Every year the Paintress paints a new number that is lower by one than the last and residents on the island of Lumiere who are older than the number are snapped Gommaged out of existence. Every year a team of expeditioners are sent out to slay the Paintress but none have been successful so far. This has been going on for 67 years and you head out as expedition 33 in an attempt to alter the future of everyone in Lumiere.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a JRPG at heart that strips out all the boring parts whilst sprinkling in some souls-like elements. There are no long expositions, no weird anime voices or repetitive grinding. It's a well paced story packaged into around 30 to 40 hours that hits the mark for those like me that might get bored of the static nature of orthodox turn-based combat.

Combat

I'm going to talk about the elephant in the room which is the inclusion of realtime elements in the turn-based combat. Expedition 33 has Persona inspired menus where you have buttons mapped to unique actions which each character can use on their turn. The twist is that you get two types of real-time prompts mixed in. On your turn there are QTEs that enhance the effectiveness of your own attacks. On enemy turns you have the option to either dodge or parry their moves to completely negate damage and deliver a powerful counterattack.

Now real time prompts have existed in previous games like Mario RPG but the creator specifically takes inspiration Sekiro as outlined in this interview

First, the game has a strong JRPG gameplay inspiration. It was conceived as a turn-based game from the beginning, influenced by Final Fantasy VIII, IX, and X in particular. Around the first iteration of the game, the game director was playing Sekiro at the same time, and he thought that the feeling of dodges and parries felt so good in From Software games, that's when we started to implement a more reactive, turn-based system in our own game.

This mechanic is probably the biggest factor on whether you will enjoy Expedition 33. On Steam, the game currently boasts a 93% positive review but as I read through thoughts of the 7% who voted negative, the largest common denominator by far is the dislike towards this parry mechanic.

Personally I love it. Typical JRPG combat often boils down to making the same repetitive motions in a menu to dial in the optimal sequences of commands. When fighting the same trash mobs, the actual actions you do as a player becomes routine. Real time inputs mean combat is always fresh with some level of focus required by the player at all times. Even the gun command require basic aiming at weak spots.

When you pull off a parry the music dims, your character ready's a counter and explodes in a fanfare of massive damage. It's a dopamine hit you get to milk multiple times in a fight and makes fights more lethal which in turns leads to shorter, dynamic engagements that don't drag on. Later on you get to parry crazy things like literal buildings which is cool too.

In terms of how pervasive the mechanic is, the game definitely requires you to engage with it to beat enemies in a timely manner but there are tons of considerations set in place to help those that might struggle. First, dodging has a larger window than parrying so you get to practice timings with it (at the cost of no counter attack). You also get many rechargeable healing and revives every fight so death isn't a very big setback at all. You can also adjust your build by levelling health and defense or attaching defensive passives that greatly increase the leniency for missing parries.

However I do have criticisms on how they designed late-game parry timings though. Parrying is inherently very strong for the player because it completely negates damage so in order to ramp the difficulty, late-game enemies throw off parry timings with unintuitive delays and weird attack motions. I had the same complaint with Elden Ring but this is an inelegant patch at best to the problem. Enemies start moving awkwardly in a way that would never happen in games without parrying. Personally I think the funnest parry/dodges are when you're adapting on the fly to a sequence of intuitive and telegraphed strings.

I also don't feel the QTEs on your own turn add to the experience as much. They're not very difficult so they only serve to distract you from watching the awesome character animations. These can be turned off if you want though.

Regarding choice in builds, the game allows a wide range of customization with unique passives (called pictos and luminas) and rudimentary increases to base stats. I didn't min/max them too deeply but I watched a play through of a streamer who was able to squeeze much larger damage by engaging properly with the RPG mechanic so the pre-fight preparations hold equal weight if that's something you enjoy. The UI could use some QOL improvements though like saving lumina combinations and showing skill/lumina explanations without hovering over them.

Presentation

The visuals of this game are top tier for something you'd see in 2025. The environments are colorful, varied and filled with detail like you'd see in a tech demo to show off the limits of engine. I would've liked an increase in the saturation though because sometimes it feels like screen has a filter which limits the vibrancy.

In combat the character animations are peak anime; An underrated aspect that I don't often see mentioned is the camera movement. The game leverages the fact that the camera isn't player controlled to create dynamic shots that wouldn't be possible in the action genre. It's both functional in that it clearly frames what you need to see depending on your action but also creates cinematic sequences when your choices play out.

The sound track goes really hard and the battle music doesn't get stale since there's new ones for every areas and fights. I like that the genre of the music isn't limited to what you'd expect from 19th century France. There's the trad orchestra but also tracks with electric guitars, woodwind riffs and even electronic synths. You can check it out for yourself on the official channel.

Level Design

The world is designed by having closed contained levels that are connected by a large overworld. The individual levels are topologically just hallways with various side paths that may or may not loop around. The game doesn't have a map for these smaller areas which lets me focus on exploring organically but the level layouts aren't really memorable or interesting to map out. The game also does the typical RPG thing where you want to explore the optional paths first but it presents like three directions which all feasibly look like the main one so you have to be wary of whether a cutscene starts playing or not. To be clear, the levels look really good but the structure could be improved; I think the main line souls series is a peak example of interesting level design.

The overworld on the other hand is vast and sprawling and feels good to navigate. I like that there are a fuckton of optional areas, bosses and items that the game doesn't force on you at all. They simply present all the content and trusts the player to engage with as many as they feel like. It's truly optional since I was able to beat the game without beating many chromatic challenge bosses and simply skipped content that didn't interest me.

The game respects your time as a player which carries over to the overall pacing and story telling. There's minimal exposition and character dialogue naturally plays out like real people talking in a movie. It's a very focused experience which refreshingly contrasts triple-digit long JRPGs that dump every little detail like you're a child.

(As a tip, the full map is opened up in the final act so feel free to skip anything since they can be revisited later)

Performance

The game is made in Unreal Engine yet doesn't have it's signature stutter so that's a huge plus. I played on a 3060ti 1440p with DLSS performance and low presets which resulted in around 40 to 60 fps depending on the area. Unfortunately the fps drops seem dependent on the area so some maps require you to play through them with frames in the 40s or even 30s which is miserable when parrying is required. For the majority of the game that runs well I have no complaints.

Verdict

⭐⭐⭐⭐/5, honestly as close as it can get to a 5.

Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 is a focused experience with fun combat and a great story; An evolution from traditional JRPGs whilst discarding the weaker elements that linger in the genre. The game has room for improvement in level and combat design but this is the best iteration of the genre I've played in ages.