--cries in fench--
this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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Narratively it goes off the rails and it has some pacing and balance issues as well, but it's still a great game.
And how refreshing is it to see a great looking RPG that doesn't feel the need to be an action game? Maybe they can convince Square to stop making crappy button mashers and go back to making good to great turn based games for all those cool combat animations.
Been slowly going through the game over the last 3 weeks or so and my fucking god, this game is an absolute masterpiece.
I'm a huge fan of turn based RPGs so I'm biased, but everything about this game is just amazing. Music is insanely good (almost at Nier levels of good IMO) the combat is satisfying and challenging at the same time, the voice acting is extremely well done (Andy Serkis does one of the villains) and the graphics and cut scenes are gorgeous, I read that they used mo-cap and had the actors actually playing their scenes together so it feels much more natural as opposed to one person doing their part and then piecing it all together afterwards.
The story is really well done so far, I'm pretty sure I'm somewhere near the end of act 2 (level 40ish across my team) and the writing for the characters is top tier. Funny banter with your team and NPCs at times but lots of emotional moments, it's been a long time since something tugged on my heartstrings the way this game has been able to so far.
Everytime I play it, I have multiple moments of happiness, some sad moments and some laughs in a couple hour gaming session. I seriously can't recommend this game enough. Reading my post back makes me sound like a paid bot but I haven't been this excited about a new game since I found Factorio back in 2020. Before that would've been Fallout New Vegas back in 2010.
Masterpiece of a game and I both can't fucking wait to beat it and see how the story ends, while also dreading that moment at the same time. It's (hopefully) gonna be like finishing a really good TV or book series and realizing there's no more story in that universe. Bittersweet knowing you won't get more of the characters and world you came to love over time. (Just finished Peter F Hamilton's Commonwealth books, 7 in total and I'm super sad there aren't any more stories to be told in that fascinating universe. I'm hoping to feel the same way after I beat this game)
Edit: Just to add some of my personal gripes so I'm not solely jerking the game off, some of the optional mini-bosses are annoying af, came across one that has a gimmick of needing to be parried constantly to kill it, and one of its attacks is an 8 hit combo. If you miss even one parry, then you don't get the counter attack at the end, which means you forfeit all damage for that turn.
Alternatively, you can cheese it by building your characters for speed or using a pictos (permanent buff that slightly alters how each character plays slightly essentially) that guarantees the equipped character gets a turn before the enemy does. If you just try to dodge, then the enemy always gets an extra turn, leaving you no opportunity to deal damage. Basically, you either find a way to guarantee your 3 teammates get to attack first and finish it off, or weaken it enough that you only need a couple of good parries, or you parry it to death from full health. You lose otherwise. The parry timing in this game is quite unforgiving (but satisfying af, ngl). I ended up skipping that mini-boss after 5 tries cause I felt myself getting mad and that just makes me play worse.
Some of the optional platforming sections and minigames for getting extra skins are also insanely frustrating and take a lot of repetition to figure out. You also can't manually restart a fight, which is really annoying when you're trying to grind out a boss/miniboss cause sometimes you just lose if you don't dodge/parry certain attacks from certain strong enemies. Forces you to just sit and wait until your whole team dies rather than being able to restart right away.
And from ex-ubisoft devs no less; the undisputed king of mediocrity. It's a testament to how utterly crushing the weight of shareholder influence and middle management bloat is on the people working there. Creativity cannot flourish within a publicly owned company that only seeks profit and nothing more.
Whenever I hear the Ubisoft narrative I feel nothing but boiling wrath for all the people who chose to not play the two Prince of Persia 2D platformers they made. I am thoroughly bored of their open world fare, but it's astonishing how reliably their most creative, better games are their worst performers.
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within.
Hands down best action adventure ever.
That combat was soo smooth and satisfying.
I want to replay it every year, but it hangs shortly after start on my Steam Deck.
Same here, I am in love with that game and I can’t stop listening to the 8h soundtrack or watch YouTube reactions videos of streamers crying in front of it.
Being French probably doesn’t help me from loving it… I finished the story 4 days ago and instantly reloaded my save to explore everything in the end game, unlocking every picto, every skills and Steam achievements.
Those Gestral beach mini games are annoying on purpose as they are a reference to final fantasy mini games. The platform parts are hopefully not very present, and I feel lucky to have killed that chromatic boss you’re talking about on the third try with full parry/counter.
Some few/nice advices, spoiler free but I’ll tag them anyway:
Tap for spoiler
Grosse tête (Big head) is another boss with tons of attacks, but easier (psa: kill it with Monoco in your team).
Once you can, go see the dragon flying in the sky (the serpenphare, snake + light house) and try to do a "Zelda TOTK" by riding it.
Do not go to the final part of the story with a too strong party, around level 60 would be my maximum. And do not equip the picto you get for finishing act 2. Otherwise you’ll be too strong and miss very cool content on some story boss fights.
After the story is done you can load the auto save and build a totally broken team to destroy everything. This is also how you can access the NG+ option.
I keep listening to Lumière over and over, it's such a good song as is the rest of the soundtrack! I was just telling my brother the last night that I like that it's a French game, its exposed me to a culture I don't usually get to appreciate.
The French inspiration throughout the game is a nice change from the usual English/Japanese inspired RPGs IMO, I especially like how Esquie refers to Francois as franfran with a French accent! (Although everything about Esquie is awesome tbh).
The French swear words are a nice touch as well, although I have to ask, is tabarnak not a thing in France? If not, what's the equivalent in France? I only know that word because I'm a Habs fan and a lot of them frequently use that word in reddit game day threads when they're playing like shit haha.
I've heard Quebecois French and France French (wording? sorry) is a fair bit different, but I don't speak the language so I only have an outsiders level of knowledge at best.
Ha that makes them a bit more palatable but they're still really annoying just like a lot of those old FF minigames were. Thank god for save states!
Thanks for the tips!
Lumière, Alicia, déchirer la toile, une vie à s’aimer… I have so much little green hearts 💚 next to Clair Obcur titles on my Spotify.
I agree that it is very refreshing to see French inspiration, we are not very used to that in video games and they embraced it to the joke level. The baguette outfit were, quote from Guillaume Broche (CEO & Art director, creator of the project): "A joke we had on our internal discord and it went too far".
Clair Obscur is an art style, the game takes place in the Belle époque (late 1800s early 1900s) and you can see plenty of references to that time, for example the pattern on the robe of the first flower seller in Lumière, just after the red and white tree.
This time period is never explored in games so that is also very cool to see.
Esquie is the best friend indeed, and he has a perfect French as the voice actor for English and French is the same. But all voice actors are amazing, English and French, it’s funny that you can hear the English ones struggling a bit with the French swearing (they tend to say "poutain" instead of "putain").
And no, no Tabarnak, this is exclusive from Quebec and very much not a thing in France (or any European French speaking country). It doesn’t really have an equivalent as they use it for various emotions. I’d say it’s the Quebec F word, so the French P word (putain).
The game was made by French from France, so no Belgian or Swiss specific French language, only the one from continental France.
It shows after you meet François, in both languages Esquie says:
- Ahahah François you got smashed
- Ahahah François qu’est-ce que tu as pris cher.
"Prendre cher" is very very French street language and means something like "pay dearly" but always in a bad way. You got hurt doing something stupid? Tu as pris cher.
It started from the city of Lyon I think and like plenty of French slang has Arabic influence, this one being the word "Cheh".
Cheh is a Moroccan (and probably Algerian) onomatopoeia for "serves you right", so if I hurt myself being silly, I will hear a little and discreet "cheh" from my Moroccan wife in the other room. One magical onomatopoeia to say "I told you so, that serves you well".
For French language differences, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Monaco and Switzerland are very close and we can understand each other without strong complications. Same goes with Northern Africa and most of Africa. It’s mostly an accent change and most vocabulary stays the same.
It gets a little bit difficult with the Caribbean French and other far away islands as they often use their own local language mixed with French.
Then you have the final boss, the endgame, Québécois. Oh Canada… You have strong accent + different vocabulary + slang. Dudes from Quebec HAS to make efforts to be understood in France (or Switzerland or whatever) cause we won’t understand them if they don’t 😁
Maybe we could with a little training, but as a famous languages school said in an add: "Time to learn French, because they won’t learn English"
I am considering picking up the game when it's on sale, and you seem like a good person to ask: Is it better to play the game in french or in english, I'm fluent in both so I don't have a preference.
The final version of the script was in french. I can try to find the interview if you want. Basically, the lead writer of the narrative has English as her first language, but the co-writer of the script is french (as is the studio at large). The script went back and forth between English and French multiple times during development, but the final script ended up being in French.
Performance capture was done by the french actors, but speaking English (for motion/facial capture), so technically both languages are dubs, and neither has perfect lip synch.
Both casts are absolutely great. I prefer some voices in English and some in French. However, there are absolutely some parts of the script where it's obvious it was written in French, with wordplay or double meanings that don't translate to English.
Did that help?
Yes! Thank you, I'll probably play it in french, in that case.
It’s a hard one, both are very good and I will do both (first playthrough in French, new game+ in English).
We don’t really know which language is the original one. Plenty would think it is French but the main writer doesn’t speak French and the motion capture for the lip sync was apparently made for English.
But the creator won’t answer on that question, when asked on a French livestream he said "I’ll let you decide which language is the OG one 🤷🏻♂️"
So, 🤷🏻♂️
Insert why not both meme here
3 weeks and ~90 hours in. Currently speedrunning new game+ to get that level 99 achievement. After 90 ish it's pretty slow.
I feel the same! The music in particular is outstanding. It’s a truly beautiful game
Wow mister that's a gotta threes
Feels like the GOTY frontrunner at this point, as it seems to have edged out KCD2 in the press. Amazing achievement for a fresh studio.
Death Stranding 2 and Hades 2 (if it comes out this year) are other possibilities.
Last time a game was in the zeitgeist to this extent was BG3, and we all know how that went. Only thing going against E33 at this point is that the Game Awards are a long time off and recency bias/forgetting about it tends to have an impact.
I sincerely hope it does sweep the awards, not only is the game phenomenal but it would also send a very positive message to the industry.
Who knows though, people love Kojima and if Death Stranding 2 is slightly more approachable than the first it might put up a good fight.
I’m not too worried about that, Elden Ring was a February game.
Breath of the Wilds was also an early year release GotY winner
Historically, Game of the Years have always been either in the first quarter, or the last quarter.
You know, a few weeks back i looked at all the GotY nominations by year, and as long as an RPG was nominated, it won. So Im thinking COE33 has it in the bag, going by the trend, unless a separate banger of an RPG comes out.
I think Astro Bot pokes a hole in that, unless you're talking about a specific award?
Hmm, i guess i did miss ReFantazio from those nominations, youre right. I dont think ive seen anything of that game, so possibly thats why i glossed over it.
Also I refuse to acknowledge the Elden Ring DLC as a nomination. Also the FF remake is a bit of an odd situation as I also refuse to acknowledge that as a new game as well, but it very clearly is.
Probably my favorite game, and I've played a lot of games
i just started streaming this game today after avoiding nearly everything about it, and WOW!! so good already! something this good only comes out once every 5 or 10 years, assuming it keeps up at the same quality of everything I've seen so far. I'm only 4 hours in but very impressed by basically every category you can look at a game. and the entire premise being a hyper focused allegory for mortality itself that we all face is very clever, even if very bleak. i can't wait to see where this game goes! if you wanna watch me on the expedition, hit up https://www.youtube.com/@crustyoldhuman https://www.twitch.tv/crustyoldhuman
Hey Baldur's Gate 3 only came out 2 years ago! I know what you mean though. It's rare when you play something that feels effortless and you want to keep playing it because it's that good. This game definitely had that! I luckily saw the trailer last fall and fell for it then. I didn't want to get my hopes up with how things are these days but I gave it a shot and was my first day one release game in over a year I think. Took the day off and I was soo happy I did.
i wasn't interested in baldurs gate. I'm very picky about fantasy settings, but expedition 33 has such a great premise I was all in from the intro onward
I can't wait to play, but I refuse to buy a digital copy. Physical copies are impossible to find!