This contains Major Spoilers for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s story.

Table of Contents: Part 1: Thoughts on Clair Obscur, Part 2: WMG on Clair Obscur, and Part 3: Final Thoughts.

I was eager to give this game a 10 / 10. The artistic work of all the designs, amazing soundtrack, the gameplay, the characters, the mystery, and the tone all the way up until the Paintress dungeon was amazing. The actual plot twist though? It felt like the gravity of the story’s tone and earlier themes fell apart. I think there’s a definite tonal clash from the early parts of the game to the latter parts.

The early parts present a brutal, insane world where people keep giving themselves up for sacrifice in the hopes of changing the world for the better. The artistic depictions of the dungeons always felt fresh; with new bizarro and intriguing aspects to witness. The designs of the characters and blood splatter really helped to sell this too. It felt so thrilling for me to finally play a game with beautifully stunning graphics and amazing gameplay that let you go on a bizarro, nightmare-fuel themed adventure with serious stakes. It reminded me of Strange Journey on the DS, but better in many respects due to the better developed cast of characters with their quirks, introspections on the brutal adventure, and the urgency of the mission. Everything has stakes and urgency in a life-or-death / do-or-die struggle where they have to make it work or all the sacrifices will be for nothing. A party member being brutally killed off early helped set the stage and the mystery of Verso’s entry seemed to be well-done to me. Exotic, intricate worlds; a brutal reality that needs to be changed; and a well-developed cast of characters that I could root for…

Then… the Paintress dungeon happens. We’re given a short repeat of all the previous story dungeons in miniature form, and after we beat the Paintress… that plot twist happens. None of it is real because it’s a painted world in a fake reality, Maelle isn’t actually Maelle but the real Alicia (the fact she is given two different childhood backgrounds felt convoluted, even if the foreshadowing was done well), Fake Alicia stops existing after handing Verso the letter and seems to just drop out of the plot entirely, and the stakes go from a brutal and heartless reality where humanity is trying to survive into… a story about a family’s poor ability to cope with grief.

The foreshadowing was well-done, the characters are well-developed, Maelle’s two backstories are explained in-depth, and it still has cool moments… but… it fell apart for me in some major ways. The stakes effectively no longer matter and were never as important as how the early parts of the story made it seem, the brutal and heartless world is reduced to a maladaptive family squabble, and what really killed it for me is that Lune and Sciel went from really well-written characters into… not even questioning Maelle about their reality, all their friends and family, and every aspect of the life they knew just being… chess pieces over a family squabble. Only Verso seems to actually react appropriately to it or even consider the implications. There’s no sense of surrealness or dumbfounded confusion over Maelle, a girl they knew all their lives, not actually being who she says she is since her very birth and actually just being — what is to them — a Goddess pretending to be one of them after her memories were wiped from the vile Goddess who slowly breaks their world, each and every year. The lives of their loved ones also don’t have any value or finality and there’s no attempt to address this in the story. Never mind the fact that Sciel and Lune are still willing to work with Verso, despite the fact he lied to them all in the hopes of killing everything because he wanted to be free of immortality and being the manipulated toy of the Dessendre family. Yet, as Verso, you can betray their trust again. All the focus is on Maelle and Verso’s growing discord, while the rest of the cast become glorified cheerleaders.

Without going into details… I can definitely see the inspirations from a certain Final Fantasy that they mentioned. I honestly didn’t like the twist after the Paintress and the subsequent final dungeon being… Lumiere again. So, start at Lumiere, then have a dungeon in which the Paintress makes a copy of Lumiere, and the final dungeon is a dark, broken and distorted Lumiere. No more cool, bizarro artistic depictions of macabre beauty and strangeness… just Lumiere yet again for the third time. As for the ending… I liked Verso’s ending, and having watched Maelle’s ending on Youtube made me like Verso’s ending even more. Overall, I really like the game and it isn’t “ruined” for me… it’s just… I really don’t like how a brutal civilizational struggle for existence was undone by this plot twist and the subsequent narrative focus on a family poorly handling their grief. The DS game Strange Journey had pretty forgettable endings, and this one is definitely more memorable, but… it didn’t undo its own worldbuilding like this game did. Exotic and intricate layers in this game’s worldbuilding having hiccups can be explained away as “the real Verso probably didn’t think that far as a kid” or “Renoir and Aline created plot holes in real Verso’s world due to their disagreements creating the Fracture” instead of an intriguing mystery or something to think about in terms of the game’s earlier multi-faceted and layered worldbuilding.

The game is definitely worth playing and I’d highly recommend it to anybody, but insofar as the story’s latter-half and the tone shift… it was a letdown for me. I was hoping the ethical dilemma could have maybe related to humanity’s future and give more weight to the sense of loss such as after losing the Expedition and then Gustave’s brutal death. I suppose the best way to summarize it is that… it felt like the game could have been more, if they went in a slightly different direction.