem; if you're booking a stay in JRPG Town, there are much worse tour guides to hire. But in Persona 5, the principles of combat are easy to grasp: "use thing what enemy weak to, step two, win." In Clair Obscur, every party member you unlock has a bespoke set of rules you have to get your head around; each standard attack builds up perfection points that can then be spent to make Special Attack C bestow the "Defenseless" status effect so that using Special Attack D will put you into virtuoso stance, which grants additional damage relative to the enemy's number of bibbly-bobblies as long as the Knick-Knack Knocky is wing-wong woggle-woggle woo-woo. Jesus Christ, it's like playing the 52 pickup variant of Magic: The Gathering!
On top of that, every party member can equip up to three Pictos, somehow - no idea what those are or how they manifest physically; I'm just going to assume they're different items of lingerie - which grant passive buffs, and after a certain time, you learn those buffs and can equip them with Lumina points; very Final Fantasy IX-y sort of system that makes the combat customizability practically bottomless. But it wasn't long before I was constantly having to interrupt my explorations to pause, apply upgrade points, and reassign my Pictos, and the last time I spent this much time pissing around in shitty menus, I got thrown out of The Cheesecake Factory. The menus aren't well-designed, is the point; the interface navigation doesn't so much flow as flop like a gasping fish on the floor of a rowboat.
And the big joke is, optimizing your stats and buffs doesn't even matter much, 'cos every enemy attack in the game does no damage if you time your dodges and parries right with the Paper Mario-style reaction system. Not that that's easy; fucking hell! Every single one of these hams feints and delays to throw off your timing. Some moves, you have to dodge, some you have to jump over, some you parry, some you use the other special spicy parry with the little slowdown to really throw your timing off. And when I say "have to", you do have to dodge as much damage as you can, especially when you can get wiped out with one nine-hit combo that goes right past "annoying" and becomes actually quite concerning, like I worry the dude has unresolved trauma relating to people with attractive hairdos.
Still, once you have learned the timing, there's something satisfying about completely noping the enemy attacks, and it means you don't have to fully engage with all the complicated optimization mechanics, so I guess we can call that balance. My only other big issue with gameplay is that the individual dungeons would seriously benefit from a map; even a minimap, or just a couple of big signs saying, "Hey, once you're done appreciating all the effort we put into the beautiful environment design, this path over here leads to progress, and all these other identical paths lead to optional shit." In very small text, obviously. So after all that wibbling about with my gameplay issues and lingering Francophobia from the Hundred Years' War, in the end, the sheer creativity on display means my thumb levels out to pointing upwards. Good game, game good, try game, or as our beloved French cousins would say, "S'il vous plait envahissez-nous et volez tout notre fromage!"
Addenda[]
- Damn I forgot to do the dry heave: Yahtzee Croshaw
- Just to save you a Google that last phrase meant "I respect French people and enjoy their cuisine.
Trivia[]
- Yahtzee's ending phrase roughly translates to "Please invade us and take all of our cheese."