malvasia bianca

I guess my primary point of comparison for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the Paper Mario series. They’re very different games in many ways, but Clair Obscur really leans into its combat, so I have to start there when thinking about the game. And that has me looking for other turn-based RPGs that are very heavily dependent on button press timing for both your attacks and defenses; Paper Mario is where I end up. (And I apologize in advance if I get Paper Mario details wrong below, it’s been a little while since I’ve played a game in that series.)

That combat plays out very differently in the two games, though, because Clair Obscur is much more maximalist than Paper Mario. Or, alternatively, Paper Mario is much more minimalist than Clair Obscur; that’s equally true, both of them are decently far from what I think of as the JRPG norm.

For example, in Paper Mario, your characters are different, sure, but the same basic ingredients get reused across characters. Whereas, when I would occasionally watch Liesl play Clair Obscur before I’d started out the game myself, I would be genuinely confused trying to figure out what the different characters were doing, both because their core mechanics were quite different from each other and because those differences didn’t map cleanly to class expectations from other RPGs I’ve played before. (I suspect that, if I’d played a wider range of JRPGs, there would be some other game or series that’s a clear point of comparison here, I think Steve pointed at such a a game in our VGHVI discussion but I can’t remember which one.)

On a similar note, the number of potential moves that characters can unlock and the number of badges that are available are just a lot larger in Clair Obscur than in Paper Mario. For the size of the basic move set, it’s more that Paper Mario is minimal whereas Clair Obscur is more normal. For badges, though, Paper Mario has a decent number of available. In Clair Obscur, the concept of badges gets split into pictos and and luminas, and while some of them are tweaking sliders in various relatively straightforward ways, others of them combine (especially paired with your characters’ moves and status-related possibilities) to let you really lean in on a whole range of synergies if that’s your thing.

As another point of comparison, numbers in Paper Mario are genuinely minimal (attacks cause small single-digit numbers of damage, for example), whereas Clair Obscur has a “number go up” design that’s much more familiar from other JRPGs, and honestly that’s a lot less extreme than many of them. On the whole, this makes Clair Obscur feel less elegant / special than Paper Mario to me; but, on the other hand, Clair Obscur to some extent ends up in a somewhat similar-feeling place because, in both games, much of the time you can protect perfectly if you’re good enough with your button presses. With Paper Mario, this is because a combination of small numbers, buffs from badges, and extra protection from perfect defensive button timing frequently reduces the damage to zero; in Clair Obscur, this is simply built into the parry / dodge mechanic.

Part of me thinks the lack of access to perfect dodges makes Paper Mario more interesting, because you it adds the goal of managing your build to make it possible to get out of battles in the same state as you came in almost all of the time; whereas in Clair Obscur you just have to get good at button pressing. But, with Clair Obscur, there’s enough button pressing and enough enemy patterns that getting good is interestingly tricky in its own right. And it also adds in the lure of “I’m probably underleveled for that enemy, but if I get my button presses just right, maybe I can beat it anyways”. (Which the game more or less makes explicit with the occasional special Mime enemies.)

The other big point of comparison that I have for Clair Obscur is Soulslikes. With the comparison to Paper Mario, I thought that Clair Obscur was playing around with similar ideas in interesting ways. With the Soulslike comparison, though, my attitude is much less favorable: it feels to me like Clair Obscur is copying Soulslikes in ways that are actively harmful.

To be specific, I think the Soulslike approach to leveling up both characters and weapons is a bad fit for Clair Obscur. Much of Clair Obscur is about enabling you to play around with archetypes and synergies: I spent a lot of the first act of the game playing around with fire attacks and applying burn, for example, with Maelle in particular keying off of that. So I’d select characters’ moves with that in mind, I’d select pictos / luminas with that in mind, etc. And of course I’d select weapons with that in mind; in fact, that early emphasis on burn was suggested by an early weapon that Maelle acquired.

But there are a lot of possible synergies out there! So you don’t want to be locked into just one: it’s fun to try out different synergies, and as you get to understand the game better and unlock more possible moves / luminas, the set of possible synergies increases. (There’s this early picto that you get that kills the character equipping it at the start of the battle; clearly useless when you get it, but sure enough, two thirds of the way through the game I ended up with a set of luminas that made that an entirely plausible approach.) And with moves, pictos, and luminas, that works great: you can change them all you want. (Admittedly a little less so with moves than with the other options, but it’s largely true even there, because you’ll end up unlocking many more moves than you can have equipped at any one time, and by the end of the game you’ll have almost all of your moves unlocked.)

With weapons, though, that’s absolutely not true, for two separate reasons. One reason is that, to unlock all of a weapon’s possibilities, you need to level it up, and to do that, you need to use a relatively rare item. That item isn’t so rare that it’s difficult to level up one weapon per character; but leveling up even two weapons per character is not something that you would do lightly. It’s not quite that simple, because you’ll acquire more-leveled-up versions of weapons you already have as you progress through the game, but still, it adds friction to experimentation.

And the second is that each weapon’s strength scales with two of your character attributes; so, if you lean into that by leveling up unequally, then that discourages you from experimenting with other weapons that don’t scale along the same attributes. You do have decently generous access to an item that let you respec, so neither of these is a huge problem if you want to change weapons occasionally, but they are real barriers for frequent experimentation, and Clair Obscur feels like the sort of game that should support experimentation. (To be specific, I think the approach to weapon variety and upgrading that Veilguard took would have been a better fit for Clair Obscur.)

Continuing on the character attribute note: I also don’t particularly like the way Clair Obscur has you choose three attributes to increase every time you level up. Something like that is necessary if you’ve got attribute-based weapon scaling, but in a version without weapon scaling, I don’t think that’s an interesting choice. (And it’s not interesting with weapons scaling, either, even though it is necessary; it’s arguably less interesting there, because weapons scaling makes your attack attribute unimportant.) I’d rather have the game either automatically pick attributes to bump up each time you level up or else give you a smaller number of much more distinct choices, as Paper Mario does.

Fortunately, Clair Obscur doesn’t go too far down the Soulslike route in harmful ways. Clair Obscur’s use of flasks works just fine; respawning enemies when you rest is also fine, and is much lower stakes in Clair Obscur than in Soulslike games, since you’re just not on edge and worried about dying as much. I don’t like corpse runs, so I’m happy that Clair Obscur doesn’t have them. (Perhaps because dying isn’t a particularly frequent occurrence.)

(Tangentially related to the above: one unusual choice that the game I played before Clair Obscur, Clair Obscur, and the game I’m currently playing have in common is that there aren’t any resources that you run out of in normal gameplay: in all three games, your magic points can replenish regularly during combat, and you can use magic to heal, so you don’t run out of either of hit points either in normal combat. (In Yakuza: Like a Dragon, MP only replenishes for some characters, but those characters are the healers, and you don’t need magical attacks for normal combat.) Not sure if this is a trend now in RPGs or if this is just a coincidence, but I (mostly) approve of the removal of item management / enforced rests.)

While I’m in a complaining mood, there are several other nits that I have about the game. Environments felt gratuitously difficult to orient in: I was constantly coming out of an battle and needing to look again around the room to make sure that I knew which passage I came in via. Several of the dungeons are a little on the long side; I get that it’s a game that takes joy in fighting, but still. The third act was structured oddly: you could go straight to the finale if you wanted, the loyalty quests had significantly different level requirements, the fact that Maelle’s loyalty quest was so much longer than the others’. For much of the game, I would have included the existence of two kinds of parrying on this list of nits, but once I got far enough in the game, I could see how the harder version of parrying opened up interesting gameplay possibilities, so now I’m on board with that.

But, honestly: none of those nits really matter? I like the reappearance of Paper Mario-style combat. I like the maximalism. I like the variety among characters. I like the way the game encourages you to experiment, to try out different combos. (I certainly wasn’t expecting Lune to suddenly turn from a solid healer to a character who could keep my whole party healed while unleashing my party’s best attack every second or third turn!) I like the frenchness of the game. I like how odd Esquie is. I like the game’s world. I’m honestly not sure what I think about the overarching plot, but at the very least I liked it enough for it to keep me moving along.

I wouldn’t want a game without warts; I want a game to be doing lots of things well, but also I want a game to combine that with having a clear personality. And Clair Obscur does a quite good job at both halves of that.