I finally beat Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 (E33) over the weekend after about 50 hours.

I’m not going to go into specific spoilers in this post, but I’ll slap a Yellow warning just in case.

Undoubtedly, one of the burning questions you have after my prior two posts complaining about it, is “did the combat system get any better?” And that answer is… Yes. Technically. Right at the very fucking end, when it least mattered. And for largely all the wrong reasons.

To be clear, the combat system is the exact same as it always was. If you disliked having turn-based combat with quick-time events baked into it from hour one, you’ll still be annoyed with it way later. What eventually changes is that you unlock a large enough variety of Pictos and opportunities to farm the shit out of mobs for special items that permanently increase your ability to equip more of them, that mobs no longer survive your first turn. By the end of the game, I had one character that always acted first, and just spammed the Free Aim attack, usually randomly generating enough extra AP to keep going until everything was dead. If they ran out of AP, they did a Base Attack which hit twice and regained them 6-8 AP to use in their second, bonus turn.

Getting to this point was not a cakewalk. One of the key Pictos necessary for the build only dropped from an optional boss fight that took me over 20 minutes of Dodge/Parrying to defeat. And to even get to that strength required a lot of farming various other endgame zones for drops that leveled up your weapons.

The kicker though is that the game basically forces you down that path. At the beginning of Act 3, you gain access to the final dungeon right away. Which is fine, refreshing almost. When you speak with your companions though, they have “companion quests” available that send you elsewhere in the world… and those places have a MASSIVE, overwhelming increase in difficulty from what you have experienced to this point. I have never seen this design in a videogame before, probably because it is dumb. Having optional harder dungeons – the equivalent of Ruby and Emerald Weapon in FF7 – for flexing? Cool. Hiding companion closure quests behind said harder dungeons, which will ultimately result in you overpowering the final boss as a result? Not cool.

Alternatively… maybe you are just really good at Parries/Dodges. In which case, you will take literally zero damage from any encounter and (eventually) beat every fight without any issue.

You might be asking why I’m dwelling on the combat system when that is not why E33 won all the Game of the Year awards. I’m dwelling on it precisely because that is not why E33 won all those awards.

E33 has some of the best art direction I have ever seen in any video game. It has some of the highest production values of any soundtrack I have heard in any video game. Seriously, I was going to go through the OST and suggest some in particular to give you a taste, but goddamn there are 150+ songs and any one of them would be a signature track in any other game. The dialog and character animations feel raw and real. The plot can be trippy and gut-wrenching at the same time, leaving you with impossible choices.

All of that… and I hated playing it. I have zero issues with the way combat is presented, the UI is slick as hell, every new Picto acquired caused me to reexamine every possible synergy (which I enjoy doing). I’m not incapable of the Parries/Dodges, I just don’t like that they exist in the game. If they don’t bother you, or hell, if you enjoy that they exist? More power to you! No doubt E33 is a god-tier game for you.

For me though? I dunno. Back in the day, 20-30 years ago, I would routinely play JRPGs and say that story is worth any amount of repetitive grind. I am not certain that that principle holds anymore. If E33 were any other game, I would have dropped it after the first 5 hours and said it was just not for me. But E33 isn’t just some other game, it’s an entirely new bar that elevates the medium in all ways… but one.

So, there it is. Glad I played Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, glad I experienced it, and glad it’s over.