REVIEW | Clair Obscur – Expedition 33

REVIEW | Clair Obscur – Expedition 33

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the best RPG I’ve played in years.
Possibly the best of its kind ever. How is that for an intro?

This is a Review in progress: I haven’t yet been able to complete the game (30 hours for main story, 30 hours for sidequests, and +20 extra hours for Robby taking his sweet time with a game he loves)

I knew I was going to like this from the very first trailer. Then, a little while ago, I got access to an exclusive preview build (which you can read about here) and it only solidified my expectations. Now I’m in the process of reviewing it and I just can’t express how incredibly happy playing this game makes me.

I’ve laughed. I’ve cried. I felt the thrill and the rush of nailing the timing on counters in combat. This is a game made by people who understand WHO they are making it for. They are us. They grew up playing Final Fantasy, they learned to time their attacks in The Legend of Dragoon, they cried at Kaim’s immortal stories in Lost Odyssey. These people know what makes the genre tick. They learned from the best and now they excel above them.

Strap in, because I’m reviewing this one old-school style: an in-depth review, without spoilers, but moving away from our typical “what I liked/disliked” bullet point style.

ℹ️ Reviewed on Xbox Series X | Review code provided by PR/publisher. This review is the personal opinion of the writer. Got unanswered questions about this game? Get in touch on X!

DeveloperSandfall Interactive
PublisherKepler Interactive

My praise starts with the title screen. Ever boot up a game for the first time and struggle to press the “New Game” button because the music is just so good? Prepare for another one of those. And the level of quality of the soundtrack doesn’t let up for the entire duration of the game. We’re talking Nobuo Uematsu levels of consistently enchanting music that you’ll still be humming along to when they’re wheeling you around in the retirement home.

Godlike Music

I don’t typically start my reviews talking about the music, but let the fact I chose to do so now be a testament to how insanely good the soundtrack is here. From the overworld music, to the varied combat tracks, to pieces that make you cry or laugh. I’ve had discussions about the music in videogames and composers telling me they have grown accustomed to not getting a lot of attention and that if someone doesn’t notice the music or sound effects in their game reviews, they’ve done a good job. That may well be, but I sure as hell noticed the music here and for all the right reasons. The game often rewards you with new songs to unlock that you can play at your camp, and one things is certain: getting to enjoy this music definitely feels like a reward.

I didn’t know Lorien Testard (the composer) before this, but it’s a name I’ll remember now. I mean, just listen to this:

Paint me a picture – Setting the Story

But let’s take a step back and start at the proper beginning. The game starts off right before the gommage. That’s a yearly event where a giant paintress awakens, erases a number on a distant, towering rock, and then everyone of that age… vanishes into thin air. Gulp!

I thought I was prepared for this, seeing that explained in the very first trailer of Clair Obscur, but when a young child holding on to their 34-year-old mother’s hand just grasps into the vanishing ashes of their parent, that’s when the first tear appeared in my face, and we weren’t even 30 minutes into the game.

Now, some criticism here, but I have a feeling that I wouldn’t have quite grasped what was going on from the intro sequence alone. The game doesn’t rub your face into the lore, and it has no reason to: everyone on-screen already knows the rules, only you as the player don’t. And I had this slight feeling that the game expects us to know the story already from seeing the trailer?

That being said, it hits like a punch to the gut. And the opening doesn’t give you a lot of room to breathe from there. Shortly after seeing the love of his life getting Thanos-fingersnapped out of existence, our protagonist Gustave sets off on the titular Expedition 33, a mission to the main continent, to destroy the Paintress and put an end to all this misery. Just like so many other expeditions did before them. They know it’s a hard-fought battle with little chance of success, after all, the previous expeditions never returned. It’s a kind of melancholy mixed with careful optimism that, some day, one of them will succeed. And they all realize that this venture into the unknown is necessary just to keep the spirits up of those they leave behind. With each passing year, their chance at success dwindles. In 12 years time, the oldest humans alive will be 21… and the Paintress keeps counting down.

The longer you wait to have kids, the less life they’ll get to live.

Expedition 33 sets off on a boat to the main continent, with mostly 33-year-old crew members, and soon after setting foot ashore, they are met with a grey-haired man who decapitates half of them with a single swipe of his cane. He attacks the others one by one, and giant Nevron creatures also pick off random survivors. Gustave barely escapes with his life, faces some enemies by himself and ends up at a giant pile of corpses where he’s just about to take his own life with his magically conjured pistol, when another expedition member finds him and reminds him of their mission: “When one falls. We continue.” Even though they may fail, whatever progress they make, will give those coming after them a better chance at success.

This all happens within the first hour of the game, and I’m avoiding any spoilers following this, but that dark outlook on their future lingers on for quite some time. Just pushing ever forward to make a bit of progress, all to help the next wave of humans fighting this impossible fight. Throughout your journey, you’ll find dead bodies of previous expeditions and many of them left Expedition Journals. These are voice messages telling you about their experience and how they faced their demise. It reminded me a lot of Lost Odyssey’s letters of an immortal, where Kaim details the many people he had lost to human mortality.

Every RPG needs a great story, and the overarching plot in Clair Obscur certainly paints an interesting picture!

Great characters, stellar dialogs

But a story is only as good as the character living through it. It’s important that we feel for the cast of protagonists, and that’s another area where Clair Obscur shines. The interactions between Gustave and Maëlle are especially endearing. How they share this fun silly action of throwing rocks at the Paintress, even though it’s impossible to hit her or even get close, it’s a cathartic thing to do while they chat about recent events and their outlook on their bleak future.

Gustave, our lead protagonist, quickly grew to be one of my favourite main characters in any game, simply by how human he feels. He’s 33, but by 2025 standards, that’s a relatively young age and he feels that way too. Among the oldest of his generation, but young at heart and just looking to make a difference for those he cares about.

The playable cast of characters grows steadily in the first 15 hours of playing and each one has various endearing traits. By the end of this adventure, I’m sure they’ll feel like lifelong friends, just like the party members of most Final Fantasy entries have given me some amazing memories.

You’ll meet tons of NPCs that are amazing too, many of them with their own invented language, like the Gestrals, walking talking puppets with paintbrush hair that can ride “sacapatates”, huge mechs made of wood and cloth (it translates to English as “bag of potatoes”)

Love the One Punch Man reference!

Or when you meet Esquie, the most powerful being in the world of Clair Obscur and he becomes your main method of transportation, but above all, has a fondness of adventures and making friends. Every chat with him is hilarious.

You can bond with your party members at your camp and get to know them even better, and strengthening your relationship with unlocks now powerful attacks.

One negative that carried over from the demo into the full game, at least at the time of writing, is the English lipsync. The writing is amazing, the voiced performances by the star-studded cast as well, but that misses a bit of impact because the lips and character animations don’t always feel as accurate as they should be. And the French version has the same issue, so it’s not 100% the cause, like I originally thought. Now, there is a day one patch that should fix this, so this paragraph should hopefully be deleted soon when I’ve had a chance to test the improvements. EDIT 27 April 2025: the lip sync is improved, but still doesn’t feel 100% natural.

Fighting the good fight – Amazing combat

We’ve gotten this far and haven’t addressed the combat yet. But it’s AMAZING. You pick turn-based actions not unlike a Persona game and can quickly enter specific buttons you assigned to certain skills. It’s fast and beats the hell out of picking your attacks from a dropdown menu.

Adding on to this, you have to time your skill attacks just right to get the most damage out of them, nothing we haven’t seen before, but executed extremely well. The most vital element of the combat, however, is learning when to dodge, parry or jump. Even at the easiest difficulty it’s recommended you get the timing down, but at harder difficulties you can’t even slip up once. enemies hit hard and they have wind-up animations that make it challenging to estimate just when they’ll hit, so use dodge at first to learn their moveset and then start parrying and countering their attacks when you’ve got the timing down. When you do, it feels OH-SO SATISFYING.

Jump, Jump, jump!

As an additional bonus to, you know, not taking any damage, you’ll also get a 20% experience boost if you defeat an enemy encounter while not taking any damage. Time to Get Gud.

Have a look at me facing this optional boss early on and trying to get the parry timing correct:

This is, hands down, the MOST fun I’ve had with turn-based combat in an RPG ever. The Legend of Dragoon had timed attacks, this is better. Lost Odyssey had its ring system, this is better. Mario & Luigi’s RPG outings had important dodge mechanics, but you guessed it: this is better.

https://twitter.com/BloodyGoodRev/status/1914980540182114794

And that’s just the core mechanics, the entire game has so many features to it that all deepen that tactical approach. Regular attacks give you AP points to spend, which you can use on skills, or for free-aim shooting at weak spots, which again is very satisfying and can sometimes even trigger explosions that hit all enemies at once. Shooting uses AP, but not your turn, so you can shoot 9 times with a full AP bar and still get to attack.

Then you get to equip Pictos, which each have a passive stat buff and a special effect. If just one party member has a Picto equipped for 4 combats, you’ll learn that special effect and can equip it as long as you have enough Lumina points. It all sounds very complicated, and that’s because it is a pretty deep system, but the game explains it well and allows you to experiment as you please.

You could equip Picto/Lumina that increases your free aim shots, or increases the chance to apply Burn to enemies, or have your base attack give an additional AP and even to attack twice. Suddenly, you can devise entire strategies to keep efficiently attacking forever and we haven’t talked about each character’s unique skills yet.

Gustave can gain charges for his electric arm, Maëlle switches stances from defensive to offensive, Lune is great at casting magical spells that add “stains” and which can be consumed for greater effects, and that’s just a few examples as the party grows and each one brings unique tactical options.

Time your attacks for big damage

My favourite is Monoco, who can use Nevron abilities, which can be learned by stealing their feet. I won’t dive into spoiler territory here, but seeing your character change into the Nevron you’ve been facing and giving them a taste of their own medicine is again, super satisfying. I think that’s the key word for the combat in Clair Obscur and the highest praise I can give it. I simply don’t tire of this combat system and even as I’m writing this, I can’t wait to get back to the game and play some more. It’s THAT good!

Let’s give those feet a good rub!

Tactical depth

There are so many player-made decisions that impact your performance in combat, it’s crazy. Players with FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) like me or people who like to min-max their stats will have ample opportunity to geek out over the various abilities, player stats and how to get the most of them.

When you level up, you can allocate stats into Strength, Health, Agility, Luck, Defense.. and depending on which weapon you have equipped, your damage scales with one or more of these. Luckily, you can find or buy Recoat items that let you reallocate these when you truly need them. The interesting thing in Clair Obscur with the Parry/dodge mechanics, is that “offense is the best defense” applies even more here than in other games. If you never get hit at all, why bother with more health and defense, right?

NOTE: This review doesn’t contain spoilers, but the cinematics at the end of this bossfight below do!

Now if you’re not the best at getting the timing right, there are 3 difficulties you can choose from and you can go and change this at any time. You can even turn the attack timings to be perfect automatically, but this is more of an accessibility feature and I wouldn’t recommend turning it on if you don’t have to.

You get a skill point each time you level up as well, which you can spend in a skill-tree to acquire new combat abilities. Experimenting with this is costly, as there are new powerful ones that can cost up to 10 Skill points and you won’t even know how useful they are until after you’ve committed hours of saving up for them. The Recoats can be used here as well, so a bit of mid-game experimentation is recommended to find your favourite tactics.

Those weapons I mentioned? You’ll find a lot of them for each character, usually after defeating a new enemy and they all have various stats, elemental aspects or they unlock new modifiers as they level up. Weapons can level up from fights, or you can use rare items that you find across the world or buy from stores. They also each have elemental qualities that can turn the tide of battle in your favour by dealing more damage if the enemies are weak to it.

Gustave used Counter. It’s Super Effective!

The Pictos I brought up earlier, are more like accessories that give defensive boosts. Or increased critical hit rates, speed, HP up, you name it. and that boost they give can also increase as these level up with use. But the thing is: you won’t want to keep the same ones equipped for long. Since having one equipped for 4 combats, makes their effect equippable at a certain Lumina cost. and you’ll find new Pictos All. The. Time.

Lumina then, is earned by levelling up with your characters, but at camp you can also use a specific item to increase one character’s total Lumina count. Each effect you equip has a cost tied to it, so something that’s not as powerful like a 20% damage increase on free shots may cost 3 Lumina, and getting a second Base Attack could cost 10 or 15. The hardest choice here is when using those rare items across your party members, I felt the need to constantly max out my favourite character, but then the rest felt like they underperformed.

You could spend literal hours in the menus just finding the optimal loadout for your characters, and I expect the end-game to be full of them, especially when you’re trying to beat certain enemies where a unique approach is required. My biggest gripe here is the navigation of said menus however. In the demo, I at first didn’t even figure out how to get into the Lumina Equip screen, and it all feels like it takes just a few too many clicks to get from one menu to the next. Combat menus: super efficient. Character equip menus: not so much.

A treat for the eyes

Whenever a new Final Fantasy released back in the day, it pushed what we thought was possible from the hardware it ran on. These days, it feels like we’ve already pushed what’s technologically possible and Clair Obscur can stand with the best of them, which is impressive when taking into account the relatively small French team who made it.

A lot of the game’s environments have a french Belle Epoque vibe to them, with marble structures and golden details, or references to real-world eyecatchers like the Eiffel Tower and even a giant Ferris wheel (that was used as transport to cross the water to the main continent, I kid you not)

Final Frenchtasy!

Everywhere you look, there are unique details that make exploring worth the effort: from caves with towering piles of dead bodies, or a frozen mountaintop with crashed trains, to landscapes riddled with giant swords and fossilised Nevrons.

When the planet is in need of acupuncture

The locations you walk through feel like they’ve lived through various apocalyptic disasters and as a small human, you can’t help but feel fragile and out of place. It’s hard to focus on the task at hand and make your way to the Paintress when you see towering Nevrons the size of a Kaiju eating the very landscape you’re walking across. Nice aside: when you see them in the overworld, the battlefield you’re drawn into also has these same details, which I appreciated.

The enemies you can face in combat walk around these levels and you’re free to avoid them, or engage when you think you can handle them. With a press of the right bumper and when you’re close enough, you can shoot them to have a first turn in combat, or you can free-aim shoot them in the face to stun them for a bit and evade them altogether. Very useful if you’ve stumbled into an area you can’t handle yet at your current level, but when you’ve seen something shiny in the distance. It’s a great feeling of risk vs reward that is not entirely different to how Dark Souls and Elden Ring handle their world-building.

Speaking of the FromSoft games, the french team didn’t just look at Japanese turn-based RPGs for inspirations but they also took some notes from designs in the player-punishing soulslikes from Japan. Tell me this enemy doesn’t give big Dark Souls vibes:

An enemy straight out of Dark Souls

And the walk to him is no different, with a fall into a dark cave and an ankle-deep pool of blood. The story preceding your meeting with him tells of the countless Expeditioners who met their end at the point of his sharp blades.

The enemy designs are varied and they all have their unique attack patterns, weak spots and they’re just plain cool to look at.

Time to play dress-up

Your own party members look stylish in their Expedition 33 outfits, but why keep them in their default gear when you can have them wear swimsuits… Well, to keep the tone of the game serious, I guess. It felt wrong to me to have them equipped with a baguette on their back, Gestral brushy haircuts or Sacapatate beanbag-like outfits. Luckily for me, there are also some pretty cool outfits that fit the theme better.

Like the music you play at camp, new outfits and hairstyles are usually unlocked by playing optional content and you can skip it entirely if the reward is not worth the effort. I wish I had known my 1-hour attempt at climbing the Gestral’s “parkour” across floating items in the sky only had a new Speedo as a reward for my Gestral party member.

Still, it’s completely optional content, so you won’t hear me complain… too much.

Traversing the world

The very first time you walk across the open world, you’ll probably feel a little frustrated. Even when running, the movement speed is absolutely glacial on the overworld and it was one of my main frustrations in the demo. You also don’t have any kind of Fast-Travel from one level to the other, only within a specific level can you teleport between flags (savepoints).

Speaking of savepoints, this feels like a good time to bring up this little nitpick, but there is only one save file in the game. It autosaves whenever you rest at a flag or camp and also at other important events. But I was missing the option to manually save at important turning points in the game. Luckily, you can choose to load various recent autosaves, which did get me out of an issue once where I had saved in the middle of an area with too high-level enemies and at another point when I jumped down from a platform and got myself stuck in the environment.

There are some mid-game improvements that alleviate the pain: you can unlock shortcuts to make backtracking easier and once you unlock Esquie, you can run faster across the world or swim from shore to shore. Even later into the game, he’ll learn how to fly while carrying you around, and that’s when the world really opens up to doing that optional side content we talked about earlier and you might be tempted to revisit some fight that were simply out of your league when you first bumped into them…

Voted Best Hugger and most useful means of transportation: Esquie!

Exploration in levels is usually pretty linear. They have a clear A to Z structure most of the time, but every gamer worth their salt will always try to find the nooks and crannies where secrets might be hidden, and Clair Obscur rarely disappoints. It’ll always have a secret hidden behind the waterfall or other places of interest you’d expect. Every 5 minutes of gameplay or so, you’ll find something new and I feel like I’m repeating myself, but it’s oh so satisfying to have that constant feeling of progress.

On that note, one wishlist I have as a completionist, is that I could have the option to see which secrets I’ve missed in a level. I know this is counterintuitive to the organic exploration the devs envisioned and it would move the game closer to the Assassin’s Creed levels of “gotta check every box”, but just seeing how many items or pictos you’ve missed in a level would go a long way to preventing me from circling around an area for hours in the hopes of spotting a hidden path I had missed. At the very least in New Game +, this could be a useful addition to the game.

Struggles on Xbox Series S

This may also be patched on day one, but the majority of the time I played on my Xbox Series X and had zero performance issues. But on the Xbox Series S, I noticed some texture pop-in that was especially apparent in dark caves with artificial lighting. the lightmap also seems baked in, so walking through a cave, you could see the brighter patches on the walls appear as you walked through it, or as the camera turns. I also noticed that loading the combat from the free roam took considerably longer. So I’d advise to play this on the Series X, if you have the luxury of choice.

How long did I play the review before publishing? 64 hours
How long to beat the story? 30 hours story + 30 hours side content
How many Achievements did I earn before publishing? 54/55 or 950/1000G (but I’m going for 1000G!)
How long to achieve 1000G | 60 hours
You’ll love this game if you like these | Lost Odyssey, Shadow Hearts series, Final Fantasy series, The Legend of Dragoon, Resonance of Fate… And it’s better than all of them.

CONCLUSION

Score: 100/100

Quite possibly the best RPG of its kind. Epic story with heartfelt moments, best-in class combat, gorgeous graphics and music that will linger for the rest of my life. I’ll be humming some of these tunes in the retirement home. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the real thing. This game will go down in history as a must-play RPG.

Want to see the game in action? Here is me playing the spoiler-free demo a while ago: