Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

[reef iron]

||and the third sister - maelle?||

[exotic ember]

Act 2 || Sirene || || This boss fight is GORGEOUS! Absolutely enchanting ||

These levels be beefy

[shell minnow]

im glad argent started playing this game so there's actually things I can click on in here 🙏

Act 1 ||I just finished up Flying Waters and did the camp scene at the end of that zone||

[nova temple]

But now you are dangerous to me!

[shell minnow]

Woooo

[nova temple]

Gonna need to start putting zone names or something

As separate tags

[exotic ember]

Act 2 || Sirene Boss || || Dang, the jump counter killed on the first part of the final act attack so I didn’t get to see the whole sequence 😭 ||

[exotic ember]

Act 2 || Post Sirene and Visages || || Oh boy these spending time with people cutscenes are getting quite interesting. Fading man and woman talking about artists. Verso's parents were artists. Verso just said "Death is not necessarily final". Between that and all the Maelle stuff and the collector + the collector's female counterpart + alicia, I can't help but think that the collector and the other one are Verso and Maelle/Alicia's parents in some way still. Like a different version, like Maelle being another version of Alicia maybe? Reincarnation stuff? Ugh I need to keep going. So curious

Oh wait continuing the conversation Verso is just like "Gustave lives on in other ways, right".||

[scarlet trout]

Endgame max relationship with ||maelle|| || VERSO WHAT THE HECK||

[analog tiger]

as above ||oh no||

||I'm afraid to know what that entails ||

||what's the max relationship level number?||

[scarlet trout]

||6 or 7||

Also I think that dungeon took me 3 hours to get through

At least 2+

[analog tiger]

Act 2 all ||last dungeon of act 2?||

[scarlet trout]

Nope an optional one

It was just very long lol

[exotic ember]

Act 2 || After both axons || || Post camp cutscene || || Hmmmm with the bit about Verso's parents being artists + this cutscene, I wonder if Verso's mother is the paintress ||

[exotic ember]

I feel like each level takes me a few hours haha

[scarlet trout]

This one just had a lot of really long fights. Like it took me 7 minutes to fight the merchant

[analog tiger]

Act 2 all ||last dungeon of act 2 took me like 5h lmao, had to do it in two sessions||

[scarlet trout]

Oh yeah that one was very long

[exotic ember]

Act 2 || Post axons || || Went back to gestral village for lumina material per suggestion here. Decided to go around and do some overworld fights to collect some feet. And uhh... wow these early enemies get deleted now ||

Act 2 || Post axons || || I must not get distracted by feet and the overworld map. I must PROGRESS ||

[reef iron]

act 2 ||in the monolith|| ||so it sounds like the third sibling died....||

||maybe the paintress is their attempt at resurrecting their dead sister/daughter?||

act 2 ||inside monolith|| ||ohhhhhhhh i think their mom didddd somethinggggggg||

||also could go back to the paintress is mom theory and she tried to paint the dead daughter back to life? ||

act 2 ||inside monolith|| ||i wonder if maelle is getting these senses and memories and stuff not just because she's a relative of the paintress but also a creation? hmmm||

||really exciting to start getting little pieces of info, just enough to stoke the imagination||

[exotic ember]

Act 2 || Monolith || || STARTING THIS 👀 ||

[analog tiger]

Act 2 ||Inside the Monolith|| ||I'm not adding reactions but I'm watching intently 👀 ||

[exotic ember]

Act 2 || Inside the Monolith || || Wow is this pretty ||

I will not be clicking on any spoilers for this level until after I complete it

[reef iron]

act 2 ||inside monolith|| ||NOOOOOOOOOOOOO I HAVE TO DEAL WITH THE EFFING CERAMIC CHEVALIERES AGAIN||

[rancid vessel]

Act 2 ||Visages|| ||That was a neat moment from Sciel there at the end. Would have liked if I had a little more character context to her relationship with "masks".
I did end up faffing around for a while so one Axon is about it for today.
On the bright side, my verso build is absolute cracked. Basically it totally focuses on his basic attack, so there's a lot going on there with various buffs I get for doing so, then getting a second turn to demolish the enemy with a high powered move, because I'm getting so much AP even his True Break move, which is the one I use the most, is no problem whatsoever. ||

[exotic ember]

Act 2 || Inside the Monolith || || Alright so we're going to retrace the journey to get here basically. Very neat ||

[reef iron]

act 2 ||inside monolith|| ||okay new worst enemy ever and that's the obscurs. die||

[exotic ember]

Act 2 || Inside the Monolith || || The fact that there's still an act 3 after this is wild. So curious where this is all going. This level being a compilation of the journey so far makes it really feel like a big climactic moment ||

[reef iron]

act 2 general ||oh my goddddddddddd i just saw that sciel's basic gradient attack is called shadow bringer 😭||

act 2 ||inside monolith|| ||oh my god.... i found it.... the clair obscur||

[exotic ember]

Act 2 || Inside the monolith || || This merchant is really giving me trouble lmfao

edit: finally got em
edit 2: And it's a pictos I would never use ||

[reef iron]

act 2 ||end of inside the monolith|| ||wow it is... SO frustrating that renoir's "disappear a member of the party" timing is different than what it was before 🙄 this is going to take me multiple tries but ONLY for that timing. frustrating as hell||

||oh yeah this is a terrible boss experience. the full cutscene replay, the longest walk in the world to get back to it||

[reef iron]

||ok got him||

||absolutely did NOT figure out the timing for the disappearing move, just got lucky and he only did it once||

act 2 ||monolith peak|| ||you're kidding me that there's a whole other areaaaaaaaaaa||

[reef iron]

act 2 ||monolith peak final boss|| ||FINALLYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY||

[reef iron]

act 2 ||epilogue|| ||?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????||

[reef iron]

act 3 ||????????????????||

okay time for bed

[analog tiger]

act 3 ||RIGHT?||

[fallow geode]

new patch
anyone found the patch notes?

[analog tiger]

huh

didn't update here

[hollow ruin]

We have patched a bug in NG+ where players would be unable to progress their battle with the boss at the end of Stone Wave Cliffs.

We have put this live on Steam. Other platforms will follow in our larger hotfix update soon, as they require additional verification.

We are still working on a variety of fixes and optimisations, but were able to quickly get this live on Steam before the weekend. Stay tuned for further updates next week on upcoming patches.

Tomorrow comes.

(re: "additional verification" - I'm guessing console platforms require compliance certification, which is likely why Sandfall will be clumping various small hotfixes together instead of pushing them out piecemeal like they do on Steam)

(either that, or they do just need to double-check if they work properly and the QA team is currently on break)

[analog tiger]

https://bsky.app/profile/johnxuandou.bsky.social/post/3lo6byapyak2j

JohnXuandou (@johnxuandou.bsky.social)

It is now Bandcamp Friday, my dudes. During Bandcamp Friday, all platform fees are waived and artists receive 100% of the payment for purchases made on the platform. Any choice is a good choice, however, how about the Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 soundtrack?

lacedrecords.bandcamp.com/album/clair-...

Bluesky · May 2, 2025, 7:20 AM

[shell minnow]

I can't say much about the story yet but it's interesting how much this game feels like so many other things that it also feels so uniquely like its own thing

It's wild how I can be like "yeah this game kind of feels like a Dark Souls, Persona JRPG with BioShock Infinite and Nier vibes meet Forspoken's particle effects" and yeah

[analog tiger]

my points of reference are different but same

mainly Lost Odyssey, FF7, FF8, Dark Souls and (this one is plot spoilers for all of the game pretty much though not necessarily directly) ||Eternal Sonata||

I'm genuinely curious if the devs played ||Eternal Sonata|| and it's intentional because that's a pretty deep cut

[reef iron]

also at the end of act 2 there is where I finally decided to try parrying and actually it went very well

guess I have learned the timings in this game

[analog tiger]

man.

Act 3 big spoilers ||being a family of painters and teaching your children to paint in this world hits a bit different lmao||

[hollow ruin]

aight, let's see if i can actually meaningfully progress the plot today

those act 3 spoilers are calling to me

act 2 ||visages|| ||I remember Verso saying it'd safer to go to one axon before another, but i genuinely do not remember which one he said we should do first at this point, so visages it is||

same ||ngl, reminds me of that one are in Final Shape with all the faces 🤔 ||

||(real "guy who only watched Boss Baby" moment on my part, i imagine)||

||oh i am vibing with whatever's going on in this area||

act 2 ||visages|| ||...well. that sure is. something.||

[exotic ember]

Going to try to see if I can finish act 2 before leaving for my anniversary trip today

[nova temple]

me, at work, still in act 1

[exotic ember]

Act 2 || Inside the Monolith || || My gf just wondered what if the paintress is killing everyone else to give their years of life to verso, Renoir, and Alicia 👀 Interesting theory I think. Prompted after I was saying I think the paintress may be verso and Alicia’s mother ||

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||visages|| ||lemme guess, the chromatic ramasseur will keep attacking until i parry an entire combo?||

[exotic ember]

Wow so I have 26 hours on the PS5 save according to the in game save’s game time tracking. And on the PC save I had around 15 hours on the save (19 hours in game according to steam).

All in a week. That’s absurd

[analog tiger]

if you want a tip about that (act 2 ||visages||) ||you can dodge or tank the attacks and parry the mortal hit||

||I found it way easier than trying to parry the full combo||

I have a pretty alright playtime

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||visages|| ||interesting. the hidden door leads to a child's room, and the music track you get there is called verso. so like, obviously verso's childhood room?||

||not much in it, ngl, bro only had a toy train to play with 😔 ||

||OMG I WANT||

||...but also, my theory of, gestrals and esquie are toys that the paintress brought to life may be back on.||

||if esquie, gestrals, etc etc were verso's childhood toys that the paintress brought to life during the fracture, it'd explain why monoco feels like he's always known verso.||

[analog tiger]

late Act 2 ||Inside the Monolith bossfight|| ||"A Life of Loving You" is a hell of a boss fight theme title||

||and the song is such a banger too||

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||visages|| ||interesting that for most of the story, we were talking about a mysterious woman; but now, here on the island, we're talking a "he". A man, or a boy, given the fading man has just talked about "him" being innocent||

||I wonder if the fading people are supposed to represent those who've died in the manor fire that scarred alicia||

[analog tiger]

Act 2 NOT SAFE FOR RASARR ||I have so many words about this||

[hollow ruin]

👀 👀 👀

do you understand how tempted i am

[analog tiger]

if it helps I did it on purpose 😊

but it is very much not safe

[dawn spindle]

Me every day. Still in Act 1

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||post-visages|| ||what do you mean, "that was verso", Verso? 🤔 ||

||was the "he" that this whole area talked about Verso? but then, are there two Versos? What?||

||I don't think that was Renoir Maelle saw, this version was grey-beared and older🤔 ||

act 2 ||post-visages camp|| ||"Verso and Monoco are now bound by manly love of style" I love them, your honor||

[exotic ember]

Act 2 || Inside the Monolith || || I want to fight Clair Obscur, but I don’t know that I have the time for that. May just move forward for now with the story and fight it later ||

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||post-visages camp|| ||did not have Sciel propositioning Verso on my bingo card, ngl ||

||ride forth, my bi queen, bag that ancient immortal guy||

||the fact that the attack Sciel learns from having sex with Verso is called "Doom"... Well, I ain't gonna question whatever freak you two got up to that night ||

[exotic ember]

Same tags. || Dang, after fighting a Clair and an Obscur together, definitely starting to get their timing better. They’re not too bad. But no. Must resist. ||

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||post-visages camp|| ||you know, i did not expect Verso to be able to summon an entire piano out of thin air, but considering they've been summoning weapons out of thin air this whole time... yeah, why not a piano. sure.||

[hollow ruin]

act 2 overworld ||oh, i never noticed it before, but the paintress actually moves, just a little bit ||

||like shifting in her sleep, i guess||

[fallow geode]

I'm going to need to set some filters (All because IDK where this starts)
||There's what Levels!?||

[severe vine]

How bad is this game about to destroy me if im a turn based n00b

[cunning reef]

If it's too hard just turn the difficulty down 🙂

I find the combat to be somewhat tough but fair on the standard difficulty

[analog tiger]

pretty much same yeah

some of the harder fights took me a couple of tries but found them entirely doable

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||sirene|| ||this area has absolutely my favourite battle music thus far, and my least favourite enemy variety||

||what do you mean, everything can dodge ||

||this being said, something I noticed is that the enemies in the axon areas seem to hit a lot less hard than enemies in old lumiere||

||either that, or i've buffed my survivability a lot more than i realized||

||tho, i think is the first area of this game to have the classic video game floating elevators 🤔 ||

[reef iron]

act 2 ||sirene|| ||ohhhhhh these enemies are super easy, slap on a good weapon of ice or dark, and just shoot them til dead||

||get luminas with free aim boosts too||

[exotic ember]

Act 2 || Inside the Monolith Boss || || Daddy has a lightning lion ||

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||sirene|| ||I am not reworking my entire builds for one area in a game that doesn't give me build presets 😅 ||

[exotic ember]

Every fight takes me a bunch of tries but that’s because I’m on Expert, I only parry and never dodge, and I have all of my characters set up to be glass cannons. If I get hit, I die 😅

[rancid vessel]

Truly playing on hard mode

[exotic ember]

Yeah except it seems for some reason lune isn’t dying instantly on hit in this fight

I may be missing some luminas on her

[reef iron]

i guess i switch around my setup all the time

it's fun

[exotic ember]

Yeah I do too

[reef iron]

i didn't think this would be too difficult, particularly with just a weapon swap

[exotic ember]

It’s such a blast

[hollow ruin]

I don't enjoy it, i rebuild my characters as rarely as possible

well, that, and also, aimed attacks are like... boring

unless the enemy has a weak point (act 2 ||sirene|| ||which none of these floating asshats do||), it's just pointing and clicking the mouse until you run out of AP

truly exciting gameplay

exactly what i want out of this turn-based game with a myriad abilities

[rancid vessel]

I wish there was a debuff that could reduce dodge

Cuz even my basic attack build on act 2 ||Verso|| doesn't help much with AP when the attacks miss

Also I hope I can find more combo picto
I want to be gaining like 6 ap per basic attack

Also, build question
act 2 ||Monoco is very heavy on the AP usage, I'm wondering if anyone has any decent ideas for him. I just adjusted his basic attack to hit twice as well to double the AP gain, but... Idk. It's just a lot||

[hollow ruin]

same ||i gave him all the pictos/luminas that give him extra AP on battle start, and over time i also found more low-AP abilities||

act 2 ||sirene|| ||I love that sometimes, the manor doors hold major lore hints, and then other times it's just like... here's the toilet ||

[exotic ember]

I wonder how varied our builds all are

I have a feeling they’re pretty different

[reef iron]

||their faces do take more damage than the rest of them I think||

[scarlet trout]

||There are a few weapons that give AP for like moving the wheel or using abilities that are empowered. but having lumina/pictos that give AP for attacking or at the start or when healing is good. Ones for parrying or getting hit also work well. He also has a skill that costs 2 and gives a second turn, but if you cast on agile mask it’s zero. So you can get an extra AP that way ||

[exotic ember]

Same tags || I can share my build next time I die. He’s currently one of my biggest damage dealers ||

[exotic ember]

Same tags || My build for Monoco rn ||

[scarlet trout]

||Oh also the one that gives you 3 ap for killing an enemy, I have that on everybody. || same tags

Like a lot of my lumina is the same on all my characters lol

[exotic ember]

Yeah I have a bunch of luminas I put on everyone as well

Same tags. These are my favorited luminas as of right now

[scarlet trout]

No dodger????

[fallow geode]

Parry4life

[scarlet trout]

It’s one point!

[exotic ember]

I literally don’t dodge

I only parry lol

And parry gives AP

[reef iron]

general mechanics ||the ap boosts are great, take where you can get them.||

well unless you take energising pain

which i did for a while

knowing i wasn't making it anyway

[scarlet trout]

I love this picto tbh on like ||maelle|| I have her with a bunch of health, shell, and defensive stance

[reef iron]

but yeah my lumina and pictos choices change all the time, sometimes as just realizing my playstyle is evolving, but also a change in zone/enemy type

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||sirene|| ||you know, I feel like if I did Sirene before I did Visages, Sciel's big character moment at the end of Visages would feel more... characterful? Because it was very weird when I did it then, but now that we actually see her seeing a vision of her husband and child (who presumably did not survive), the whole "I am the mask" thing makes more sense, huh...||

[reef iron]

if i'm facing multiple enemies vs single target boss

etc

to say nothingggg of how i will switch out weapons JUST for when it's time for attribute leveling

[exotic ember]

General mechanics || Applying 42 burn on Maelle’s pyrolyse is so satisfying ||

[reef iron]

attribute allocationnnnn

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||sirene|| ||love how cinematic this fight is, but oh boy am i bad at it||

[exotic ember]

Act 2 General Mechanics || An attack with Sciel just now did 66k damage lol. And that’s with only 9 foretell ||

[exotic ember]

Same tags || It’s beautiful ||

[nova temple]

I wouldn't have expected your weapon at the time of attribute allocation to matter

just, when you equip it, it gives you additional bonuses based on your attributes

but I don't know, the former is just surprising to me

[scarlet trout]

Post act 2 game mechanic || I was pretty happy with big number here ||

[reef iron]

||i can't wait to see what my REAL damage numbers are ||

[scarlet trout]

It’s so nice! ||Also def changes some of the abilities I use ||

[exotic ember]

Act 2 || Inside the Monolith Boss || || Gah, almost had Renoir phase 2 beat ||

[reef iron]

act 3 mechanics ||right, because it's a little unclear right now how good my abilities really are, when i'm comparing low/medium/high/extreme damage... the number of hits in a move.... ||

[scarlet trout]

|| mhm like I def used maelle less before because she’d often only hit one enemy for 10k once but freaking Monaco could it at 10k 6 times. Also incentives me to use buffs/debuffs now. And countering is way stronger I had one hit for like 65k yesterday ||

[reef iron]

act 3 mechanics ||oh maelle has multi hit moves... i'm definitely interested to compare percee to sciel's twilight dance tho||

||and monoco's mutlihits feel so gooooood right now but will they be AS good when i sign on today?||

[exotic ember]

Act 2 || Inside the Monolith Boss || || Second phase down! Finally got those parry windows pretty solidly ||

[hollow ruin]

language ||are you shitting me||

act 2 ||sirene|| ||the game crashed immediately after the sirene boss fight concluded||

well, let's see how much progress this crash cost me...

[rancid vessel]

Is this MOD ABUSE

[hollow ruin]

steel this is justified mod abuse

[scarlet trout]

SCANDAL

[hollow ruin]

aaaaaah

i have to redo the bossssss

[scarlet trout]

NOOOO

[rancid vessel]

I don't disagree it's justified, it's just still mod abuse

[hollow ruin]

I THINK YOU WILL FIND MY SWEARING JUSTIFIED

[scarlet trout]

What system are you on?

Out of curiosity

[hollow ruin]

win10, but my laptop is old and weak

so i've been experiencing one crash a day

it's just

an unfortunate timing for the daily crash

[reef iron]

the game did crash on me yesterday

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||sirene|| ||between all the flying enemies and now this, sirene is in teh running for my least favourite area of the game 😭 ||

[reef iron]

act 2 ||sirene|| ||is where i sat my ass down and leveled up a bunch 😭||

[scarlet trout]

Same tags || sirene area was literally I shoot all the enemies with my first character fight over so yeah probs my least favorite too||

[reef iron]

same tags ||boring 7 second encounters but at least they were only 7 seconds and i had everything else about the zone to entertain me||

[scarlet trout]

Fair lol I did like the exploration

[reef iron]

i actually do need to go back

act 2 ||sirene|| ||i have at least one drop and 1/2 petanks to get||

[analog tiger]

holy

Act 3 mechanics ||I want to compare Marked Percee to Sword Ballet to the Break move that keeps you in Virtuoso||

[scarlet trout]

|| I had an every enemy multi hit with Monaco that did 115k each on the first hit and everything died so I didn’t get to see how high it would go||

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||sirene|| ||man, but the shot of Lune being lifted up on Sirene's hand was fantastic ||

||also, game, if you think I'm giving up on Medalum swod for this barrier breaker thing, you are sorely mistaken 😌 ||

[reef iron]

act 2 general ||the autocorrect to Monaco keeps throwing me, cause i keep mistaking it for the country||

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||post-sirene camp|| ||"I feel used, but I like it" so you've got that kind of kink, huh, Verso? ||

||this whole fling they've got going on is so funny to me||

act 2 ||gestral beach|| ||"You deserve a new reward, use it wisely" The reward: ||

||Sciel will use it wisely, yes ||

[hollow ruin]

well, inasmuch as I'd love to go (act 2 late) ||to the monolith and confront the paintress|| right about now, it's almost 11 PM and I am starting to feel the wear and tear of playing this game for six hours

tomorrow, then.

musing on what i know so far, up to (act 2 late) ||piercing the barrier.|| ||So: we have a family of artists. We know it consists of at least two kids - Verso and Alicia - Renoir, who is the father, and an unnamed mother. Renoir and Ms Mother are famous artists, who want their children to follow in their footsteps; Verso doing music is not following in their footsteps. So, given everything about this game, likely Renoir and Mother are painters.||

||there are also two other names that have appeared that we don't have faces attached to quite yet: Alina (visible in names of some music tracks, audible in overworld song), and Clea, who gave Francois his rocks and whom Esquie misses. Given that, I assume Clea may be a third sibling to both Verso and Alicia (or possibly a cousin? some from the kids' generation, at any rate), which would leave Alina to be the mother.||

||The family lived in a manor that burned down at some point, horribly scarring Alicia. And there is talk about a boy/young man that has died despite not being "guilty" of anything. Given the only men in this family are Renoir and Verso, it's very likely that this refers to Verso. There's also the fact that at the end of Visages, Verso talks about Verso in third person, and Visages themself also brings to mind the phrase "recto and verso", which in art refers to front and back of the painting||

||there's also the convo Renoir and Verso have at the last camp where Renoir claims that defeating the paintress will be a terrible loss for the people of the Expedition 🤔 ||

Now, to speculate: ||I think that (1) the paintress is Alina, who is also Verso and Alicia's mother, and, by extension, Renoir's wife; the original expediton zero was led by Renoir to reach his wife, not to kill her. (2) Verso has died in the manor fire (3) at least some people in Lumiere aren't... real, per se? Like I don't want to say that everyone is a fake person, because that'd make the game depressing - your choice is either everyone dies now or everyone dies within the next two decades or so? I genuinely don't think the game will end with the whole cast dead.||

||So, my current theory: Alina has created the whole painting world out of grief for losing her son, and the Verso we know is a "recreation" of him, of a sort. Within the painting world, she made her whole family immortal because she doesn't want to lose them the way she lost the original Verso and nearly lost Alicia in the fire. Verso (the reproduction) wants to stop the paintress because she's killing the surviving people, Renoir wants to stop expeditioners because he wants his family to live on.||

||Things I'm not sure about yet: (1) why is Alina gommaging people? Is it like equivalent exchange thing, does she need to kill people to sustain the immortality of her family? (2) What is Maelle's role in this? For that matter, who is Clea and what is her role in this? Is Maelle Clea? (3) What's the deal with the Mistress? If my theory that gestrals, nevrons and esquie are toys brought to life in the painting is true, then Mistress would presumably be whoever used to own them? So is that Clea? Did Clea also die in the fire? Perhaps Clea died in the fire and was "reborn" as Maelle, the same way Verso (original) was recreated as Verso (the one we know)||

...sorry for wall of text, I had Thoughts.

i have more Thoughts

(act 2, up to ||breaking the barrier||) ||the fading people. they look kinda burnt, in the same way the Curator is. When Maelle hands the first axon heart to the curator, she sees a face that she thinks is Renoir, but didn't look like Renoir to me. But if it's someone who looks similar enough, perhaps it's Renoir's father/Verso's, Alicia's (and Clea's?) grandfather? And the other fading people, they could be the staff of the manor, a building this massive would surely have a ton of people on staff. Lune at one point speculates that the fading people are spirits who haven't finished gommaging, perhaps those are ghosts of all the people who died in the manor during the fire?||

||if the Curator is the family grandfather and Maelle is a member of the family (ex. because she's Clea?) then it'd explain why he's so eager to help her; she is his granddaughter||

||not sure what that would make the floating woman that sometimes accompanies Alicia tho||

i think may be out of Thoughts now; again, apologies for the wall of text

[analog tiger]

as far as I'm concerned never apologize for a wall of text of thoughts 🙏

[exotic ember]

Late Act 2 || Monolith Peak || || I hate this paintress fight so much. I’ve been at it for hours. The rock throwing move is bad. I can’t for the life of me figure out the tell for the parry. I’ve beaten the first phase a few times now, but I’ve been on my second group by then. I’m going insane ||

[analog tiger]

Late Act 2 ||Monolith Peak|| ||oh yeah that fight was annoying, took me like two tries ||

[exotic ember]

Same tags || Yeah don’t think I’m finishing act 2 today. Will probably retool my pictos and luminas for this fight when I next open up the game, since I think my build is too heavy handed on AP gen and damage amplification, to the extent I think there’s a lot of waste, as I’m capping out on damage and generating too much AP given how much the paintress is attacking. Not much point in boosting damage further if I’m already capped and likewise for AP gen ||

[exotic ember]

Same tags || The anger that arises from this 😂 ||

[reef iron]

same tags ||I did it in one.... 👉 👈 I thought it was really fun. ESPECIALLY way way way more fun than Renoir, which I never feel like I mastered, only got lucky||

[exotic ember]

Same tags || This is what I get for exclusively parrying and for building such that getting hit once = death ||

[analog tiger]

Late Act 2 ||Monolith Peak|| ||it's surprising how much easier the game gets when you aren't trying to parry everything ||

[exotic ember]

Same tags || I’m actually kind of fuming right now lol. Probably doesn’t help that I haven’t eaten yet today either ||

[scarlet trout]

|| the magic of dodging lol||

[analog tiger]

Late Act 2 ||Monolith Peak|| ||I loved the Renoir fight, the OST for that fight is probably my favourite in the whole game so that definitely helped, but I also enjoyed the gameplay ||

[exotic ember]

What’s funny is I think I find dodging harder than parrying for some reason

When I try to dodge instead I try to dodge too early and just die

[analog tiger]

Post Act 2 ||also the theme for that fight is called "A Life of Loving You"/"Une vie à t'aimer"||

post act 2 ||which... layers ||

[exotic ember]

Yeah my build also just doesn’t work if I dodge either lol

I have to parry for my build to work 😂

[exotic ember]

same tags || The thing is I have phase one like 90% down. So I’m close. But I need to get it down enough to get the first part of my team to phase 2 so I can start learning that phase ||

[scarlet trout]

|| you running heals?||

[exotic ember]

|| Why run heals if you don’t survive getting hit lol ||

[coral trout]

Act 1 ||Stone Cliffs|| ||I think I have out leveled where I am at. ||

[exotic ember]

Oh yeah I wonder if I’m underleveled haha. I feel like I’ve been gaining 1-2 levels per fight where I’m at

[coral trout]

Act 1 ||Stone Cliffs|| ||Oh no another platforming puzzle ||

||I did ittt||

[coral trout]

Act 1 ||Stone Cliffs|| ||Oh no old people ||

[nova temple]

cutscenes cannot be skipped??

figured it out

[coral trout]

Act 1 ||Stone Cliffs|| ||Gustav just got Aerithed.||

||Inigo Montoya is that you?||

Act 2 ||So Inigo uses all of Gustav's stuff? That kind of... Just feels wrong to me.||

Act 2 ||Losing a rock is better than never having a rock. ||

Act 2 ||RELATIONSHIP LEVEL? ||

[severe vine]

Alright im finally headed in, wish me luck on my Prologue journey

[nova temple]

Don't do it, there's no going back

Save yourself

[reef iron]

general mechanics ||new best setup||

[split canyon]

That is one way to do it i guess

[scarlet trout]

Did 880k in one turn with || sci||

[nova temple]

Oh, huh, Gustave is voiced by Charlie Cox??

Something about the mocap has been tugging at my brain for a couple of days, and this makes it fit. I don't know if he is also the physical actor, but I think it might be?

[coral trout]

Act 2 ||Gestral beach || ||I DID ITTT! The hard gestral volley ball challenge. I was failing so hard then I just LOCKED IN.||

Act 2 ||Mansion || ||Devs?||

[reef iron]

act 3 ||okay so i'm tired of going around still getting my ass kicked at big bosses, so time for main story again||

[scarlet trout]

Okay I might be very over leveled for the end

[coral trout]

What level you at?

[split canyon]

im really digging all the fire synergy ive got going on right now

everyones burning

and everyones doing things with fire its very lit

[coral trout]

You got a fire build too? I am just having trouble for the third member to being fire focused.

[split canyon]

The 3rd member is adding burns and thats good enough for me

And interacting with burns and their personal mechanic

[scarlet trout]

70

[split canyon]

I'm like lvl 10

[coral trout]

I am like just getting into act 2 in the 40s, I am kind of worried I am too high from killing hard things.

[scarlet trout]

End || I actually think Renoir is right and they all need to leave the canvas behind ||

Waaaay over level lol

[exotic ember]

I’m at the end of act 2 and only in the mid 40s lol. And that’s only because I’ve been gaining XP like crazy in the current level

[scarlet trout]

Good game

[obtuse pond]

I think this might be my favorite turn based combat system (outside of Deltarune and Undertale, but those are weird).
It’s basically Mario & Luigi but with modern high tier RPG visuals.

[merry lance]

Finally starting, and I love how there's an option on if character customization (I assume armour and outfits and the like) should be reflected in cutscenes or not

[fallow geode]

outfits and hair

and it's only in engine cutscenes

[analog tiger]

Act 3 ||I'm still not okay about this game 😭 ||

Act 3 ||the lyrics for Renoir's bossfight theme and the name and the everything have me like||

[nova temple]

Act 1 ||baguette baguette!||

[dawn spindle]

I'm glad to see I can still click Argent's spoilers

Hopefully I can play a bit today finally

[fallow geode]

Act 1 General ||I wonder what percentage of end screens are just "Maelle casts BIG SWORD"||

[coral trout]

Act 1 ||My favorite is "Don't look at the explosion" Lune end screens.||

[shell minnow]

Act 1 ||As of last night, I have acquired fourth party member... Astrologian Reaper is quite a job combo but she seems nice. I also have a mount friend now.||

[fallow geode]

||Mon Ami!||

[shell minnow]

Act 1 ||A sun and moon themed character named Skye do got me looking into the camera like I'm on the office tho||

||(s)ciel. Ok. Ok.||

[fallow geode]

Act 1 ||Gestral fights gen|| ||I hate that fake out right hook. Gets me every time||

[fallow geode]

Act 1 ||yellow harvest|| ||oh my god there's so many fallen expeditions here. Also so much Lumiere style architecture 🤔 ||

[ionic kite]

Ah damn
I missed Energising Start I apparently
Where is that

[fallow geode]

How far in are you?

[ionic kite]

Going to Stone Wave Cliffs

I have 2 and 3

I don't have 1

[fallow geode]

notably, Pictos don't always drop in the order you expect

[ionic kite]

So I can only assume I missed it somewhere

[fallow geode]

oh ok ||It's on the overworld a ways to the left of the Stone wave cliffs entrance||

[ionic kite]

Mmk

Could I get it before ||Esquie||

[fallow geode]

||no||

[ionic kite]

Mmk

Pre-Stone Wave Cliffs + NieR Replicant ||I'm not half wondering if this game isn't just doing a NieR, and the masked woman and the old man are just Maelle and Gustave||

[coral trout]

I've been wanting to play Nier.

[ionic kite]

Do it!

It's amazing!

[coral trout]

But I am playing 33

[fallow geode]

also, Nier Automata ||"The Nevrons are intelligent!?" and "lets go to the friendly village and do some kooky sidequests"||

[ionic kite]

Yeah methinks they took just a little inspiration from NieR

[fallow geode]

TBF, I think these are yet more relatively standard JRPG tropes

[dawn spindle]

well, it's 10pm and I'm still working so...

[rancid vessel]

Act 2 ||post Visages|| ||uh... Yeah totally just had sex
Lmao||

||I uh, didn't see that coming||

||aw, that was beautiful. ||

[nova temple]

NieR was the game I was trying to 100% when E33 rudely interrupted me!

[rancid vessel]

Act 2 ||post Sirene|| ||uh, I can face the paintress now? She's definitely not the final boss then... ||

[hollow ruin]

Aight, let's see if I can reach the end of act 2 within the next 2 hours

Definitely not, but one can dream

actually, before i head there, is anyone who's already in act 3 able to advise me: ||am i supposed to be able to unlock diving and flying as Esquie before act 2 ends or not||

[rancid vessel]

HAHAHA

Act 2 ||pre-Monolith|| ||ESQUIE SPEWING WINE I CANNOT LMAO||

[wild jackal]

||Flying is in Act 3. I still haven't gotten diving yet, but I'm not sure if that's because it's later in Act 3 or if I just missed it.||

[reef iron]

act 3 ||....okay i didn't think this would uh happen but i seem to be at the end of the game 😩 ope....... oh no.........||

||i'm not ready........||

[obtuse pond]

It’s fun learning French swears by playing this game

[hollow ruin]

thanks!

...i went side dungeoneering

act 2 ||falling leaves|| ||the manor door i found in falling leaves leads to a room that contains a music record named Alicia. The door then opens not to the main manor hall, but to the adjacent room... which is the one where we originally found Maelle back in flying waters||

||hm.||

[reef iron]

ok definitely ended the game before i was ready by accident

ahhhhhhhh

[analog tiger]

answer: ||nope||

[hollow ruin]

i have found the worst climbing wall

i got stuck on that wall, unable to progress, 4 times now

please game

i just want to climb this wall

attempt 7 worked 😌

[reef iron]

end of the game, like i've seen the credits end of the game ||oooohhhhhh i picked maelle's path first (i will pick the other one later) and ooohh oooh oohh my stomach hurts, i don't like that one. something about verso begging to die................||

||i need a lil break 😔 ||

[dawn spindle]

Oh no!

[reef iron]

I didn't realiiiiize

[analog tiger]

oh man

I really should finish the game

Act 3 ||though I still am not sure I don't want to mess around in the open world for a bit before||

[dawn spindle]

I was finally going to start playing... at 1am

and there's an update

I don't want to be an adult anymore

https://tenor.com/view/bunny-gate-fall-bunny-gate-fall-gif-17120893162149303529

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||the monolith|| ||I love the touch that the flag we see here belong to Expedition Zero cause like - yeah, that's the only one that made it this far||

well, inasmuch as i'd love to ||face the paintress|| right now, it is almost 2 AM, so that's gonna have to wait for tomorrow... again...

well, today

but next night

[merry lance]

Act 1 ||Post Flying Waters|| ||I've gotta say, I'm digging how I can win the Chromatic fights as soon as I find them as long as I git good (I decided not to go straight to the red forest, and explored the overworld map instead. I found the Chromatic Anchorguy, and when I beat him up he gave my team like 3 levels||

[nova temple]

Act 1 ||Esquie's Nest|| ||more baguette baguette!||

[shell minnow]

oh no argent's catching up to me

i need to start playing again...

[nova temple]

I saw Grey's hours and realized I am a shadow of my former self

[fallow geode]

Act 1 ||Chromatic Ophelion|| ||What the hell is their speed stat? 6-9 turns between my teams ||

[shell minnow]

alright back into it then

[hollow ruin]

ah, i'll miss you going through that part of the story have fun!

[nova temple]

Are there... new traversal tools later in the game? Like, if I am in a zone, like Act 1's ||Esquie's Nest||, and I see a collectible, but can't figure out how to get to it, am I just not finding the way, or can I not do this just yet, and need to come back later?

[fallow geode]

||No, you can reach it with your current tools. You may want to check around Francois again||

[nova temple]

Hmm

Huh, I don't know how I missed that the first time around

[fallow geode]

Act 1 ||Maelle's Second Nightmare|| ||...wat. I'm going to need to frame-by-frame the tapes||

any players with future sight willing to find me a youtube video of that?

Same tags? ||"My best friend was human" "I thought Francois was your best friend?" "Yes" ||

Act 1 ||Maelle's Second dream redux|| ||... Is anything in this reality real? Is it all a dream of the paintress?||

[analog tiger]

yes

oh misunderstood the question, Null is right

[dawn spindle]

oh god this thing is... annoying

well I managed to play a little

Act 1 ||Flying Waters|| ||The Chromatic Trobadour has a set of movements that are messing with my brain ||

[fallow geode]

Act 1 ||Overworld|| ||Be careful near Stone Wave Cliffs, more soft lock terrain||

||Ok, wiggling and switching characters did eventually get me out of it||

Ok, side questing done ||Time to find Florrie||

Act 1 ||Stone Wave Cliffs|| ||I love Esquie||

||Literally just||

[nova temple]

Act 1, just before ||Stone Wave Cliffs|| ||I keep getting vibes that a lot of the creatures here are, in some way, human... And not just human, but humans that are sometimes familiar with our cast. Might be reading too much into too small things, but something about the premise of these expeditions isn't quite right||

[fallow geode]

||I'm definitely getting the same vibes||

I think all my side questing has overleveled me for SWC
||I have yet to discover what these priest looking dudes do, they die too fast||

[reef iron]

all/ending/the game/the whole game ||i have...... thoughts......... and feelings...... i'm really not sure how to feel about this story man.||

[fallow geode]

https://tenor.com/view/frodo-keep-your-secrets-alright-then-lotr-gif-12907121

[reef iron]

||if you did see them move, they are actually priestesses!||

[nova temple]

Unrelated to that, Maelle and Gustave are precious to me

[fallow geode]

||oh that's my bad, I was sitting pretty far back from the screen||

Act 1 ||SWC|| ||Well that seems pretty good||

[reef iron]

SWC ||it's just that like, it gives them pronouns which is really funny "she stabs herself" or whatever||

SWC ||actually hold on i'm watching someone play this zone right now, it says - never mind also got killed||

[nova temple]

Them's some danger signs, pardner

I feel like this message might be unsafe for me

[reef iron]

haha

SWC okay got it ||"Greatsword Cultist covers her sword in blood"||

[fallow geode]

Act 1 ||SWC Hexga|| ||... can I dodge the Unblockable Attack? It's a complete party wipe for me, unless I'm just missing the timing?||

[analog tiger]

the whole game ||👀👀👀👀👀 ||

[analog tiger]

Act 1 ||Stone Wave Cliffs|| ||if it's the attack with the gold flashing icon, that one has to be jumped not dodged or parried||

[fallow geode]

||there's no gold icon that I've noticed, the screen just gets a greyscale filter||

[analog tiger]

... huh

[fallow geode]

||this is specifically the friendly one with the quest||

[analog tiger]

NSF Null ||huh I didn't know they had that kind of attack lmao||

Act 1 ||SWC|| ||ooo I didn't fight that one||

[rancid vessel]

End of Act 2 (I hope) ||my God this music
I thought Renoirs fight was intense, but the second phase of the paintress is insane||

[analog tiger]

Act 1 vague answer to the above ||SWC|| ||I suggest coming back to fight this one later||

[fallow geode]

Act 1 general ||I've been fighting all of them. I look forward to finding out how I'm a terrible person||

[analog tiger]

Act 1 general ||I didn't fight any of the friendly ones 😔 ||

[fallow geode]

||ah, is there a tool I'm missing?||

[analog tiger]

explicit answer ||yep, you'll get a way to deal with those kinds of attacks later||

[rancid vessel]

End of Act 2 ||my jaw DROPPED when she freaking ripped reality apart.
Also I am gonna need an explanation for what happened when the world tore apart and now there are multiple verso? Well ones dead so||

||goodness the second phase is hard. Very hard||

[rancid vessel]

End of Act 2 ||uhhhhhhhh
Everyone died?
We're in the real world? I am SO confused||

||ok I get the world was erased because the paintress was actually stopping the father from erasing everyone. But uh, now I'm in an epilogue and I'm still just
Very confused||

[rancid vessel]

Act 3 ||yeah there was no way I was gonna see that coming.
I'd kind of like Alicia to stay here as Maelle. It's clear she was quite miserable in the real world.
Well time to wander around a bit and then I think I can just simply end the game by going to Lumiere again||

[nova temple]

bruh, how big is SWC

[rancid vessel]

The areas are all pretty deceptively large

You can go straight through them

[nova temple]

and miss on things??

[rancid vessel]

Or there's like a gazillion other paths and get really, really lost. I mostly just got very lost

[nova temple]

Hm

So things sure happened, and I wish I understood more than 20% of them

Finishing act 1 at 2 am was, perhaps, not the smartest thing I've done

[obtuse pond]

Got to the end of Expedition 33: Act 2
||…What the hell?||

[shell minnow]

End of Act 1 ||I finished Act 1 last night and mmmmmm... I respect it. Killing the quote unquote main character at the end of the first act and pulling it off is bold and I think they rocked it. I definitely thought they were actually going to make you try to dodge the killing blow but I think for the sake of not letting people actually out-skill a plot moment, it was right to put it just in the cutscene.||

||I think with how much I kind of overleveled SWC, I was starting to see the mechanical writing on the wall about Gustave before it happened, but I didn't put together that was what it was. Like, the friends watching me got to see me point out that Gustave had way less skills to choose from than the rest of my party and that it was weird that his weapons didn't have level traits like everyone else's. ||

[nova temple]

Act 1 all ||You know, I had been wondering about the skills and the weapons thing, but I assumed it would be a thing I unlock for some reason||

same ^ ||that said, I better get all the resources I dumped into this man back!||

[shell minnow]

Theories (End of Act 1) ||I don't trust Verso. I think the narrative is doing a very clever play of wanting you to trust what he tells you about what's going on because he's the good one who just saved you, but I don't buy the tale that Renoir just likes being immortal and doesn't want that to go away. That doesn't match the way Renoir's been acting and his fixation on Maelle being special or important or the things he said about family. Verso's not being entirely honest and I think he's pursuing his own ends.||

||There's some worldbuilding things that are sticking out right now, little off moments. Like the characters mentioning that Esquie has lived for centuries, even though the Fracture happened 67 years ago. I think we assume the world was normal Earth before the Fracture, but I think that maybe wasn't the case. They also mentioned that at one point Expedition Zero had survivors (the only expedition that did) and I think that some of them came back to Lumiere? So I think there's more to that thing as well.||

||As for the full picture, I think the theories I've come up with are the obvious ones that I don't actually think are happening because they feel pretty boring: this is all a make-believe world of the Paintress who's like, a normal kid making things up or something. Or Maelle's kind of an avatar of the Paintress doing a Haruhi Suzumiya self-insert into this pretend world. I don't really like either of those, so I hope they're doing something more interesting that I don't have the context to figure out right now. But I tend to be pretty bad at theorizing anyway, meh.||

[hollow ruin]

🍿

[shell minnow]

Act 1 ||Oh, there was also the weird moment of Gustave and Sciel talking about the ferris wheel, and Sciel said it was a normal ferris wheel, but Gustave seemingly joked that it was actually an expedition vehicle that got wrecked here. Except then we find a journal where an expeditioner talks about the wheel being their wrecked vehicle and it's like... okay was Gustave not joking and he was serious? Or did something alter reality around his joke? ||

[fallow geode]

Act 1 ||SWC Manor|| ||Maelle, care to explain what your bedroom(?) is doing in the Manor?||

[hollow ruin]

act 1 ||okay, i need someone to tell me what SWC means cause I am drawing a blank||

[nova temple]

Act 1 ||Oh, I am also reminded that a couple of the optional quest NPCs have said or implied that the Paintress and their "Mistress" are not the same, so that's also interesting. Someone mentioned a... Regent? And this is probably nothing, but one pronounced it as pain-tress, and that had 1% of me go 🤔 ||

[shell minnow]

||Stone Wave Cliffs||

[hollow ruin]

[shell minnow]

||Aka "the obligatory rpg columnar basalt level"||

[hollow ruin]

||I did not realize it was obligatory ||

[reef iron]

#1365016201465565184 message

oh yes

[shell minnow]

a collection of examples from jedi survivor, dragon age, and monhun

[hollow ruin]

I see I see

[shell minnow]

also, bonus points, the wheel of time show:

[nova temple]

it took you saying it for all the connections to just snap into place in my brain

[shell minnow]

fantasy designers LOVE ||columnar basalt||

[hollow ruin]

(act 1 area) ||i mean, no wonder, Giant's Causeway looks like it came out of a fantasy story||

[shell minnow]

||it is a very weird rock||

[nova temple]

post-A1 camp, and... MB Era 1? ||this is just Kelsier's "Better to trust and be betrayed. Better to trust and be hurt."||

post-A1 camp ||I am sorry, this is now a thing??||

[shell minnow]

same reaction

[nova temple]

this game really is just 3 games in a trenchcoat, isn't it

frenchcoat, I suppose

[shell minnow]

Act 1 ||I'm waiting for them to actually give me a deck of Double Dyad cards||

[nova temple]

Act 1 ||there was a huge area in the Gestral village that just smelled of a minigame area; I think it even had a neon sign with cards and dice||

[hollow ruin]

act 1 ||it doesn't have minigames, but it does have my favourite picto||

[nova temple]

Act... 2, I guess? Exploration? ||Painting Workshop|| ||You look familiar...||

[fallow geode]

End of act 1 ||did Verso's name get that reverb just for dramatic effect? Made it sound like the end of a dream||

[nova temple]

||Well, well, well||

[fallow geode]

Act 2 Mechanics ||Having looked at "his" swords, and skill tree, I'm kind of scared to find out what fighting with Verso is going to be like. Looks like I have to pull off combos perfectly to get Ranks? When a Skill says a Rank does more damage, does that mean going over that Rank reverts to base damage?||

||also, I just noticed that everyone has the three skills on the right padlocked. Except for Maelle who has another 4 still locked away 👀 ||

[rancid vessel]

||basically, you do more damage at higher ranks. You get higher ranks by doing damage, any damage, without getting hit. Certain ranks will boost certain skills, but in general you want to be at as high a rank as possible for maximum damage. Without getting hit.
Which I am INCREDIBLY bad at||

[hollow ruin]

act 2 mechanics ||i've found there are basically two ways of playing Verso - either you play into the ranks and try to stay at S as often as possible, or you let yourself bleed and use Berserk Slash as your main damage source||

[fallow geode]

Act 2 beginning ||did the first expeditioners know about the Gommage when they set out? How many 100+ yr olds could there have been to get disintegrated?||

[reef iron]

act 2 general ||i have the suspicion that "you go the year before you gommage" was a tradition that evolved later when the gommage years started trending younger||

||with a much bigger population, I think we have every reason to think they were much more a volunteer affair with lots of people. like maelle could go even now||

[fallow geode]

||I'm specifically thinking of the fact that (a) Verso knows about it (maybe he learnt from later groups, or maybe they lived there for a while) and (b) what was the inciting incident for the first Expedition? Why go before any died from the numbers?||

[reef iron]

||oh. I mean, why wouldn't they go and see?||

[shell minnow]

i should edit today but the world is bad and maybe i just play e33 all day instead

[rancid vessel]

[reef iron]

featherrrrrr it's self care!

[fallow geode]

Act 2 mechanics ||any suggestions on Verso's sword/build?||

||I have these||

[hollow ruin]

where did you get that outfit from

anyway, act 2 ||I use the one that cuts your HP in half at the start of the battle, iirc it also auto-starts you at C rank||

[fallow geode]

https://tenor.com/view/little-busters-komari-kamikita-money-big-money-ballin-gif-6402536367463560718

It's DLC

[hollow ruin]

ah, it's the deluxe?

act 2 build ||re: build, i pumped almost all his points into Vitality and Agility||

[fallow geode]

Act 2 ||Here's the whole party||

[rancid vessel]

Act 2 mechanics ||the build I ended up sticking with uses a sword you haven't gotten yet, but essentially revolves around taking multiple turns after using a basic attack I've enhanced beyond all reasonable limits. It allows me to push out high AP moves literally every turn, so his damage is nuts even if I'm bad at keeping him at S||

[fallow geode]

Act 2 Mechanics ||But Steel, I already have the perfect sword for you||

[rancid vessel]

Hey I'm not THAT bad

Usually

Act 2 mechanics ||usually I hover around B, jumping up to S and then getting knocked back down.
At least until I finally got my sword to level 20 and now I'm usually at A, cuz of how much perfection I'm getting with my double hit basic attack||

[fallow geode]

W2B Party Size Unlocker

[shell minnow]

alright whatever let's go

i think argent's pulled ahead and that's untenable, so

(proceeds to probably do a bunch of optional quests anyway for hours)

[nova temple]

Feather

my sweet beloved feather

[shell minnow]

Argent

[nova temple]

I am playing volleyball in this game

[shell minnow]

wow. spoilers.

[nova temple]

what do you think I am doing, the main story?!

[shell minnow]

ah, another game in a trenchcoat for this game to be: skyrim

[hollow ruin]

this is a very big trenchcoat this game is wearing

[coral trout]

That was so hard.

[nova temple]

it reeeally doesn't like KBM controls

I'll come back to it later

[hollow ruin]

yeah, i still haven't beaten the second stage of it

[nova temple]

I got 2/3, but 3 was rough, and I wanted to just... play the game

which is to say, find another way to not play the game

[coral trout]

act 2 ||Gestral beach|| || This helped me beat it.
https://youtu.be/SC0z5JVlkYs ||

[analog tiger]

you know, waking up today I really did not expect to see a (End of Act 1) ||Haruhi Suzumiya|| reference in the 17th Shard discord server

that was a bit of a jumpscare

Act 2 Mechanics ||My Verso is auto attack based with break buffing stuff for his big break skill||

[fallow geode]

Act 2 Mechanics ||I think I'm happy with where I've taken my Verso. Agility / Defense ( 🤢 ) With the Sword that buffs alternating Light and Physical attacks. Most skills from the left side of his tree||

Act 2 ||Dark Beach|| ||"Danger" it says on entry. Maelle, Verso, and Lune all die because I don't know how to dodge the handbird's Dark Blast yet. Send in Sciel. I literally can't see her turn on the tracker, her Speed is that low compared to the enemy ||

[nova temple]

Act 2 ||Stone Wave Cliffs Cave|| ||just joining what I assume is the chorus of people unhappy with the chromatic hexga and how poor a job the game does at communicating how you should deal with the damage immunity||

[hollow ruin]

same ||I still haven't figured it out||

[fallow geode]

Same tags ||Naru said I should come back later?||

[rancid vessel]

||Shoot the rock||

[hollow ruin]

oooh

thank you

[rancid vessel]

I got annoyed and had to look it up

[nova temple]

^ ||multiple times||

[fallow geode]

sigh time to go back to SWC again

[nova temple]

my issue is that I did that, and the game gave me no feedback that this is the right thing to do

[fallow geode]

I already went back for some collectables I missed

[hollow ruin]

i'd test that right now, but the last i've left off, (act 2 near the end) ||i was practically at Paintress's feet||, so I assume it's gonna be a second before I can try that fight again

hmph.

i thought i'd finish act 2 today but i'm really not feeling in the mood for playing

[nova temple]

actually, do you mind tagging that? I don't know if other people will be okay with the answer

[hollow ruin]

i think playing this game every day for the last 10 days may've been a bit exhausting, mentally

[analog tiger]

Act 1 ||SWC|| ||for the quest one ye, the others you can beat rn||

[rancid vessel]

I took a break for a day before attacking the end of Act 2

Given how intense it all is that was good, gave me plenty of oomph to power through a lot of difficult fights

[rancid vessel]

Anyone who has finished the game, could you answer my question

Act 3 ||will going to Lumiere to fight Renoir end the game? Just wanna know before I stop exploring ||

Thanks

[reef iron]

holla

not realizing that was the mistake I made

[rancid vessel]

Act 3 ||honestly assuming he's the final boss, he has a LOT to live up to given how absolutely insane the Paintress fight was||

[merry lance]

Act 1 ||SWC|| ||Journal 50|| ||What do you mean Gustave wasn't BSing when he said the Ferris wheel was an expedition vehicle!?||

[rancid vessel]

General ||one of my favorite things about the game so far is the sheer variety of different things the expeditions have tried over the years. Some made it farther than others, but everyone tried||

Act 2 ||monolith|| ||I was genuinely surprised to see that Expedition 70 made it all the way to the monolith to place their little hook things, then died near the top. They made it incredibly far||

[shell minnow]

Act 2 ||Forgotten Battlefield|| ||Okay the Chaliers, the dudes with a helmet and a weakpoint inside... is there any actual way to get that weakpoint or is it bait? I have tried shooting the helmet off to no avail, am I just missing something? ||

[reef iron]

||I think it's bait, these guys I just fight as if they don't have weak points||

[obtuse pond]

https://www.tumblr.com/cerulean-renegade/781784827039973376/im-only-3-hours-into-the-game-but-i-already-love?source=share

Act 2 ||Verso can be “The Struggler”||
||God, I almost called him Clive.||

Anyways, wow

141K consecutive players for a single player game on just Steam is nuts.

[hollow ruin]

for a single player game that's also on Gamepass, let us not forget

I wonder what the total concurrent player count across all platforms is

[split canyon]

yaa ppl seem to forget that things exist beyond steam user numbers and twitch viewer numbers

both are easly accessable stats but there is a world beyond those two things

even if at times they can be good indicators for things

[fallow geode]

Act 2 mechanics ||This is a Light damage type, right?||

Rasarr

Act 2 General ||Also, I just noticed this is a Gestral's Arm!! ||

[nova temple]

https://tenor.com/view/thats-it-yes-thats-it-that-right-there-omg-that-thats-what-i-mean-gif-17579879

[fallow geode]

Act 2 ||Overworld|| ||WHAT IS THAT||

[exotic ember]

This is not a drill. This is not a drill. I am now in Act 3

[fallow geode]

Act 2 ||Painting Workshop|| ||... I think I just stumbled over a true ending quest step. I have acquired "A lamp that can be used to awaken the beast" from the Faceless Boy||

[exotic ember]

Act 3 Beginning || So Maelle can bring people back. What if the sixth expeditioner is Gustave 👀

Also just wow. This game is wild. This story is wild. Who are the Writers. For a second I thought Renoir was going to be party member 6 but nope definitely not. He’s definitely giving act 3 boss.

VOID DAMAGE?!?! Increased damage based on burn stacks!? Uncapped damage!?

Hoooo weee this is going to be fun! Really cool how Act 2 eventually it got to a point where single hit moves were just straight up bad because they could only do 9,999 damage. Uncapping definitely could make things interesting again on that front and open things up even further ||

[fallow geode]

sigh
It wouldn't be a JRPG without a minigame precisely designed with the worst control scheme possible

Act 2 ||Yes I'm talking about the Volleyball||

[exotic ember]

Very Late Act 2 || Monolith Peak Boss || || Finally made it through both paintress phases. Had to rethink my pictos and equipped skills a little bit. Equipped Boucheclier Fortify on Monoco and that ability is so good if struggling with a fight. Shields are cracked, so getting a shield on everyone when in heavy mask or god mask is amazing, as is the gradient attack that costs 2 gradient charges and puts 2 shield on everyone. So I’d basically stack shields with him, applying shell and powerful on everyone too, every time I had heavy or god mask. And then I’d do the chalier combo in balanced mask. Combined with lune, who just somehow ended up tanky, and Sciel who just shreds. Didn’t even need my secondary party when I made it through. Shields OP ||

Curious what levels people generally are around by late act 2/start of act 3. Everyone for me is around level || 45 ||

[scarlet trout]

Normal level

[exotic ember]

Act 3 beginning || I’m going to have to redo all my builds soon. Should be fun to rethink everything with that damage cap removed ||

[analog tiger]

Act 3 the levels of my party after act 2:

[exotic ember]

Act 3 Beginning || In camp after all of the act 2 stuff || || “Esquies can be sad or bad or even rad! But never ever mad” I love this marshmallow wineskin.

The voice actor must have been having a ball with this. It’s so unserious I couldn’t imagine trying to keep a straight face. ||

Also this game continues to be peak

Also, the 24 hour peak on steam for E33 is higher than the 24 hour peak for oblivion. Love to see it

[nova temple]

Well, I was gonna go catch up on my WoW weekly chores but I can't log in so I guess I have to go back to E33

[fallow geode]

oh the humanity

[nova temple]

I tried to balance things, clearly extreme and irresponsible dedication is the correct way

[split canyon]

weekly wow chores can be done tomorrow tho

[merry lance]

Act 1 ||SWC|| ||There's one part of the map that's being patroled by a guy with what looks like a flaming weapon, is that actually accessible? You can see him from where the bleached rocky guy that was stuck in the ground is.||

||That guy down there, I see a couple items near him too, but the only path I see is blocked by a blue glowing thing. Should I just move on, or is there a path I just haven't found? (I've finished the dungeon, just cleaning things up before I move on||

[fallow geode]

same tags ||I didn't notice a way down there, but I wouldn't be surprised if we get a way to break those blue tree roots/trunks||

[merry lance]

||Everything maps like I should be able to get there via the caves, but I can't find a path...||

[rancid vessel]

Alright time for my final (for now) play session

Gonna mess around and then beat this game

[nova temple]

Act 2 ||Monoco's Station|| ||Whoops, I couldn't finish the tutorial for Gradient Attacks because I killed the tutorial boss too quickly 😅 ||

[ionic kite]

AYO THERE'S BEN STARR

MY GOAT

||Is Gustave actually dead, I wonder? He has a whole ton of abilities we couldn't get, I wonder if that's just there for fakeout or if he'll come back later somehow. Granted, I'm also fairly certain that both Ben Starr and Old Man Smithers are also Gustave somehow.|| Post-Stone Wave Cliffs

[shell minnow]

Act 2 Speculation ||I'm wondering if Verso is an ancestor of Gustave's perhaps, if he had a kid before he went on Expedition Zero maybe...||

[ionic kite]

Act 2 ||Verso.||

OH
||THAT'S WHY NONE OF GUSTAVE'S THINGS HAD SECONDARY EFFECTS||
I WAS WONDERING ABOUT THAT
I THOUGHT THAT WAS WEIRD

Ah and now the real game starts I see
||Now I have bond events||

YEP I KNEW IT
||READING HIS SKILLS AND STUFF, I KNEW VERSO WOULD BE DEVIL MAY CRY MAN||

[fallow geode]

Act 2 Mechanics ||That's so much more succinct than my description ||

[rancid vessel]

Act 3 ||holy crap this chromatic golden sword girl is hard. She only has 2 attacks but they are long and genuinely hard to get the timing of the dodge right. ||

[obtuse pond]

Act 3 ||Lune romance||: ||“Hey I’m having writer’s block with this new song, wanna follow me into the woods and spend a few hours helping me destress and compose this song” is such a great euphemism lmao.||

Also, speculation for up to the start of Act 3: ||I wonder what was up with all the locked skills Gustave had. It could be a clever way to make us think Gustave had more story to go, or maybe he does actually come back at some point and unlocks those new skills.||

[analog tiger]

Act 3 ||I'm disappointed that both Lune and Sciel are romanceable. I was really hoping that Lune was a lesbian||

[reef iron]

act 3 ||i love when everyone is bi actually 😌 ||

[analog tiger]

Act 3 ||I would love Verso to be bi!||

||Gustave too!||

[reef iron]

act 3 ||okay sandfall bring gustave back for like, five minutes, it'd be SO worth it||

act 3 ||but such is the way when the cast is mostly ladies so i'm not exactly crying over this one||

||truly, a rarity to not have m/m ships for pure lack of options||

[analog tiger]

act 3 ||it is a developer's decision to have the party be women, monoco and a male pov character twice, and even in the act with the (Maelle) you still play as Verso; as well as having a moment in the past that probably was intended to be a one night stand between Lune and Sciel but still keeps plausible deniability that it was only a fully platonic night of friendship, and then both of those characters are romanceable by the male POV character||

act 3 ||there's gay people in the background of the game and Lune and Sciel are probably bi (while still keeping it possible that they are just straight if you happen to want to see it that way because of one reason or another) but I would like more||

act 3 ||I would like gay people to be front and center and undeniably so, not background pieces of the scenery||

[reef iron]

||mmk||

[rancid vessel]

HAHA I WON

That was so hard

[nova temple]

Act 2 ||I can't believe they putting a @#$%ing Getting Over it / Bennet Foddy / whatever level in this abomination of a game||

[rancid vessel]

Act 3 ||for my trouble I got a level 24 awesome weapon for Verso. Only problem is it rewards not getting hit... Which im extremely bad at
BUT HEY I CAN LEARN LIKE I JUST DID HA TAKE THAT||

[nova temple]

legit took me like 2 minutes to figure out why this is an achievement

[rancid vessel]

Is there a reason I am throwing myself at overly difficult challenges

Because that's all I've done today

[exotic ember]

Same tags || I did definitely say during this “what in the getting over it is this nonsense” ||

[exotic ember]

Same tags || Right!? This game goes so freaking hard it’s unreal. Super cool move ||

Beginning of act 3 question. Looking for a very general spoiler free answer || So I have flight access now. Final objective is to go to Lumiere. Is it just kind of open ended do stuff until you feel ready to take on the final objective?

And can you go try out the final fight, get destroyed, and then just go back to doing stuff in the world until you feel ready to tackle it again? ||

[reef iron]

explicit answer ||yes, it is open ended stuff until you want to go do the final objective. the final objective is not hard. you are likely capable of it now, you will not be destroyed. downside is that if you want to go see the remainder of the world to your satisfaction, being destroyed by the final fight is like, not gonna happen lol||

[exotic ember]

Thank you!

[nova temple]

I was beating my head against a boss earlier, that wasn't too difficult, but it just had so much health (or I was probably underleveled for it) that I just decided I didn't want to do 100 perfect turns or whatever

[exotic ember]

Act 3 question follow up || Again looking for spoiler free answers regarding story. So what about the underwater stuff and those blue like tree stump type things that appear everywhere? Is that stuff post-game content/is there a post-game? And is the sixth party member post-game too then? I just don’t want to miss content ||

[reef iron]

||there isn't really a postgame.... all stuff gotta be done before going to the end. what sixth party member?||

[exotic ember]

Same tags || Oh huh good to know, thanks. I think I had seen something about a 6th party member or six playable characters, and one video review mentioned listening and not watching because they didn’t have enough footage that wouldn’t include spoilers for the sixth playable character. But I didn’t even consider that we have a party of 5 and previously we had gustave, which makes six playable characters lol

A little unfortunate that you can’t finish the story and then do everything else ||

[exotic ember]

Post Act 2 || This is hilarious ||

[scarlet trout]

tyty

[exotic ember]

It’s such a good feeling being able to actually read all the stuff said about the stuff through the end of act 2 now lol

[rancid vessel]

Ok I can answer one of those

[exotic ember]

Act 3 Beginning || I think the direction the end of act 2 went is pretty interesting overall. Very curious about the Writers. I need more info.

Pretty wild stuff too. Didn’t expect so many answers by this point in the story. Not at all mad about that. Super interesting ||

[rancid vessel]

General ||the tree ability is acquired by rescuing 4-5 lost gestrals, then talking to the dude hidden in your camp. It allows you to attack them to break them||

||as for diving, that's the very thing I'm about to try and figure out ||

[exotic ember]

General || Ohhhhhhhhh wow that would have been good to know a bit earlier haha ||

[reef iron]

oh i didn't realize you wanted specific answers to those

act 3 answer ||just keep spending time with esquie in camp||

[scarlet trout]

||Diving comes later you get 5 lumina from each||

Very useful tbh

||Because things get EXPENSIVE||

|| like the amount of times I was like I would love a couple more Lumina for this zone ||

[exotic ember]

Act 2 general || This is so interesting because Lune has pretty consistently been my weakest character throughout all of act 2. Her damage has been pitiful in comparison. Only move of hers that does decent damage is Hell and that was only doing about 20k due to the two hits. Mayhem always does quite a bit less than that for me ||

[exotic ember]

Act 3 general || Oh yeah wait I remember seeing the game has a NG+. I’ve never done one of those and I don’t want to look it up due to spoiler risk. Do you know what that consists of? Does it basically just consists of carrying all of your progress from the end of the game through to a new save and playing against much stronger enemies? ||

[analog tiger]

Act 2 general ||I have a good break build on her||

[reef iron]

i actually don't know

[scarlet trout]

||from what I understand you keep weapons and pictos as well as character levels and outfits. ||

[exotic ember]

|| Cool, thanks! ||

Act 3 || Well I guess one other thing is that if I finish the game on the PS5 at any point, I still have the PC save that’s like halfway through Stone Wave Cliffs haha ||

[reef iron]

answers to some act 3 questions ||okay i looked it up. apparently it IS possible to keep exploring the game after finishing the game. and ng+ is in the same place, click "continue" on the beaten game and go to the flag. iiiii don't know that i saw said flag but i don't know if i was really looking for this||

info about ng+

[exotic ember]

|| Oh sweet, thanks! ||

[rancid vessel]

Honestly I'll be pretty tempted to do NG+ at some point

Though, probably not until after I finish Xenoblade 3, since I put that on hold for this game

Alright I'm done wandering around
Time to finish the game

Act 3 ||oh no, my Verso one cycles these enemies I am doing so much damage with my TRIPLE COMBO ATTACK BUILD||

||uh, I think I went the wrong way ||

[rancid vessel]

Act 3 ||uh, compared to the paintress, that was a cakewalk||

The ending ||oh, I have to choose... Maelle to keep the canvas, or Verso to have it fade away.
I think... I think I'm going to choose Maelle this time. If I get around to replaying this game, I'll choose Verso, as a true end. ||

||oh thank goodness, Verso isn't using my build he was doing 200k a turn||

||not entirely sure who the kid is... If Verso got repainted to play the piano, who's the child?
And from that final shot, it seems that Maelle truly stays in the Canvas until she decays.
Unfortunately neither ending would be entirely happy. And this way, Gustave and everyone else lived happily, and Verso got to play the piano again||

And that's it

What an absolute masterpiece

Ended up clocking in at about 32 hours

Game all ||I appreciate that they didn't over explain the real world. If they ever decide to do a sequel, they could use that setting to do an entirely different story that doesn't rely on the events of Expedition 33 pretty much at all. Especially with this conflict between magical painters and magic writers... There's definitely interesting stuff there.
But I'm happy that with either the Verso or Maelle ending, the story of this family, and Verso's canvas, more or less comes to a close||

[reef iron]

the end/all ||I still am struggling to figure out what I think and feel about it. neither option feels good. I'm a little upset that Renoir was right and there are only cruel options. maybe that's my North American desire for a "clean" third option||

the end/all ||I hated hearing verso begging to die, knowing how much he doesn't want to go on. maelle's ending could have framed as a good thing, but it's really, reeeeally not. and/but on the other hand, the people in this canvas are still real in a way. should lune and sciel and everyone have to die/remain dead because he's decided he's done? and yet, on the other-other hand, didn't his canvas irrevocably change once he died and the fracture happened and suddenly the stories in his canvas' world all became about death and grieving? and yet other other other hand, how willing this one family is to kill so many people because they need to move on? it's unclear how much they see the people in the canvas as real, because they treat the people in the canvas with a lot of dignity and respect, no contempt, but then at the same time, are totally willing to go "yeah we'll wipe out this canvas even though we loved you all". clea even has a line somewhere in a dungeon about how Alicia shouldn't give her any crap about how much this canvas means to her, because clea spent more time in here with verso than Alicia ever did. it's all so messy!||

[rancid vessel]

The end/all ||I believe the Fracture came about during the battle between the parents within the Canvas. At least that's the impression I got.
Other than that... Yeah the ending is messy. And yet, I still feel satisfied. I'm not sure a true happy ending would have been appropriate or even possible with what they set up. What is the difference between real and not? Are the people in the Canvas any less living, and thus less deserving of life?
And Verso's cries... He really did just want to make music. He never wanted to paint. Being made to paint endlessly to keep Maelle happy is kind of a terrible fate.
And yet we fought through the entire third act to save the canvas, not destroy it. Sigh so messy||

[reef iron]

ending ||right, but the battle between parents was because their son died||

[rancid vessel]

True

[reef iron]

||they made their grief inhabit the whole world||

[rancid vessel]

Ending all ||literally the entire final battle I was yelling at Renoir that he was just as damaged by his time in the canvas as his wife was and he needed to leave. At least Alicia had time before that was an issue.
I'd hope that Maelle taking control of the Chroma would help make the world liveable again. The characters seemed happy at the end, anyway||

[reef iron]

ending ||I'm not totally sure I'm satisfied. I have to think about it more. verso's ending feels more "correct" to me if only because it gives verso what he wants and maelle a chance in real life to grieve and then move on, but it doesn't feel right that it comes at cost of the canvas because evidently two of the three women in the family will kill themselves with it if it's still an option. :? ||

[rancid vessel]

Ending ||and yet, what's in the real world for Alicia? Pain, and crushing guilt. And those scars aren't going to heal, or stop hurting||

[reef iron]

||and the whole thing with "maelle has chosen never to leave and will stay until she dies" is like. ermmmm okayyyyy....||

||forcing verso to keep going through the motions.... blah, it felt so wrong||

||I felt pretty ill||

[rancid vessel]

||I'd have felt better if Maelle used it as time to heal and come to terms with things
But no, she was determined to die in there. Stupid girl.
Perhaps there was another way if she left, and made her own canvas. Idk. ||

[reef iron]

ending/all ||both endings made me feel like, damn, what's... the point of going back to continue to play the game. it's all just over and gone in verso's ending, and maelle's ending made it all feel like some sick facsimile more than anything else did. it was played like a horror movie even. i think i need a little grieving break myself, haha, and then go find some challenges when it feels like it's worth it again||

[rancid vessel]

Ending all||I was pretty satisfied before heading to the boss, I fought some really difficult enemies. I didn't hit everything the game had to offer, but I felt great about my skills and builds by the end there.
Going back, it'd only be to up the challenge more. ||

[obtuse pond]

Act 3 speculation (haven’t reached the endgame): ||I wonder if we’re gonna get more games in this universe. The “epilogue” makes me feel like we could get more games in the “Clair Obscur” universe with “Expedition 33” just being the first installment.||
||It’d be interesting, although that absolute table flip of an ending to Act 2 wouldn’t be quite as insane now that we know the rules of the universe.||

[obtuse pond]

Act 3 ||I really like the trick this game does of making it’s mystery really hard to figure out by just having characters lie in their exposition. It’s genuinely impossible to figure out what is going on if you take Verso at his word that he and Renoir were part of Expedition 00.||

[obtuse pond]

It’s interesting to see how differently people build some of the characters.
Like I see a lot of people building Lune as ||a burst mage||, but I’m playing her as a ||hyper tank with constant AOE damage, healing and and bonus break meter from Terraquake, Typhoon and Stormcaller.||

[reef iron]

I definitely am going to steal other people's builds for her in my next playthrough, she ended up as my consistent last choice

[fallow geode]

||I just shoot, cast Thermal Transfer if I'm lucky, and then Mayhem. If she's having an off turn, then she gets to use her other skills||

||though the skill that's just "cast fire on everything forever" seems a little interesting||

[scarlet trout]

Ending/all || I chose Verso’s ending. I agreed with Renoir, getting lost in this shadow of a world is dangerous. You have to come out and keep going and Maelle delaying that only hurts whatever is left of Verso’s soul. You don’t get through grief by staying in denial.
As for the others would Maelle really let them be people? Would she let them grow or change? Would she let them die? Or would she force them to basically stay the same, to stay with her in the world now that she knows she’s basically god? Are they nothing but toys for her to put down when she decides to leave? ||

Same tags || also I think there is something I the fact that the other characters are paintings. A reflection of what a human looks like or does but not actually human itself. An approximation of life ||

[reef iron]

ending ||this is the vibe I got||

[scarlet trout]

|| yeah I mean if I could stay in a world where I could bring back all the people I’ve lost I don’t think I’d ever leave especially so after losing them ||

[obtuse pond]

I haven’t gotten to the ending yet but I’m roughly aware of ||what the final choice is||.
||Honestly it seems like a super messy choice without a “good” option, and I kinda dig that.||
||I have no idea what I’ll pick yet, it’s probably gonna depend on information I don’t have yet. Or information I just won’t get period and have to kinda infer. Like I’m not sure if the game is ever gonna give me a proper answer on how “real” people Lune, Sciel and Gustave are.||

[scarlet trout]

|| ~~well now I’m starting to worry that I’m a monster because the choices didn’t seem that messy to me ~~||

[obtuse pond]

Ending ||Well I just don’t have a lot of the information, all I basically know is that the final choice is some version of Maelle staying in the painting or leaves and the painting gets destroyed.||
||There are a lot of ways things could play out that would shift my opinion one way or the other.||

||“How real are all the people in the paintings” is the big question I have that will influence this, and frankly I’m not sure if that’s actually gonna have a definitive answer.||

[reef iron]

ending ||yeah, in the sense of like, it didn't feel like life continuing on, just in the canvas, no matter how maelle framed it to her dad and verso - i definitely got the strange and horrible sense of "she's keeping herself and everyone (but verso?) in stasis of that time". framing is everything, and "life in the canvas" ending could have been played happier than it was. but that was the way they framed the choice||

ending ||like, renoir needed to stop, but not because he was... wrong... but because he decided force and violence was the way he was gonna do things, and like. that was never gonna fly. like idk what relationship he and aline had, but definitely not with his daughter. what was he doing to make life on the outside more enticing?||

[obtuse pond]

||The other thing that is really giving me pause is that Maelle’s life as Alicia seems to suck.||
||Like if there is some talk in the ending of healing Alicia’s body or her sister promises to be less awful to her, then that’ll shift my opinion.||

[scarlet trout]

|| to me Renoir’s actions towards Maelle were much closer to a parent seeing their kid was struggling with loss and not quite knowing how to get them through it. But he also knows that you can’t literally stay in a world of denial. That won’t make it better. And yes he went about it the wrong way… but also they had the ability to literally paint the dead back into existence and then live in that world so 😬 that would make it even harder.

Like I try to think of what my mom did to pull me through a similar situation and how much harder it would’ve been if I could’ve stayed dreaming and was never forced to wake up and remember they were gone||

[reef iron]

ending ||and i mean like... there's this whole thing about what clea says (beginning of endless tower) where she's like "me and verso hung out here while you were reading in your room" which leads me to think about this passion of alicia's was robbed because ... the Writers are the ones who did this? not only a family member but alicia's usual escape from the world was taken away, tainted forever. does she hate her books now because of the Writers' plot?||

||and also... alicia does think her life is over. she was dealt a very, very raw deal. but she's also 16 years old. everyone else in her family have REALLY really good memories of this canvas. alicia got the version where everyone is constantly dying around her. and if she stays.... at 16 years old, she doesn't know what moving on and having a happy life after all that grief looks like. there's the ol' inception question in this, like, is a beautiful fake dream better than a bleak reality? and i come back to... i think she should try reality, because again, she's 16 and verso didn't save her so she could die in front of his old canvas||

||(and yet also everyone and everything in the game treats the world of the canvas as though they're real, too, and that's just a whole confounding factor that i think muddies the story of this family's grief)||

ending/all ||and i understand a little bit, because it's a little more than just "get verso and gustave and sophie back" and so on.... i think a fairly large portion of it is also the appeal of getting to be maelle. maelle rules, alicia is sad. being maelle is to be whole and loved, being alicia is being damaged and alone. it's REALLY rough! i don't fault alicia for wanting to stay in the canvas at all..... but i just keep thinking about real verso and what he was thinking when he saved his little sister. ugh now i want to write a fic where alicia grows up and her and clea get close||

[nova temple]

Hmm, yes, yes, nodnod, indeed

[split canyon]

thats how i feel too

i really gotta stop clicking on random things as well

cause ive spoiled my self on a couple things

ill probs just forget them tho cause we in the final two weeks of a semester right now

[nova temple]

(do go on, please, this is not a problem)

[scarlet trout]

|| yes I understand her desire too. But at the same time I remember what one of my friends said when they made me come out of my house. “You can be sad, you can be silent, but you’re not going to be alone.” Letting Maelle stay is letting her sit in this grief alone with literally just the figments of her imagination. Even if that’s what she thinks as best, she’s like not… “wrong” but like definitely in what I would consider “shouldn’t be allowed to make long term decisions about her life” territory. Which is what she would’ve been doing if Verso hadn’t stopped her.

And to be fair all of this is shaded by my interpretation of what the canvas is. I see it as a collective dreamscape, a memory, a shadow of reality. But not actual reality ||

[reef iron]

sorry even more thoughts, ahhh sorry lmao, ending/all ||and i think the world of the canvas feeling like the people in it are real is what hurts, but also, it's like.... if the very world of the canvas itself has been.... getting a century-long countdown to a final death, that's like.... verso's world going out with him. this is the aspect of the situation i'm struggling with the most, is the reality of the people living in the canvas||

[hollow ruin]

good gods, y'all are already at the end of the game

[reef iron]

||ah yeah i think that might be the only point where we're actually differing, cause i'm nodding along with nearly all of it - but just not the idea that the canvas is fake||

[hollow ruin]

well, anyway. place yer bets, folks, what are the odds the game will crash on me right when I (act 2 ending?) ||beat the paintress?||

(act 2 ||the monolith|| ||unless, of course, I'm not actually about to go into a Paintress boss fight 🤔 ||)

||well, cross that thought out, i literally took ten steps and walked into the paintress boss fight||

||it... sure seems like we got all the way to the paintress but did not actually find a way to, uh... kill the paintress||

[scarlet trout]

|| yeah I mean I’m not even sure the canvas continues to move forward in time when there are no painters in it. It is not unlike the world we imagine when we read or play video games. It’s there and it exists when we are there but does it move independently of us or our thoughts? For me the answer is probably no, but I understand that for others the answer might be different ||

[reef iron]

all ||yeah that would make me feel a little better. but i'm like... i really really hate "and it was all a dream! (fake)" narratives. like to me, it removes the point of caring about anything that happened in acts 1 and 2 if "they aren't real" and "they aren't real = it's okay to end them". what's the point of liking gustave and then being sad that he died if "he isn't real and therefore all good to erase in the name of this family moving on". what's the point of caring about lune and sciel and monoco and even this version of verso. "they're not real" erases the point. so i'd rather be in the version of a story where it feels like acts 1 and 2 are still meaningful||

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||inside the monolith|| ||hey paintress, we heard you like dungeons so we put a dungeon in your dungeon...||

[reef iron]

all/end ||so i'm not totally sure how i feel about the story's scope narrowing from this lumieran society of people going to "actually, there are only four people whose feelings are important to take into account"||

all/end ||even though there's still so much of act 3 i was meaning to play and go to the end by accident, i kind of... didn't feel like playing anymore to go back to it. like, really big "god what's even the point"||

[obtuse pond]

Oh, so a tip for anyone who wants to do level grinding in Act 3:
Go to ||Frozen Hearts, the place northeast of Monoco’s station. Enemies there are tough so they give a lot of XP and good resources, but they have some of the easiest parry timings ever so you can get through them pretty easily in spite of them being really tough.||

[reef iron]

i was going to head there next, that's nice to know

[obtuse pond]

Also, so just a general thought on this game:
This might be the only time I’ve ever played a game where I’ve been like “You know, I wish there were more notes and audio logs left by random strangers”

[hollow ruin]

oh boy this zone is crashy af

third time now

that's a record for a single day

[pure forge]

Game wasn't clicking for me till I heard the ||Flying Waters|| fight music and the choir kicked in. Absolute perfection.

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||inside the monolith|| ||so there were three children, just as I was thinking; so that'd be Clea, Alicia and Verso||

||interesting that this whole zone seems like a reprise of prior zones||

||in yet another Rasarr Boss Baby moment, reminds me a lot of Pale Heart over in Destiny ||

[analog tiger]

Act 3 camp ||CUTE!!!||

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||inside the monolith|| ||lmao, those two minibosses||

||what are we, some kind of clair (and) obscur?||

[reef iron]

oh i need to 🤐

||i love when they're named the thing||

[split canyon]

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/s/JzjGfZ3gkD

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||inside the monolith|| ||and there it is, the clair (french) obscur||

||you know, there comes a moment in your life when you must ask yourself, "what am I willing to tolerate at 10 PM on a Monday", and today, the answer is "not this fight"||

genuinely this area is so laggy, i feel like i'm supposed to feel epic and all but instead i just feel frustrated

[reef iron]

omg i never found this place

[exotic ember]

Act 3 || Very tempted to wrap Act 3 tonight and then do everything else as postgame ||

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||inside the monolith|| ||hole in the ground in the stone wave cliffs area, right past the petank||

||0/10, can't recommend||

[hollow ruin]

me, two hours ago: oh yeah, i can totally finish act 2 today
me, now: when... does it... end...

[analog tiger]

Act 3 ||I'm doing the optional relationship dungeon and man. the final boss being weak to fire is very messed up lmao||

[hollow ruin]

okay, enough for today, i did not expect this to take that long

[reef iron]

yeah

when you said "I'm not doing this at 11pm" the other day, I was like good idea!

[analog tiger]

Act 3 big spoilers ||oh this is brutal||

act 3 massive spoilers LMAO

[nova temple]

ooh, I heard the call of the abyss there...

[analog tiger]

if there is two sets of spoilers not to click it's those ones

very plot related to the end of the game

[nova temple]

oh, I am sure

[reef iron]

unfortunately I turned spoilers back on, however, this is something I was almost certain of

[analog tiger]

Act 3 general ||the only one left to finish the max level relationships is Monoco but I also kinda want to just finish the game. I wonder if there is a secret ending if you max all relationships but I think that'll have to be (watched on youtube) seen on a second playthrough||

[wild jackal]

Act 3 ||Monoco's is pretty quick, FWIW, but I don't think you're missing much by skipping it either.||

[reef iron]

act 3 ||that's funny, I went for monoco's first||

[nova temple]

Act 2 ||Old Lumiere|| ||I know there's a lot of crazy environment stuff on this Continent, but no one is talking about the giant freaking glowing dripping swords||

[exotic ember]

Same || I definitely thought they were really cool! ||

I was aghast when I saw one YouTube video where a few people were saying the game is ugly. I was like, in what world?

[nova temple]

I meant in-world, but also yes 😅

[exotic ember]

Some were basically saying the game is ugly because it runs in 1080p on console

Which is such a wild take to me

[nova temple]

wish the game had a photo mode

[analog tiger]

E33 ending ||Verso being weak to fire is really messed up LMAO||

and that's credits

E33 ending ||I did Maelle's ending and like it's not a happy one but I think it's happier than the Verso ending because like - the people in Lumiere are real, they deserve to exist. I think Verso's ending would be the good one if it didn't end up with everyone being erased||

[analog tiger]

Act 3 ||yeah I'm really not a fan of that||

E33 ending ||I think it's interesting that both endings are almost good but the people make them bad. Like, Maelle could just leave the painting and visit so often, or spend some time there before going back to the real world or even just let Verso go, I will not judge her for wanting to live a normal life for a little time even if it kills her instead of being trapped as she was for the rest of her life; and the leaving and moving on could be good if Renoir wasn't an ass entirely dedicated to erasing the Canvas. If he lets the Canvas go, the people of Lumiere can keep living. I don't know if I like that these endings are like this, it feels a little angst for angst sake but I appreciate it nonetheless||

[reef iron]

ending ||it did feel like a lot of "but mom can't be trusted not to come back in all the time" as one of the motivations and then right at the end they snuck in "and alicia can't be trusted not to come back in too" and i'm like 🤨 hm.....||

[analog tiger]

ending ||thinking about it I like Maelle's ending better because it's less final. Like, in Verso's ending the painting is definitely erased and everyone is gone; in Maelle's it's heavily implied that she is dying and then probably Renoir will erase the canvas anyway but it's not as definite. Renoir can come to his senses and not erase the painting, Alicia can back away from the painting and heal... etc.||

[analog tiger]

hard agree with this too

[analog tiger]

E33 all ||100% the whole point of the relationships thing is that like - these people are real. Their grief, their dreams, their lives are real even if they exist only inside the canvas||

E33 post ending all ||also I really want more information on this world so I can have information to make a better OC 😭my first thought is to make them a Writer because well. but I need to know more about Writers first||

E33 post ending all ||also would to know what Painters can do, like can they only create Canvas and go into them or can they paint on the world?||

E33 ending ||for my save in game time says 31h, steam says 39h, seems about right||

while I think I'd be fine with 100%ing, I think I'm fine uninstalling for now. Maybe I'll come back for a second playthrough later or especially if there's DLC

[exotic ember]

I want to click all the things

[nova temple]

Act 2

You know, I don't hate my life enough to be fighting this thing

[nova temple]

Act 2 exploration ||mm, no, no thank yoj, nope, pass||

[reef iron]

i definitely didn't explore much before act 3 huh!

wtf

[exotic ember]

Act 3 || Yeah I should have done more exploration earlier in the game lol. Fighting some of the stuff on the Act 1 section of the island like the yellow harvest boss and Maelle just decimated it with Combustion after damage was unlocked. 44k damage per hit with only 8 burn stacks and no mark lol ||

Act 3 || Will be fun fighting this stuff on PC where I’m not overpowered yet ||

[scarlet trout]

I beat ||sprong||

[exotic ember]

Act 3 || I just dealt 117k damage with one hit of Maelle’s combustion by stacking about 80 burn on an enemy ||

[obtuse pond]

Well I reached the end.
||…I really don’t know what option to pick.||

Okay I need to lay it all out and get my thoughts sorted.
||Choosing Verso means allowing all the remaining sentient(?) creatures in the canvas to die and will really mess up Maelle. Although at this point that’s just Lune, Sciel, Esqouie, Monoco, and the gestrals. And Verso I guess, but he wants to die.||
||Choosing Maelle means Maelle spending the rest of her life in a realm she is effectively the goddess of, which can’t be healthy for anyone involved since Maelle has the power to change anything she doesn’t like. It also will truly break her family beyond repair. And the fragment of Verso’s soul wants to move on.||
||There is also the fact that they can make more canvases, this is just the only one with Verso’s soul and our painted cast. So Maelle can create other canvases and go into those with a healed body as a form of escapism.||
||Also I think Verso’s ending is the narratively better one.||
||Damn, I think I just talked myself into siding with Verso.||
||Honestly I think the only thing that’s been holding me back is Lune looking exactly like my childhood best friend to an upsetting degree.||

||I am gonna need to immediately watch the other ending to get my happiness fix.||

[exotic ember]

Act 3 || Lumiere || || Whoever thought I wasn’t going to die to Renoir, what? First phase is pretty easy. This most recent attempt I had 5 shields stacked on everyone by the end of phase 1 and phase 2 pretty much instantly decimated me lol. Those attack patterns will definitely take some learning. Granted I basically went straight from finishing act 2 to doing Lumiere. Would be nice to swap Lune out but she’s kind of tanking and reviving as needed lol. Plus a bit of burn setup for Maelle ||

[obtuse pond]

Ending ||Well, I’m ugly crying. Can’t remember the last time a piece of media did that to me.||

[obtuse pond]

Ending ||Okay having seen both endings, I think Verso is the better choice.||
||Even with the most generous interpretation, Maelle’s ending is an Omelas child situation that I don’t think will ever get fixed.||

Ending ||It is a bit of a rough choice because it requires so much inference on stuff.||
||Like… I don’t think we have any idea real idea how long it’s been since Verso and Alicia got disfigured died in the real world. And that information would’ve definitely played a factor in my decision, the less time has passed the fire the more validity Renoir telling Maelle “It’ll get better” has.||

But yeah 10/10 game, I genuinely don’t see how any other game takes my 2025 GOTY spot.

[reef iron]

act 3 ||frozen hearts|| ||okay yeah that was a very fun little area, and the stuff in the store that endless ice unlocks! wow! so now i have AMAZING outfits for verso, sciel, and lune - a beautiful snowflake weapon for lune - and lotssss to save up for with this grandis vendor||

[obtuse pond]

Act 3 ||I wonder what part of the story the devs came up with first. Was it the story of of the expedition or was it the painters vs writers thing?||

[analog tiger]

Ending ||it can get better though, even if only after Maelle dies. Assuming Renoir doesn't erase the canvas then, but it's still a possibility. In Verso's ending those people are dead dead and through no fault of their own, just because of Renoir's grief||

[pure forge]

Just met ||Verso. Agony. Ceaseless torment. I ain't cried at a character death in a video game in a long time.||

[obtuse pond]

https://x.com/expedition33/status/1919701863491838316

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (@expedition33) on X

Twelve days in, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has crossed two million copies sold.

We’ve watched in awe as so many of you began your journey. Feeling every step, every emotion, every revelation alongside you.

To those just joining us: welcome.

Tomorrow comes.

X · May 6, 2025, 10:32 AM

[exotic ember]

Absolutely love to see it

I genuinely don’t see how any game surpasses this for my GOTY either

The only one that might have any chance is Doom, but even that I don’t expect will beat this

[analog tiger]

I wonder, Polygon

I really do wonder

[pure forge]

Weird that an indie hit nobody expected needed to do this, but not any of the AAA games they thought would sell well.

[exotic ember]

Act 3 || Lumiere boss || || The start of phase 2 summoning the canvas is such a cool scene. As is phase 1 summoning the axons. This game does big cinematic moments that go incredibly hard SO WELL ||

[obtuse pond]

https://80.lv/articles/clair-obscur-expedition-33-director-left-ubisoft-because-he-was-bored/

"Projects like these – with new IPs, original stories, completely original characters – are super hard to push through in a big company," commented Sandfall CEO (via MP1st). "There are a lot of approval steps, and in general, in big structures, you already have to have proven yourself and be pretty high up in the hierarchy just to have a chance at pitching this kind of project.”
“For me, a project like this would've taken 25 years to make in a big company. And I don't have that much patience. We also wanted to do things our own way and really create an atmosphere. That's what this game is – creating a vibe."

[exotic ember]

And the vibes are immaculate

[nova temple]

yeah, this game is just vibes

[scarlet trout]

Postgame || uhhhh stumbled across this game malenia ||

[sick yew]

As a washed-up FPS player, do y'all think I would enjoy this game?

[fallow geode]

I am 🤷

If you have Gamepass, it's arguably free to play for you

[hollow ruin]

it's... not really an FPS by any means 😅

but it's a good game

[sick yew]

Only gaming device I have is a PlayStation, sadly.

I’ll try to pick it up at some point soon here.

[split canyon]

gampass pc

is great btw

and expidition 33 works great on pc with a controller

thats my primary way of playing it

since my kid is using the xbox a lot right now

[nova temple]

The gameplay is fine enough, but I would say that the world, plot, and characters are what carry this game - so your inexperience (?) with RPGs shouldn't matter too much

oh, and music

and... style?

like, the gameplay is the least interesting part of it, and it's still good

[sick yew]

Like I said, only gaming device I have is a PS. My PC is not capable of running games.

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||inside the monolith|| ||this may be a new old lumiere, but exploring it feels the exact same 🙃 ||

||this dungeon just refuses to end||

[analog tiger]

same as above ||it's a mammoth dungeon||

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||inside the monolith|| ||I love that the monster named the same as the game is just... off to the side here ||

same ||clair obscur down. that's it chat, wrap it up, i've beaten not just the game, but the whole nascent franchise ||

well, the game crashed on me, so this seems like the sign to stop for today

i expect i will remain in this dungeon for the next five business days

[exotic ember]

I would personally say the gameplay is excellent myself. I find it incredibly enjoyable and would argue it fully stands alongside everything else

[reef iron]

i definitely take a great deal of enjoyment from the battle system

lots of fun crafting builds

[analog tiger]

same

definitely top 10 JRPG battle systems for me, probably top 5

[nova temple]

Hm, yeah, I come from a place of not really enjoying JRPGs, so a good rating from me probably translates to something higher for enjoyers of the genre

And on that note, Act 2... builds? ||I don't feel like I have a great Lune build (I want the multi-element path, but generating one of each stain reliably is a bit of a struggle), and I don't really have any build for Maelle (other than trying to stay in Virtuose Stance as long as I can, but that's not a build), but I am enjoying Verso's double auto attack with double AP||

[potent tapir]

Act 2 || I've got Lune set up as a healer with the weapon that generates free Light pips on heals (and the Pictos that gives AP on heals). So when she isn't healing she is full up on pips to do the big AP spells. ||

Major ACT3 spoilers || I've somehow convinced myself I need to beat Simon before I beat the game for the last Journal entry. I can tell this is going to suck next time I play.||

[potent tapir]

Act 2 || for Maelle ive found that a good weapon for Virtuous Stance, the skill that re-ups your stance, and Pictos that make counters good really effective ||

[potent tapir]

Major Act 3 || Maelle: "Did you let Gustave die?" Verso: "Yeah sorry, we couldn't keep paying Charlie Cox" ||

[sturdy edge]

By request, this will be posted over here too

[random zero context clips]
[act 2 contents included with zero context]
[language warning]

[reef iron]

I just think he's so so funny too ☺️

literally burst out laughing during multiple of these

[nova temple]

legend

Maybe slap an act 2 on it

I didn't watch long enough to know if there's anything act 3 in it; we don't need to make a big deal of it, but we can give people a chance to avoid things they want to avoid

[hollow ruin]

it's just act 2 stuff, up to ||old lumiere||

[potent tapir]

Act 3 ||the VA for Monoco's delivery on "please help me" to Verso during his side quest killer me||

[exotic ember]

Act 2 || Yeah I have yet to get Lyme doing much damage as well. She has kind of taken the job of being a revive machine because she was the only one surviving any hits. That and a burn applier ||

[exotic ember]

Probably my favorite. Love the parrying mechanic. Makes for really fun and engaging fights. And I suck at parrying so it makes them really challenging too. Feels super satisfying to me to finally beat every fight once I’ve learned the moves of the enemies well enough.

That said, I notably haven’t played many JRPGs

I’ve played Pokémon, some Persona, some Xenoblade Chronicles 3, and some Octopath traveler

[potent tapir]

|| I did that for most of the game. But I've now got her with the Typhoon and Lightning Storm abilities for when she isn't healing ||

[exotic ember]

Same || Yeah I have lightning storm and hell on her to apply the lighting on-hit and burn basically. But most of her value is in staying alive through hits to revive others lol. I have the second chance pictos on her too for that reason ||

I do think it is quite amusing how my build completely falls apart if I dodge instead of parry. Most of my AP costs are pretty high lol, so I’m really banking on getting multiple AP back per parry and having big multi-hit attacks targeting my whole team so I have 9 AP on everyone each turn

[analog tiger]

Act 2 mechanics ||Mayhem with the weapon that generates stains on free aim + a lot of lumina that buffs break and crit and damage on burning enemies and other damage buff luminas makes her damage go crazy||

||I was doing legit like 30~40% of bosses HP bar with one move||

[nova temple]

^ ||that's kind of what I am rocking - spam free aim w/ Trebuchim and hope I get the 4 stains, and then Elemental Genesis the enemy into oblivion. Or, if I feel like my stains suck or don't have enough fight left, just Mayhem. It feels like Elemental Trick should be doing more to help me set all of this up, but it hasn't been super reliable||

^ ||I guess maybe what I should be doing is running the basic skills, like Immolation, Thermal Transfer, and Earth Rising, so I can generate or "convert" stains into ones I need (e.g. Immolation generates +1 red, and can consume a blue, so if I have 2 blues but am missing a red, and I can fix that... but that never felt reliable either||

[analog tiger]

||I never tried a full elements build so no idea how to make one work||

[nova temple]

||Elemental Genesis does a stupid amount of damage, but setting it up is haaard||

[obtuse pond]

||I have other characters for damage, Lune is basically the only character with good heals.||
||Also I found a weapon for Lune that scales off of vitality and defense so I just leaned into making her a super tank.||

[nova temple]

Ah, see, I don't heal 😅

I bash my head against fights until I can get the parries perfect

[halcyon elbow]

Drive-by John Oeth-posting: https://youtu.be/gbFGnw2JYe0

[obtuse pond]

I just find it very funny that they’ve created a world where being in your early 30s makes you one of the oldest people alive and you’re basically viewed as being on your death bed.
That’s a mood.

[halcyon elbow]

It do be what being in your early 30s feels like

[obtuse pond]

I’m not in my early 30s yet, but a high schooler once asked me “Wait, you were born in the 20th century?” (I was born in the late 90s) and I almost just evaporated on the spot,

[nova temple]

heh, yeah, I did clock that as a little funny

and also profoundly sad in-world

[obtuse pond]

Yeah I like a lot of the worldbuilding that’s been done with the whole concept of this age countdown.

People over the age of 50 haven’t existed for almost a full generation, every teenager is without parents at this point and generally wind up getting raised by people just 10-15 years older than them, having kids super young is very common to maximize their life expectancy and the time you have with them, etc.

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||inside the monolith|| ||man, i love that there's an in-universe explanation for why there are grapple points and grabbing ledges everywhere, and that there was literally an expedition whose entire mission was to install them. That's such a cool idea.||

[obtuse pond]

Same spoilers ||Yeah the past expeditions are a cool way to establish why there is a sort of trail laid out for you, something which a lot of games just kinda hand wave and have weird naturally occurring yellow paint.||

Also fun fact, ||If the path you’re following splits in multiple directions and one path is lit up with torches/lanterns, that’s generally the one that progresses the story and the other ones are the optional content. And it’s like that because the other expeditions have already been here and are marking what the correct path is.||

||It’s a great way to help you know which routes to go depending on if you’re looking for the optional content or if you’re looking to progress the story.||

[fallow geode]

have a lazy meme

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||inside the monolith|| ||me: oh, this looks like a boss arena, I think I'm finally fighting the paintress for real||
||The ever-ominous Renoir:||

||https://tenor.com/view/ours-blanc-meme-bonjour-polaire-polar-bear-gif-25176258 ||

||oh gods, Renoir's got hands||

act 2 ||inside the monolith|| ||now that I've died, i have to say, glad that i called it on real Verso being dead and this Verso being a Paintress creation, but the pre-battle dialogue kinda makes it sound like... Renoir is a Paintress creation too? I mean, he says he "inherited" her grief, and he is also immortal...||

||so if the fading souls shadow people we've been seeing are souls of the dead like i've speculated, and Maelle saw face that looks like the flashback Renoir when she handed the materials for the sword to Curator... does that mean the Curator is the real Renoir?||

||or the reanimated corpse thereof, as it were||

[obtuse pond]

🍿

[hollow ruin]

that popcorn's gonna be cold and stale by the time I'm done with that boss fight

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||inside the monolith|| ||good heavens, it literally came down to just Lune alone holding the line cause my first party all died and then he vanished Sciel But, I defeated him...||

||please don't have another phase...||

[runic surge]

I want to join this channel but know I'll absolutely spoil myself so: wow this game rules, the whole OST is on Spotify too

https://open.spotify.com/track/1GO2HzBSJGPelxaqXIHEYh?si=dda6b56e0cbe4aa1

[hollow ruin]

act 2 ||monolith peak|| ||i feel like my theory about renoir is pretty much confirmed at this point 🤔 anyway, rip to him but i'm just better (she says, having taken 10 attempts and going down to one final expeditioner to defeat him)||

||but i think i'm gonna hold off on the paintress until tomorrow||

man, this is the slowest Clair Obscur playthrough of all time

[wild jackal]

Mechanics||It's mostly just a gear issue rather than a build issue. Element Trick generates the corresponding stains for hits that crit, so once you have 100% crit(or 75% plus Burning Crit) you can just go Element Trick > Elemental Genesis over and over. You should be able to do it by late Act 2 or early 3.||

[nova temple]

100% crit seems wild to me 😅

but maybe if I dump it all in luck?

[fallow geode]

im going rto throw my stomring controller through the storming monitor

[fallow geode]

Act 2 ||Beach Volleyball|| ||It's eating my inputs. I press R1 and NOTHING HAPPENS||

||and no, it's not cooldown from the previous shot||

||STORM YOU AND THE HORSE YOU RODE IN ON||

genuinely the worst minigame I've played in a while I think

[obtuse pond]

So I’ve been thinking about possible sequel ideas.
[major ending spoilers]
||I think the idea I like the most right now is Clea is the protagonist of the next game and it being focused on the painters vs writers conflict, whatever that is. It’s a good way to continue on the story while not having to pick a canon ending, you can just have Maelle’s current status be something that occasionally gets referenced or shown without it completely altering the story.||

[analog tiger]

same as above ||I would like a sequel to not involve the Dessendres, only have them as mentions or something. Would like to see a Writer point of view too||

||but also I want a female protagonist so I'm fine with Clea being the protagonist or any other woman tbh||

[wild jackal]

Late Act 2 gear||Nah, 99 Luck only gets you like 40% crit. If you aren't at the point where pictos are dropping with 25-33% crit on them, I would probably try and build the stains with the low cost builders or gamble with Trebuchim like you are already, but Element Trick will definitely start to come online once you begin to get the higher level pictos.||

[obtuse pond]

Ending ||Well I think if this turns into a full series it is gonna be the “Clair Obscur” franchise with “Expedition 33” as the first game, like how you had “Horizon: Zero Dawn” as the first Horizon game and then we got “Horizon: Forbidden West”. In which case it kinda has to remain focused on the painting side of things since Claire Obscur is a painting technique.||
||We could get Painters from other families, but I think Clea is the right mix of connected enough to the first game to make me invested while not being so involved that it makes reconciling the two different endings impossible.||
||Or they could just make Verso’s ending canon. I wouldn’t mind that since that’s the one I found fit the narrative best and found it to be slightly less miserable, but I’m sure some people would be upset.||

[analog tiger]

ending ||I'm some people 😌 ||

[obtuse pond]

Ending ||The upside to making Verso’s ending canon is you can have Maelle remain the main character and actually have her somewhat get over her trauma.||
||Although I guess the same could be said for making Maelle’s ending canon, you could find ways to make that ending less miserable as well.||

[nova temple]

Act 2 ||Frozen Hearts? I think that's what the zone is called|| ||Man, I am having the hardest time getting these enemies' attack patterns, I don't know why. I am just always a split second away from a parry||

[analog tiger]

Ending ||I would prefer Maelle to not be the main character of any sequels. Clea would be fine but I'd really hope for a Writer, I'd like to see what's their deal - especially from a non-inimical pov||

[fallow geode]

Act 2 ||Forgotten Battlefield|| ||"Are you awake". I'm getting the feeling I should have been using Maelle to talk to all the Nevrons. High chances that she's the Mistress that the Paintress is rebelling against (Or whichever way round those roles are)||

[nova temple]

||You know, it never even occurred to me to switch my "party leader" except for variety||

[fallow geode]

Act 2 / Outfits ||I was not expecting to get Gustave's version on Maelle||

[nova temple]

||You found an Obscur for Gustave?||

[fallow geode]

||Had it from the beginning. That's DLC content I guess||

[nova temple]

Aah

[fallow geode]

Act 2 ||Forgotten battlefield|| ||there are an astounding number of bodies here||

[nova temple]

I guess now that I've played - and loved - the game a bit, I might want to reconsider getting the DLC, to throw some more money their way

[fallow geode]

||oh look the suspicious bridge had a trol guarding it||

[wispy falcon]

This game updated the mental image I have when thinking of the era 1 Mistborn characters

[exotic ember]

Ahh yes. A fellow man of taste

[nova temple]

Why experience a fun story when you can get frustrated instead

[wild jackal]

Act 3 ||The Abyss|| ||Is there a way to stop him from removing the entire party at 20% of phase 2 or are they forcing you to build two parties?||

[coarse fjord]

Hey, I don't go here but I've had lumiere stuck in my head all week lol

[obtuse pond]

Okay having sat on it for a bit, I think I have two main criticisms of Expedition 33
First, the power curve can be really out of wack. It’s not too bad in the early game, but once you get to the late game it feels like 90% of the areas are either cakewalks or borderline impossible unless you’re a parry god, and you really don’t have much clue as to which are which beyond some of the really high level zones being marked with a “Danger!” sign out front, but that isn’t something you can fully rely on. It also just feels weird how many random mobs in Act 3 are way stronger than the big bosses in Act 2, but that’s a lot of RPGs in general tbh.
Second is a story critique of Act 3, ||I feel like we never really got to unpack Lune and Sciel’s thoughts on the massive bombshells that got dropped on them in that Act. Lune especially feels like she should have a ton of questions about what is going on considering how inquisitive she tends to be about the world. It doesn’t break the story for me because the actions/dialogue we get from them still make sense and you can just say those conversations happened off screen during Maelle’s exposition dump or during one of the many camp nights, but still it would’ve been interesting to see and it feels lame that we didn’t get it. Also would’ve answered some of my questions about how this world works.||
All that being said.
These are legit the only issues I have and the rest of the game is just perfection IMO.

[obtuse pond]

The song I’ve had stuck in my head for the past few days is the ||Renoir|| boss fight theme: https://youtu.be/3kMbTzomh94?si=vLM_dQReEQ8TD8Iy

God, the lyrics hit different when you look them up (or if you speak French I guess) and have context for them

[nova temple]

God, Frozen Heart is both a massive zone and it's full of hard enemies. Ran out of chroma elixirs there for the first time since the start of the game. The fact that I just got a level 21 weapon from there, and am looting upgrade components that do up to 32, miiight be trying to tell me that I shouldn't be there at my current level, with level 12 weapons 😅

I've been strugglebusing it for like 2 hours, I think sleep is due

Found some sick costumes though 🎉

[scarlet trout]

Oh yeah I didn’t go back there until after a few zones post act 2

Like I tried it got my butt kicked and was like okay another time then

[reef iron]

i did it in act 3

[obtuse pond]

I did it at the start of Act 3 and had the party timing down perfectly, so I just grinded for a bit there

[exotic ember]

Alright so I cheated and watched the ending with my girlfriend before she takes a flight out tomorrow because we got back from our vacation pretty late tonight and I don’t have the time to throw myself at the end boss until I finally don’t die

[obtuse pond]

Oh, another minor gripe:
I dislike how little I know about how much side content I have left beyond just the achievements left.
Completion trackers for each zone would be nice.

[exotic ember]

Ending || Basically I’m still on the final boss fight against Renoir and I’m more consistently getting to phase 2. But I can’t count on being able to unpack the PS5 and get it beaten tonight and I also need sleep due to a morning meeting ||

[obtuse pond]

I think all I have left in terms of major stuff (so not counting collectibles and whatnot) is ||The Endless Tower, the Painting Workshops and Renoir’s Drafts||
But there might be major stuff in a zone I missed, or maybe there are zones I’m assuming I visited but never actually did.

[exotic ember]

Ending || So we watched both endings. My gf is very much of the mind that this didn’t have to play out this way and that it’s Aline’s fault that everyone dies in the Verso ending because she can’t stop herself from going into the canvas. She thinks that you should be able to at least say that the canvas was destroyed and then hide it away somehow such that Aline wouldn’t find it. And then everyone gets to live. Well except Verso because he should be allowed to choose his fate. ||

Ending || I definitely think the Verso ending is substantially better. Though it’s hard to see our cast of characters all erased. The Maelle ending imo is really messed up in particular forcing Verso to continue to go on against his desires. And Maelle really isn’t dealing with her grief whatsoever. Which as others have noted, isn’t healthy at all. Granted it would be really hard to let go as well ||

Ending || It’s definitely a tricky situation imo.

I can see the argument with Maelle’s argument that these are real people essentially and you’re just wiping out a bunch of lives. Going trolley problem on it basically - Maelle’s life vs everyone else’s ||

[obtuse pond]

Ending ||I feel like everyone in this whole family is at fault in some way.||
||I am curious tho about this idea that Aline would always be able to find the painting no matter where they had it. We know so little about what powers being a Painter actually gives you, it’s possible she can sense the location Verso’s canvas.||

||There are ways this could’ve resolved nicely if Renoir and Maelle were both less stubborn. Unfortunately neither of them budged and that just caused them both to double down.||

[exotic ember]

Ending || I am SO CURIOUS about this whole writers vs painters thing. Such an interesting world and concept.

Someone made a really good point about the painters basically being gods of these worlds they paint. Which is pretty wild ||

[exotic ember]

Ending || Yeah it’d be interesting to see that all explored more. What being a painter entails in more detail ||

[exotic ember]

That’s really fair yeah

Really looking forward to beating the final boss fight and doing all the endgame and side content

[obtuse pond]

Yeah you definitely wanna do the final boss pretty early on into fully exploring Act 3.

Kinda funny how ||Renoir’s Drafts|| is an infinitely tougher area than the actual last story mission area

[exotic ember]

Act 3 || Lumiere boss || || Yeah I went straight to Lumiere basically. I just am dying to phase 2. Consistently making it to phase 2 now though at least as of the other day when I last played ||

I’m tempted to do the side content on the PC save, progressively doing it as I get access to it. Since I’m still in late act 1 there. Coming back to the act 1 side content while leveled to act 3 has me coming in like a wrecking ball lol

I feel like I want the challenge of having to actually learn the enemy attack patterns rather than instantly deleting everything in the side areas I didn’t explore at the time due to wanting to progress the story

Between all the side content and NG+ I think this game will keep me busy for quite some time

Saw this in another discord.

Ending || Project W. Could that W be for Writer(s)? 👀 ||

[shell minnow]

Alright, started listening to the songs outside of the game and I'm right, they're not all in French or English

The title song, Alicia, is in Frenchy gibberish, and does have what seems to be a direct reference to "Grandma" from Nier, which is another surrealist gibberish-French song that I think a lot of the soundtrack sounds inspired by

They both use the very similar words "tovla" and "sovfla" which kept catching my ear

E33:
Kasoi dalé u
Moi dané
Goséi dané
Kala soika tovla
Goséi moéto

Nier:
Cyaré vou pali tandu briavé
Flané imundra lonom
Sovfla monusi ohna kanéro
Issa séttu flanésho

Anyway for people who like e33's music, you'd probably like Grandma as well: https://youtu.be/qgomsK00EuM?si=oimumx7GJp9FBaq1

Also apparently the songs that are in French are not entirely in French and have a lot of gibberish and sometimes Latin in them

[hollow ruin]

So they're sung in gestral language

[reef iron]

oh I don't think I agree

seeing an ending is pretty final and changed my feelings on going back into the game to do more content

[nova temple]

I strongly agree that some kind of completion tracker would've been really super nice

[potent tapir]

I know i can just do the final boss and it will probably be easy, but i agree that once i see the ending ill probably want to stop playing. and I want to do the extra stuff because the game is fun

[reef iron]

listening to lumière on repeat today

time to feel a little sad

[obtuse pond]

I mean I’d curbstomp the final fights if I were to do them now.
I wish the ending was something I could put off until later because it does fit best for the end of the game, but I’ve reached a point where the random mobs I’m encountering do more damage and have more health than anything from the final story mission.

I mean I guess I could use a recoat to take away a lot of my attribute points, weaker weapons and less busted pictos.
But that’s not fun and also a hard thing to judge.

[reef iron]

yes but the final fights are already kind of easy the moment they're available

I never did extra leveling and so when I went into it, the area itself was pretty typical of the difficulty I'd been experiencing, and even for me, the final bosses were easier than the area preceding them

actually I might suggest people go into the final area and go clear it right away without feeling beholden to going to the final fights, because they're going to be easy no matter what

go to the final flag and then back out again lol

ending ||but the emotional impact of seeing the ending choices and seeing a path was pretty... smothering to the desire to keep playing after that||

||I'd rather run through an easy final zone than see the ending before I'm ready||

[obtuse pond]

Maybe just ||turn off the painted power picto|| for the final boss so you can’t end it before the bosses second turn.
Because that is frankly what I would be able to do now.

[analog tiger]

Ending ||all that's needed for it to not be a bad ending is for Renoir to stop being a dumbass and just not erase the canvas||

yeah I saw credits and uninstalled the game lmao

I might do a 100% run eventually but not now