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Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 – Complete
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.
In An Age 
Gameplay of the Year
Dec 2
Posted by Azuriel
So, Polygon released the list of Game of Year 2015 contenders last month:
While I might be alone in railing against inexorable fate and media narratives, I will be very disappointed if Witcher 3 wins Game of the Year (again). But in examining the feelings that give rise to this disappointment, a question surfaces: what deserves to be a Game of the Year anyway?
When it comes to mechanics, systems, and everything that makes games games, it seems clear to me that Metal Gear Solid 5 deserves to be Game of the Year. Everything in MGS 5 simply works. The controls are tight, the stealth gameplay compelling, and the Fulton system synergizes brilliantly with every other game mechanic. You can kill people from afar, but you want to steal them for your base more, which leads to close-quarters sneaking and higher tension gameplay. The way all the pieces of MGS 5 harmonize with one another is simply a thing of beauty and elegance.
…which is a real shame, considering how much of a disaster the story ends up being. “Disaster” is a bit uncharitable, but the abbreviated ending leaves one with a sour taste in one’s mouth, making it easier to forget how ~60 hours of incandescent joy preceded it.
Then you have Witcher 3. Mechanically, the game is just bad; none of the various systems fit together, and often actively clash. You are encouraged to collect hundreds of different crafting components, including junk you can break down for parts, but the vast majority are completely pointless. Random loot will give you high-level blueprints for items you will never be able to use, while recipes for staple items are conspicuously absent. Everything about the first two games that established Witchers – and Geralt in particular – as a fantasy noir detective that needs to plan encounters ahead of time to survive, flies out of the window mechanically, as Geralt gets to pop infinite potions and bombs like they were MMO abilities with per-encounter cooldowns.
…but Witcher 3 will still likely win Game of the Year. Because of things like the Bloody Baron quest. Or when Geralt (spoiler alert) finds Ciri. Nobody will remember mindlessly pressing Alt and Left-Clicking a million times to snore through the combat even on the harder difficulties. Hell, nobody will even remember that, for however good the Bloody Baron quest was, how ridiculous it was in a narrative ostensibly about a race against time. Or how Novigrad was one giant slog through completely unrelated nonsense. Or how little sense it made, pacing-wise, for there to be an open world at all.
It seems to me that what is really being voted on here is “Game Experience of the Year.”
Which is… okay, I guess? Hell, I’m usually the guy defending story over mechanics from the people who believe plot has no place in gaming. In this specific scenario though, I hate the idea that MGS 5 is going to lose because it lacked 1-2 missions to seal the deal, whereas Witcher 3 is going to win because it had a few bright spots in an ocean of bad design.
Ironically, Fallout 4 has thus far hit the sweet spot inbetween the two extremes for me, but I don’t believe it will win because it didn’t hit the sweet spot hard enough. Plus, ugh, that useless ass UI. How could they have they spent so much time coding in Settlements and approximately zero minutes giving us an interface worthy of that descriptor to interact with it?
Bah.
I will say though, I’m happy to see Ori and the Blind Forest show up under four different categories. While there were some difficulty spikes in there, Ori is one of the best-looking, best-sounding, and more entertaining indie-esque titles I have played this year.
Posted in Commentary
4 Comments
Tags: Game of the Year, Gameplay, Metal Gear Solid 5, Ori and the Blind Forest, Witcher 3