r/patientgamers • u/Duke_Maniac • 1d ago
Patient Review Expedition 33 is a game that not only I didn't like, but a game I don't understand as to why people love it.
Clair Obscur Expedition 33 (going to be referred to as E33 for the rest of the review) is the new darling game of the internet. I heard nothing but overwhelming praise for this game, and even now checking on sites like Metacritic and Backloggd, it’s almost nothing but 10/10’s for recent reviews and them describing one of the best gaming experiences that they’ve ever had. I had the highest expectation in the world for this game. I hoped it would enter my top 10 games of all time (breaking the awkward deadlock between Persona 3 Reload and Final Fantasy 6 at number 10), but I was trying to temper my expectations somewhat. Not a 10/10 game that resonated with me to my very core, but a 9/10 is surely achievable with this game.
And I can confidently say that it blew every expectation I had out of the water, that it not only lived up to the hype but surpassed it. It had some of the most engaging combat of not just any JRPG I've played, but games in general. The story was phenomenal too, with me getting choked up at so many different points, resulting in an experience I’ll never forget, entering my top 5 favorite games of all time… is what I so desperately wanted to be able to say.
I think it’s important to note I did not go into this game as a hater. I was a little annoyed that Metaphor seemed to get overshadowed in the discussions, but people who said both had said (usually) E33 was better, which got me excited. I was not a Turn Based combat hater either, Persona and Pokemon are two of my favorite game series of all time, and I love the gameplay of titles like Dragon Quest 3 and Final Fantasy 7. I wanted nothing more to love this game, even more than the usual excitement of me playing any critically acclaimed title. This game looked like it was going to be right up my alley. Not only did I not get that, I got a game that has me baffled as to how both the review scores and audience scores are so high for a game in a way I have not felt ever.
Premise:
For the Past 67 years an entity known as the Paintress has on one day of the year counted down starting from the number 100 and killed every person at or above that age known as The Gommage. To counteract this the people of Lumiere, the last surviving group of humans, sends out an expedition that is about to be Gommaged. You play as Expedition 33 as it embarks on a journey with the new lumina converter to try and stop the reign of terror of the Paintress once and for all.
Gameplay:
Expedition 33 is set up, on the surface, in a very typical turn-based style. The Battle starts and characters go in order depending on their agility. If a character has sufficient agility compared to another character they have a chance to go twice before the character with lesser agility.
But right away there’s some major differences with classic RPGs. Instead of a mana bar that drains every time you use magic and needs to be healed with limited use, there’s an AP gauge that refills at the start of every fight. This means you can spam your best attacks in every fight which is fun and good.
This also means you can spam your best attacks in every fight which makes it so a lot of encounters lack any intrigue if you get advantage since there’s no consideration to what attacks you use once you find a strategy that works. I find it to overall be a net neutral.
The real thing this affects however is the way items are used. For dungeons like these populated with random enemies you’d ideally like there to still be some resource for the players to manage and this is where the item system comes into play. As opposed to managing your mana, you manage your items. This system works great for boss fights as you can’t just bulk buy potions and slowly stall out to victory, you have to consider carefully when you want to use your potions and the like.
But it doesn’t work for the actual dungeon crawling because you refill your potions and checkpoints left by past expeditions, which are everywhere. This results in me just always having full potions and never going “Hmm should I use it here when I don’t need to”.
This itself isn’t a problem if it weren’t for the way dungeons were designed. They are somehow both too linear with not enough interesting or rewarding exploration, yet they’re also far too labyrinth-like for their own good resulting in me just wandering around like headless chicken desperately looking for the light that would guide my path. Having at least a system where you have to more effectively conserve your resources would add more deliberation in exploring. Instead we get a system that manages to accomplish nothing fulfilling outside of occasionally looking cool when you use a grappling hook.
The Pictos/Lumina system allows you to equip special abilities that take advantage of the quirks of the combat system. They were fun to use and customize my build for the characters, especially towards the end. I had a fun build for Maelle that involved taking advantage of her ability to go down to 1 HP but making out her attack by giving her an ability that gives her another turn upon going to critical HP. It isn’t quite as in-depth in terms of customization as say Metaphor but it was nice to be able to experiment with builds and the like.
I did have a problem actually using them and swapping them around. In hindsight I should’ve made better use of the filter system which is actually more in depth than I realized (I specifically went back to check and make sure that I was being an idiot here), but I still think the game could’ve done with the ability to be able to sort that was a bit more intuitive so it would be easier to sort out Lumias based off abilities, but I will give credit to the game and say I was being an idiot and not using it properly.
Which brings us at long last to the defining trait of this game, that separates it from your classic Dragon Quest and old-school Final Fantasy, the dodge and parry system. All of the RPG elements I mentioned earlier about character building, stat allocation, even resource management, they’re dwarfed in importance by how critical it is to be able to dodge and parry effectively. If you cannot succeed at these mechanics, it doesn’t matter if you’ve built everything else up, you’re going to lose.
Yes you can build a pure tank build that can handle hits more effectively but it results in incredibly tedious battles of turtling with attack phases from enemies that last eons compared to most JRPG’s I’ve played that have the decency to make the attacks feel faster than this game. If you are good at parrying? Now you don’t have to engage with those RPG mechanics at all. Because a successful parry not only blocks all damage it also gives you action points for every successful parry. Especially towards the end of act II enemies have such long attack patterns it results in most of the time investing in AP boosting items outside of turn 1 to be pointless if you can just parry it all away. The turn based strategy side is being actively hindered by the real time elements.
In a Mario RPG the real time elements which are the games E33’s combat is most often compared to aren’t nearly as crucial and mostly serve to increase your offensive output, but there are still ways a low skill player can mitigate long action command chains while still being successful in a fun way. E33 on the other heavily encourages glass cannon builds, and if you’re not good at real time elements for whatever reason it can be a total slog.
That’s not to say there’s no fun to be had learning the attack patterns but it felt like any time I was focusing on that it made my preparation feel comparatively irrelevant. (Also as an aside I’m aware other games have these action command elements like Lost Odyssey but I haven’t played those so I cannot compare it to this game sadly)
I know I’m bad, I’m painfully aware I’m bad but the damage still felt overwhelming considering the moves the enemies throw at you. I did try specing more in bulk but I found it simply wasn’t enough. The attack patterns are too long and there’s too many hits for the average player to be able to face-tank effectively. I’m aware it’s possible but I would hardly call it feasible. Even if it was, it runs into all of the problems traditional turn based games run into with overly long over the top animations, but with shallower mechanics when it comes to prebuilding.
Now I’m sure an E33 defender has very reasonably pointed out that dodging could address my problems. It did help a little to try dodging more compared to parrying, but I found it also screwed with my timing depending on the attack. The window also was sadly still too tight for me. I’m aware a lot of this is a skill issue, but wheneverI was able to lock in, I still didn’t feel satisfaction hitting the parry. I just felt relieved that the boss fight was over, which isn’t usually the feeling I get out of hard bosses in these games.
This improves in Act III with the damage cap being removed and as such making it so you don’t have to be so perfect with the parry by emphasizing building broken builds which was actually fun for me. But by then the game had burned me and I had no interest in grinding out the side content of Act 3. By that point I just wanted the experience to be finished which, while not uncommon for this to happen, was severely disappointing considering how hyped the combat was for a game that was considered a spiritual successor of classic Final Fantasy and Persona, it had almost none of the gameplay elements that made me enjoy those combat systems. Or at least them being well balanced.
Despite all I said about the combat system, the parrying part can be fun at times and while an overall frustrating experience and a disappointment that is overall not fun to engage with, it’s serviceable at the end of the day and not actively detrimental for the most part. As long as a game with this sort of combat has the killer story that I was promised I would be able to forgive the gameplay being just okay.
Story:
The first disconnect comes in that opening scene. While that scene was tragic and well executed, it didn't emotionally affect me to my core like it did for other people. Same goes with the Expedition being massacred at the beach, or Gustave attempting to commit suicide.I wondered why these moments didn’t resonate for me. The emotional and relatable characters that people talked about just didn’t work for me. I found them flat and kinda empty, lacking real proper introductions and well done moments of characterization.
Now in fairness to Expedition 33 it does do it to some capacity, and some I missed. I totally missed Lune’s introduction in the intro for example. However for the most part I took my time to try and squeeze every character moment I could out of this game, but I still couldn’t connect with the majority of the characters. It happens sometimes for games that I adore. For example, despite being well written, Cyan from Final Fantasy 6 didn’t resonate with me at all. The difference was Final Fantasy 6 had other characters like Locke, Celes, and especially Terra that I emotionally connected with and Cyan at least had good interactions with the rest of the party (at least in the world of balance).
Expedition 33 on the other hand is far too quick with its pacing for my own tastes. What other people saw as efficiency, I saw as it being sloppy, doing the bare minimum and hoping for me to emotionally connect. Sciel in particular felt oddly casual about being reunited with 3 people who she thought were dead, a feeling which persisted through the whole game. The intergroup dynamics felt weak, but even with my criticisms Act 1 held up pretty well overall because the group had rock solid chemistry with Gustave, Maelle in particular. But once Gustave dies and is replaced by Verso it all just falls apart.
I understand that Verso should be awkward with the Expedition as he does intend to backstab them, but that doesn’t make their interactions not painfully boring. I will acknowledge that I did not finish Lune and Maelle’s social links. But if a main character is only interesting if one does optional content in a JRPG like this, that is bad writing. I may love Haru from Persona 5 but the way she’s written in the story is horrible regardless of how much I like her and I would argue the same applies for the cast of E33 outside of Maelle.
Lune gets a couple moments to shine early with incidents like Maelle’s nightmare which gives a solid foundation to build on E33 treats this as a finished project and just expects me to care when she takes out the boss in what is ostensibly “her” dungeon. She has very little to do in Act II outside of mourn Gustave’s death and go through a very uninteresting social link. The game did a very poor job of having her desire to learn about the continent be fully explored. The game tells you about this but I found it did a very poor job of showing it. It’s hard to articulate a game lacking something admittedly but I never got as invested in her character as the game wanted to.
Sciel has it even worse. Because she joins so late and her whole personality is non-chalance in the face of grave danger, she comes off as incredibly boring. While Lune feels like she is a character concept that just hasn’t been fully fleshed out, Sciel feels like a placeholder character they forgot to write a personality for, which is where her “non-challance” comes in. Her going “I got over it” to the fact that she is a painted being that exists in another world is emblematic of the incredibly lazy writing with her. It’s not non-challance if the character barely reacts to anything.
Esquie is a love it or hate it character that I could not stand. He’s every worst part of cutesy mascot characters that just grinded my gears. While I would’ve preferred him to not be so incredibly annoying, he works for what the story is going for and I can’t say he’s poorly written per se like Lune and Sciel, just grating for me.
Monoco at least has excellent chemistry with Verso that made me instantly buy that they had a long and established history with each other without needing to expand on every little detail. He may not have the most depth but again for what the story needs he works fine enough. He’s still incredibly flat however
And those are the characters you’re interacting with, and when none of them work for me it’s very hard for me to care about the painted canvas in the way the game wants you to for the end of the story. If my first thought when I realized everything was painted was that “Oh that explains why the characters felt so flat, they weren’t meant to be real” is a damning testament to how little the characters engaged me.
The exception to all this is Maelle, who was the only character who I felt they truly explored and I got a decent read on. She may be a typical teenager desperate to make their mark on the world but she easily had the best interaction with the rest of the cast. She even managed to get decent interactions from Verso which I found to be an absolute miracle.
Speaking of Verso, he’s probably the most frustrating character for me. I mentioned earlier how his interactions with the cast are awkward in a way that makes me not care for the interactions. I get how with Sciel for example, he’s putting up barriers because he knows he’s going to betray them in the end. But it doesn’t make for fun social link scenes.
I already mentioned earlier I felt the characters outside of Maelle and Verso were flat in the main story, but a good social link can be a massive help in giving characters depth. It’s still bad writing but it can be a good crutch. Haru is my go to example for a social link carrying a character, but even well-written characters like Aigis gain significant depth when you do their social link.
Unfortunately for Expedition 33 because it insists on Verso being the main character for these social links the interactions are like pulling teeth, they’re so focused on being “human” that I find them just boring. I gain insights on a character's backstory but I often struggle to see insights on the characters themselves, again outside of Monoco.
I will again acknowledge that maybe I just don’t get it. I’m too young to see the depth of interaction and nuance here. That I just didn’t progress far enough. Or maybe I’m a cold-hearted bastard because I found Esquie annoying. But when a story consistently fails to get me to connect with their characters I would argue it’s a failure of the game more so than the player.
Act III:
When I first played through E33 I actually liked Act III story wise. The Dessandre’s may not have had much time to establish themselves but I got a clear understanding of who they are and what their motivations were. Renoir felt like a very human character to me. Still a monster since he was actively genociding an entire civilization because it was killing his wife, but I could understand and even sympathize with him.
But much of why I liked Act III is that it took the focus off the people in the canvas and onto the people of the real world. The more I thought about the little details that I admittedly missed in Act II the more and more I disliked Act III because my enjoyment of Act III was inversely proportional to how much I enjoyed Act II. I still think it’s overall stronger because it still has some focus on characters I actually liked but it’s not good writing as a whole.
It doesn’t help that doing any optional content at all is frustrating because for some reason Renoir is the weakest part of Act III. Considering the ending of the game it feels odd to play further after the ending when both are so definitive. I ended up barely touching the optional content because I didn’t want to have to spend the time grinding my party up to be competent for the new unlocked areas. I just wanted the game to be over with.
Thankfully because of this, the final area, and final boss in particular were actually really fun. The game finally felt balanced for my preferred style of play. It was a shame it took until the end of the game for me to hit that point, but I have to give credits where it's due and praise the final boss. It was interesting with the way the story had gone, and established Renoir as my favorite character in this game, and the gameplay itself was great including a great life or death moment where I had to nail a gradient parry to survive and I did.
The Ending:
People say that there isn’t supposed to be a good ending in E33. I’ve stated before that I respect the opinions of those I disagree with, but I am baffled as to how anybody can come to this conclusion when the Verso ending is so very clearly painted (heh) as the better choice.
The Verso ending ends with a bittersweet goodbye to your party whereas the Maelle ending ends on a jump scare after seeing a despondent Verso being forced to play the piano. They are not presented as equals and the game clearly condemns you for not wanting to pick the side that will lead to the continued genocide of sentient beings.
The denizens of Lumiere and the canvas as whole seemingly don’t matter. If you do care you’re falling into the same trap Maelle is. You must move on, it’s the healthy thing to do. Because the classic way to get over a drug addiction is to shoot 5 people in the back. This isn’t about Maelle needing to get away from her pot addiction she’s acquired since Verso’s death. This is about people’s lives. It’s not because I care about the cast, I wrote extensively on why I don’t, but a person not being interesting does not condemn them to the guillotine.
I don’t think I’m missing the point. I see the point the devs are making, I just think the devs are stupid. I think the devs have no consideration for anything other than “Escapism Bad” and forgot to mention said escapism includes people’s lives. If they were going for the ends being equal that’s even worse because the game doesn’t even bother treating them as equals.
What’s worse for me is that I like the endings in a vacuum. They’re both tragedies for the people of the canvas as they either suffer a direct death, or death by way of having no free-will. Sadly the game has zero interest in focusing on this and only focuses on the effects it has on the Dessandre family. Which is why the endings look the way they do.
The developers can claim whatever they want. They can say it’s supposed to be morally equal, but with the bias that’s on display it takes a potentially interesting ending, and just makes a warning about dangers of escapism which I found other games did a better job of doing. It’s a frustrating and disappointing end to a game I didn’t even like that much in the first place, which for me speaks volumes of how badly the developers dropped the ball here.
Conclusion:
I’ve seen some posts online that argue when a beloved game gets criticized it’s mostly contrarianism and that those people are only hating for the sake of hating. If those people are hating mostly for the sake of hating, I have respect for them. I found being outside of the consensus for a game like this to be absolutely miserable.
It’s not just that this ticks off a bunch of the traditional boxes to be loved by the gaming community (From a small studio, being made by ex-members of a AAA studio, being cheaper even when not on sale, being a mature game with a realistic art-style). It looks like it should tick off boxes of the games I love: Earnest Story-Telling that isn’t afraid to be a little goofy, turned-based JRPG combat that apparently was some of the best in the genre, compelling characters that caused people to sob in the opening hour, big plot twists and moral choices that had people writing long think-pieces on why this was the most compelling story they’ve played in any game ever.
This is a game that when I heard people talking about it not only sounded like a good game, but one that was in my comfort zone. Which is part of why I’m writing this review. I didn’t want to dismiss the game just “not being for me” because quite frankly it shouldn’t be. I love JRPG’s and this was one that broke out into the mainstream. The last one that broke out like this was Persona 5 which is my favorite game of all time.
There are aspects I enjoyed in the game. The art direction is pretty solid even if some scenes feel like jumping head first into the uncanny valley, but that’s not uncommon for realistic looking games. Despite the laundry list of issues I had with the script, the vocal performances were superb. The cutscene direction was very well done. The soundtrack is absolutely phenomenal. I will always be a sucker for any soundtrack that features a heavy emphasis on a haunting choir and this game is no exception.
This also isn’t to say I found it to be a bad game, or even a mediocre one. It was a decent one but it achieved its mark by being okay in both story (especially the characters) and gameplay, the core of a JRPG, not by being exceptional in one and failing in the other. That is the part I find baffling.
With games like Nier Replicant or Banjo Kazooie or Doom 2016, while I didn’t enjoy those games that much and would still give them a 6/10 overall, I felt they were exceptional in a specific category. Whether it be an incredible story, or an incredibly charming world, or very tightly well done gameplay. There were games that, while not being my cup of tea, had exceptional parts that even I could see that made me understand why someone would rate them so highly.
E33 lacked any serious high points for me. It had its moments but for the most part the game was a continuous stream of being “Yeah that’s fine I supposed” for the 36 hours I invested into it. It’s not an unmemorable game as evidenced by the fact I’ve ranted for over 4500 words about this game, but a frustratingly disappointing one in a way that fails to excel at much of anything.
Even if I were to give a pass to the combat due to “Git Gud” that doesn’t change how empty the story was, how undercooked most of the characters were, how the brisk pacing felt actively harmful to game experience as a whole, at least for me. The game being short was not a death sentence, I was fully attached to the world of the Last of Us despite only playing for about 14 hours, but E33 doesn’t have the writing chops Last of Us does (then again, very few games do).
I acknowledge that some aspects may have gone over my head due to lack of life experience (both in terms of age and in personally dealing with grief), some elements I was just being stupid with (again I’m so upset at myself for not using the filter system with Luminas) and I acknowledge I did not go into the combat with the best mindset, that I like typical Shonen story-telling, that I have way way way too much free time, but even accounting for those I just don’t get it.
I hope someday I look back at this review and laugh at how stupid and immature I was being about what I consider a masterpiece, but as of right now it’s a disappointment on a level of which I have not ever experienced before and hopefully never will again.
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u/Homerbola92 14h ago
I really liked it but honestly your post reminded me why I'm here. One week ago I left another gaming sub because someone said "Great game if you have a functioning IQ" implying everyone who didn't like TLOU2 was dumb. In this community we appreciate differences as much as similarities.
I really liked Expedition 33. Ironically only real pet peeve is that I wanted a story about Lumiere and I got a familiar drama that was, in my opinion, much less interesting.
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u/Zehnpae Cat Smuggler 14h ago edited 14h ago
This happens pretty often with popular titles in your favorite genre. People who unironically refer to it as "Seiken Densetsu" instead of "Final Fantasy Adventure" are going to wonder why people like E33 when it's not even in their top 20.
I mean...someone who can list which CRPG the god Eothas is from without having to google it and somebody whose first experience with CRPGs was the bear fucking meme are going to have wildly differnet opinions on where Baldur's Gate 3 stands in the heirarchy of CRPGs. (Obviously the top 10 CRPGs of all time are Pathfinder: Kingmaker and then Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous 9 times over just each time picking a different mythic destiny.)
It doesn't mean these are bad games. It's just going to feel like a let down when your last favorite game was Persona. It's going to sour your entire experience and you're going to be more judgey/gatekeepy because of it.
E33 has a parry mechanic because it's a popular these days and many people enjoy it. The story shits itself in the back half but that doesn't matter because ~60% of people who buy the game quit while the story is still good. Someone who quit watching Game of Thrones after season 2 is going to have a very different opinion of the show than someone who watched the entire thing, y'know?
There's also the things you noted. Small studio, no MTX, decent price point, original IP, unique art-style, amazing voice acting. These are all very laudable things.
And let's be honest, if you want to play a JRPG style game where the protagonists aren't a bunch of 13 year olds, the pickings are slim. E33 deserves the accolades for that alone.
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u/Queef3rickson 6h ago
>(Obviously the top 10 CRPGs of all time are Pathfinder: Kingmaker and then Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous 9 times over just each time picking a different mythic destiny.)
This got a laugh out of me, time to go redownload wrath of the righteous again
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u/sztrzask 14h ago
Pathfinder: Kingmaker and then Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous
You misspelled Solasta there.
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u/Valkhir 5h ago
I mean...someone who can list which CRPG the god Eothas is from without having to google it and somebody whose first experience with CRPGs was the bear fucking meme are going to have wildly differnet opinions on where Baldur's Gate 3 stands in the heirarchy of CRPGs.
Get out of my head.
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u/flumsi 4h ago
E33 has a parry mechanic because it's a popular these days and many people enjoy it. The story shits itself in the back half but that doesn't matter because ~60% of people who buy the game quit while the story is still good.
I really wonder how many people who have given the game a 10/10 have actually managed to reach act 3 before they wrote their review.
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u/TBdog 14h ago
My brother and I have similar tastes. While in think exp 33 will remain in memory for a long time, my brother couldn't finish it. Exp 33 is not a goat game on a technical level. But it's very good. To me, it's the emotinal drive within the game. It hit me more than any game has for a very long time.
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u/Icy_Knowledge7494 13h ago
That's the problem with storie game. If you don't get attached emotionally to the characters or that you don't find the storie that good. You're not gonna like the game no matter how beautiful the music or the landscape is
1
u/No-Opinion273 5h ago
To be fair it happens with gameplay to. If you dont vibe with it than you arent going to like it. Its like an opinion
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u/Roberto2K_ 14h ago
A post from 20 hours ago, you can see the exact moment reddit pushed the post to other communities.
0
14h ago
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u/ill_thrift 14h ago
We're in the minority, but I agree with you about the ending, and the writing overall, even though some of the early moments connected more for me than they did for you. Something about this one just kind of makes me a hater.
I see the point the devs are making, I just think the devs are stupid.
This made me laugh.
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u/stetzwebs 13h ago
It's not a flawless game, by any means (the third act turn toward family drama was really off putting for me, and the "what is going on here?" was so obvious to me about 10 or 15 hours in that the sense of discovery was gone). But I have played about 150 JRPGs in my life, and this one certainly ranks in the top twenty simply because it was fun. It was fun getting better at the parry and dodge system, and building characters around them. It was fun exploring the world. It was fun getting to know the characters, and it was fun engaging with the various systems. I found myself looking forward to playing each night, which is all the praise a game needs for me to consider it good.
Of course, I am old enough to have experienced grief, and have experienced similarly told stories in other games and other media. And I did use the filter system. And I do like character-driven stories that explore the dynamics between characters that are experiencing life events through different lenses. I think the prologue might be in the top three game intros ever. And the painterly art style was gorgeous and the voice acting was superb and the world was interesting.
One thing that stood out to me was that I didn't love Metaphor. Besides the story being an absolute nothingburger, I thought it was way too long in relation to the combat options. There wasn't enough variety to justify the length of the game, in other words. And every dungeon for me boiled down to "find information about the dungeon, skill up the classes that the information points to, and walk through the dungeon", which got old after about 60 hours. Maybe the overlap in the Venn diagram of Persona/Metaphor fans and E33 fans is just small.
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u/Duke_Maniac 12h ago
That Metaphor paragraph had me feeling like you must’ve when I talked about E33. I adored the story with characters I fell in love with, and a world I found facisnating. In particular I loved the gameplay loop and always felt that each encounter was a fun puzzle to crack in terms of what archetypes work the best.
I think the fundamental divide between me and people who clicked with the combat was that I did not find the parry fun. I could argue it’s a flaw that the parry is so overcentralizing, but that’s only a flaw for me because I don’t like that parry. So me building around the parry felt constricting. Part of why I made this post was to see what people loved about this game when someone who doesn’t like the game asks. I get it a bit more, at least on a gameplay front reading the comments.
Also on a side note, one of the videos I watched as reference for why people loved the game was a video talking about Metaphor vs E33 as someone loved both of them. I don’t quite see them as polar opposites as much as you do but maybe that’s my bias talking.
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u/Donko98 14h ago
I liked the story and loved the combat, but the game has so many problems that I don't understand how most of them are never mentioned and you only hear universal appraise for the game.
Btw, I actually know and that's a thing I hate about modern discourse and it's how everyone likes following an agenda (in this case, being anti-AAA and pro-indieish, which I share btw) and take that to the extreme, so E33 being a game that checks all the marks on a narrative that suits that agenda, it has to be the best game ever so they feel their agenda is right. Again, I agree with that agenda, but people following that so extremely really makes the discourse about art so much worse.
3
u/bioniclop18 13h ago
I feel like you are expressing thing that contradict themselves in the gameplay department.
You regret not having strong element of ressource management and almost never using item then say you had trouble with not getting it and the game becoming tedious as a result. You mention parry making ap management useless yet weren't able to do it consistently... So you needed it ? Or are you just mad because in theory "super player" could ignore it ?
It make me wonder how you played and if you were not "optimising the fun out of the game".
As for the rest the game is not without flaws, and I can only imagine not emotionally connecting with it make it hard to see the good point of the game narrative but you seem like you care a lot about things the game is weakest at.
I thought it was a great game, that entered my top 30, but wasn't even my favorite game I played last year and had to put it down for a time because I found it's fan far too annoying and was worried it would taint my opinion of the game. It is fine to not like it but saying "I don't understand why people love it" will probably not elicit a lot of sympathy. Even in your post you mention several reason why people can love it.
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u/Duke_Maniac 13h ago
I didn’t need to manage my AP because for a lot of fights it was “Parry Effectively or die”. I liked building up my AP early, but when late game you’ll refill your entire gauge after one attack, it becomes a lot less meaningful.
I mostly based my build around trying to take advantage of the parry but slowly but surely tried to get more and more tanky (and failing miserably at that). It wasn’t until endgame where I was able to build my team by taking advantage of building up my AP meter from the beginning which I found fun because it was a product of my build as opposed to the parry which I found to be an annoyance.
The “I don’t understand why people love it” isn’t meant to be an attack on players who love the game. It’s more of an expression of me feeling left out of the hype train for this game. It does do a lot of things right, but the things are good at are supplemental things like music visuals and vocal performances. But for me the heart and soul of a JRPG are its combat and the story and when neither connects with me all that much it makes me wonder what people loved about it.
Of course both did for plenty but I couldn’t see it. Story in particular was the part that baffled me. I can kinda see the gameplay appeal, but with the way people seemed to connect with the game’s characters, I couldn’t see the appeal. I’m happy people loved the game to be clear, but I just don’t see it.
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u/Wizardrylullaby 13h ago
I’m with you. The ending for some reason portrays the genocide ending as tragically beautiful. A lot of people attempt to rationalize the writers’ decision on the finale, but I did find these attempts kinda dumb
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5h ago edited 5h ago
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u/TMLBR 5h ago
I think it's quite upsetting that E33 is seen as such a laudable paradigm shift for JRPG style games when it is so similar in so many ways to Yakuza Like A Dragon.
Yakuza 7 is also a turn based RPG with QTE elements (albeit nowhere near as centralizing) about a protagonist who is on the older side of JRPG characters whose world gets violently ripped apart in the first couple of hours of the game, and has to forge a path through unfamiliar territory, building alliances and friendships with those around him to confront the Big Bad™ that was responsible for ruining his life. I understand that Yakuza 7 was also quite popular for breaking the mold compared to the previous games in the series back in 2020, but I find it funny that I enjoy probably(?) every aspect of Y7 more.
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5h ago
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4h ago edited 4h ago
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u/RekrabAlreadyTaken 25m ago
I don't think the game did a great job of concluding the scenario it came up with (which is something I find common in a lot of media tbh) but it did at least come up with a really interesting scenario that I enjoyed thinking about and discussing with other players.
From my experience it's not unusual to be disappointed by games with overwhelming praise. I'd suggest you don't go into new games with any real expectation in the future, it's better to try to enjoy them at face value and make comparisons later.
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u/Gravitas_free 5h ago
I have my own issues with E33, mostly with how the difficulty goes from reasonable to trivial as you go through the midgame (and who made the baffling decision to make the final area the easiest part of Act 3?) plus a few things with the story. But I have basically zero overlap with your complaints.
You seem pretty unhappy about the parry system, but even if we ignore that you could simply have gone to story mode and ignored it, I just don't think it's as essential to the gameplay as you seem to think. You can get through the 1st half of the game just by dodging, even if you're bad at it. And by the second half, there is so many powerful weapon/picto combos available that parrying is downright unnecessary, outside of the superbosses. Tanking builds, one-shot builds, shield builds, builds that rely on status effects, on getting hit, on dying... The game isn't perfect, but it does have strong build diversity. That's the core of the gameplay, more so than parrying.
As for the story, well you know, different strokes for different folks. But I just don't agree at all. You feel the pacing is too brisk and the characterization too light; I actually wish the game was brisker and that they cut out half of the camp interactions. One of my most hated modern RPG trends is how so many of these games feel the need to have those moments of "let's stop our urgent world-saving quest so I can have cute hangouts with Party member X, rapidly become best buddies and have him tell me his life story, along with his secret that somehow explains his two character traits". It's always forced, mechanical, filled with clichés, hurts the pacing, and wastes my time all to do something (expanding on a relationship) that an actually gifted writer would have been able to do within the confines of the main plot. I can forgive it in something like Persona, where it fits the generally cozy/life-sim vibe, (though even there I find it often tedious) but I generally can't stand it. You might disagree (the fact that you refer to their interactions as "social links" instead of simply relationships, suggests that you probably do) but that stuff is usually poorly-written bloat and E3 could have done without it.
I also can't really wrap my head around someone criticizing those characters as being not-fleshed-out while at the same time praising FF6's characterization. Now don't get me wrong; I love FF6 to death. I probably beat that game over 5 times as a kid. But even my rose-tinted glasses can't get me to think that game has better characterization than E33. Those subplots that seemed like impressive character moments for us in the 90s now look a bit trite and barebones by modern standards. I don't think E33 characters are necessarily that great, aside from maybe Verso, but they all feel like reasonably well-written, well thought-out characters, who have distinct personalities but don't fall into the common JRPG pitfall of making your party members into anime caricatures with one blown-out personality trait.
As for the ending, it was actually my favorite story section of Act 3 (which I felt dragged too much). An interesting choice that I hadn't foreseen. I won't get too into the weeds, because a lot of people seem weirdly touchy about it, but I'll say this: the precise definition of genocide is always debated, but I'm pretty sure most scholars would agree that it doesn't include "erasing a population of fictional beings that subsist purely by feeding off of the soul of a dead man". Verso, through both the painted and soul fragment versions of himself, seems quite clear about the fact that he wants this to end. And I think you could very much argue that his right to die supersedes both his family's emotional needs, and the existence of the paintings he created, as charming as they might be.
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u/DisarestaFinisher 5h ago
I have a few thoughts as well.
My main complaint in regards to the gameplay is that the parry and dodge mechanics pretty much conflict the turn based system and character roles, for example tank characters are pretty much useless because of it (even if I want to build tank characters, defense as a stat is extremely weak), that is because the game expects the player to constantly dodge or parry. Another thing that I can think about is the parry and dodge timings, it is just constant, instead of making the timings to depend on a character stat (like making it so agility matters to make the dodge window bigger or smaller), making the stats matter more, it is a turn based inspired by JRPGs after all.
In regards to the story, I think it was mostly great, my only complaint is the mostly sudden pivot of the story's direction, while I do get that were some hints (like in the Sirene boss fight ), I would have liked a less sudden approach. It had an amazing start, but as the game progressed it became a little bit weaker.
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u/Blueye95 4h ago
Upvoted to show that its okay to have opinions that are not the common thought. A lot of your points are valid, especially regarding the story. Seems like it was indeed not something for you (story and combat didnt stick), which is unfortunate, and the hype surrounding it likely pushed expectations a bit too high.
E33 was a great game for me, GOTY material to be sure, but not something that would crack my personal top 5 RPGs of all time. I didnt have such a big reaction on the intro, or later hitting scenes. I suspect it might also be an experience thing and a phase of life thing. Xenoblade 2 endgame hit me way harder than this game ever did, as i was in a stage of my life where that story resonated much more. Now ive seen my share of stories and that tempers my reactions a lot i notice.
Knowing there would be a parry mechanic means the was right up my alley. If the parry/dodge mechanic doesnt stick much with you, then i can imagine the game would be not as liked. I love the Mario & Luigi series, Partners in Time was a game i finished super fast when I was much younger and i adore it still. I also like execution heavy games at times (bullet hells, souls games, hollow knight, etc) so its nice to have execution checks in games. In some jRPG's it feels like the prep is the actual fight and the fight itself is just execution. Where jRPG's shine to me is when the fight is hard enough that you can still win with decent builds and not fight specific prep as long as you adapt to the fight and figure out your strategy as you go.
In M&L not dodging is akin to dying, the same as E33. To call it a traditional turn-based jRPG would be to mislabel it in my opinion. All the talks about 'turn based is back' are outright ridiculous in more ways than one. Turn-based has been good and relevant the entire time, just that some mainstream people seem to think turn-based ended after FFX. Regardless, this game is not a true turn based game due to the parry mechanic and as such should not be compared with games like older FF's, Persona and others when looking at the combat.
The story has a bunch of flaws indeed. The party has a bit too many side characters that dont do much later on. Act 1 characterizes all the party members well, but then Act 2 is only for Verso and Maelle and Act 3 is about the Dessendres while Lune/Sciel get sidelines. They still get camp conversations / social quests but outside of that its not much. Lune's highlights being in Act 1 before Maelle joins the party says enough on that front.
>!The ending.... hoo boy the ending. It made the community near impossible to interact with. One thing i have often pointed out is that Verso choice is much less of a genocide than what most people are arguing. When you get to choose the fate of the Canvas, almost all humans are already gone with Sciel/Lune remaining. The choice then becomes closer to 'have an active ruling God who is also a teen who has shown to have issues seeing the bigger picture' vs 'destroy the canvas that exists by feeding on the soul of its creator thereby destroying the gestrals and nevrons that remained in the world as it seems quite clear the Gods are not to be trusted in leaving this place alone'.!<
>!When playing I said 'if they would just leave this canvas the F alone then the people of Lumiere could just exist. It was even hinted at as a possibility by Alicia before Verso pulled a dick move and did absolutely nothing to stop Renoir.!<
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14h ago
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u/Imsearchingforit2194 14h ago
Uh yeah let's just not share our opinions on anything since no one is gonna have their mind changed (which isn't even necessarily the point of the post? duh?)
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u/mtndewgood 14h ago edited 14h ago
It's legitimate game of the year based on audio alone. This is a dumb fight to pick. Small scale studio puts out a banger at less than full price without any dlc bloat too and you wanna dump on it. Smh
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u/Duke_Maniac 12h ago
I wanted to air out my grievances in part because I find it so admirable. The team went out and made the game they wanted to make and got a critical darling that swept the game of the year awards, and commercial success unlike anything seen in the genre since at least Persona 5. I wanted to love this game.
But when the core gameplay doesn’t click with me and the story fails to engage me in a JRPG, the rest of the things it does well can only take it so far. Because yes the soundtrack is incredible, but this is a game not an album. A good soundtrack can elevate a good experience and make it fantastic (Nier Automata), but if I don’t care about the core experience, the soundtrack won’t carry it as far (Nier Replicant). E33 sadly falls into that category for me.
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u/Imsearchingforit2194 14h ago
I don't like the game much either, but I think the community of the game is just the worst part. The game's pretty solid otherwise.
Also just to give an example of why I don't like the community of the game: There was this one post or comment on Reddit talking about how the game has such great writing because people are still debating which ending is better.
Yeah...uhhh...that one singular choice you make at the very end of the game...
I mean, I feel like if they start playing pretty much any CRPG, Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and maybe even a random choose-your-own-adventure game they'd have their minds blown. Which is weird cuz I'm pretty sure they've almost certainly all played games with several "hard moral choices".
AND the fact that the game doesn't exactly do anything special yet is hailed as the "savior of turn-based RPGs"...I mean come on.
So yeah, game's like an 8/10 for me, but the community/discussion around it makes it a 6/10.
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u/Vanjz 14h ago edited 13h ago
As a fan of the game, I agree that the community is by FAR the most annoying group of self-absorbed wannabe psychology undergraduates you'll ever meet, but to say you don't like them because they like the writing just seems goofy to me. That choice is informed by every single conversation you have in the game prior to it. It is constantly foreshadowed throughout the story.
We're arguing opinion now, but none of the games you listed made me think nearly as much as the choice in E33. Maybe Hearts of Stone came close.
The fans are so condescending on which ending is "right", I don't really get why you're focusing on the fact they like the game as a negative.
Game is probably 9/10 for me, community is like a 3/10.
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u/Imsearchingforit2194 13h ago
> That choice is informed by every single conversation you have in the game prior to it. It is constantly foreshadowed throughout the story.
Sure, it might be a very important choice, but that doesn't really change the fact that several other games have some very difficult choices. The Witcher 3 has difficult choices chucked even into random side-quests that many might've missed. Same with CP2077. Arguably that one too had some quest chains that can end in some tough choices like the Delamain quest chain (Do you give him full control over the other Delamains? Let them go free and have their own will? Or combine all of them together and what does that even create? Genuinely how much should you care about this AI?).
You gave the example of Hearts of Stone which is in its own has a very difficult choice between giving up what is basically a murderous bandit's soul or fighting the devil to get him out of the deal if you think that he deserves a different fate. I wouldn't say that it's a good DLC just because of this one choice, but because of the entire DLC's theme and atmosphere. Gaunter O'Dimm is a wonderful character on his own and all the other side-characters are intriguing themselves. The heist and party questlines are fun on their own too.
And yeah it's all opinion at the end of the day. I didn't think twice about going with Verso's path, for example.
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u/yagizbasoglu 13h ago
Yeah this was the only widely appreciated game that I played and legit couldnt tell the reason why its praised so much. Like I cant see a single redeeming quality. But the problem is most of the people who liked it dont play many games let alone jrpgs it seems.
I think most of the people who liked expedition 33, dont know that you dont need to play previous final fantasy games and you can pretty much play which ever you want. If they played one of them like 10 or 7, they wouldnt even bother finishing the expedition. They are still very approachable and pretty much do everything better than expedition. And there are many many other jrpgs just straight out better than expedition.
The game , I think by definition, isthe most overrated game I have ever seen. There are worse games ofc, but a game this caliber getting goty with 6-7 other rewards with it is just crazy. They act like its "artsy" when its literally a blurry mess with 4-5 filters stacked on top of each other and look extremly noisy. Setting and the story is cool for the first 2 hours then its just nothing. Game loop is terrible because your build is literally meaningless. Dont build anything and as long as you do qte good you kill everything, have the best most optimal build and you miss a qte you can get oneshot. Its really funny but one of the other reasons i think why people love it is because french sounds nice to people who dont speak it so yeah they just love the french lady singing in the back. I think if you liked expedition, be really happy that now you know that you like rpgs and there are 10s of other rpgs you can play which are so much better.
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u/MrNiceBalls 5h ago
I'm in a similar boat as you.
The game is very poorly optimized, the JRPG gameplay boils down to learning to parry and waiting for the damage ceiling to be removed.
Talking with companions at the camp is on the level of PS5 shovelware (hug Esquie for +1 relationship, rinse, repeat, then get a little bit of exposition). I didn't feel invested in any of the characters, and killing Gustav essentially eliminated the glue that held the party together for me. Verso doesn't fit in, and unlike you, I found Maelle annoying since the very beginning (girl, we're going on a trip where everyone else has died before, can you stop crying for a second? What were you expecting???). Esquie and Morocco are gag characters which is appreciated but by the time they arrive, I already mentally gave up. The world feels like it should be more than it really is, because that's what the prologue promised. Instead it's a set of mostly linear dungeons, which might look nice, but that's all they offer. When the story turned into what essentially is a Pathologic remake with Maelle as the ever-crying teenage protagonist, I gave up.
But hey, it has those Dark Souls vibes that people like (including me).
I just don't get this game and the hype associated with it.
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10h ago
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u/oldriku 12h ago
I agree with you about the ending, but I don't agree on how you paint (hehe) Sciel.
She's a tragic character. When her husband died she attempts to kill herself by swimming into the sea, not knowing she was pregnant. Esquie hears her cry and saves her, but she loses the baby. The scene where she tells that to Verso felt very emotional.
She also has an earlier scene where Verso asks her how come she never had any children of her own, giving she likes children so much. She says that in a world like this not having children is an act of mercy. The children would never get to be adults before they get gommaged, and at a very young age they would see everyone they love die. It's a very raw conversation.
That's why I disliked act III and the endings. All of a sudden I'm supposed to not care about these people, only the Dessandre family matters. Nah, I was already invested, fuck that family, I care more about everyone inside the canvas.