Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

[rancid dagger]

Hm, I do that every opportunity I get when I camp 🤔

It doesn't show up often, actually

[dawn spindle]

how far along are you in the main story?

[rancid dagger]

Further than Glam

[dawn spindle]

hmmm 🤔

[rancid dagger]

I've [act 2 nsfGlam]|| killed Visage already, the other Axon is this week ||

[dawn spindle]

You should have seen that I think then

[rancid dagger]

Maybe I missed one of the check ups

[sick yew]

This was specifically between ||Monoco's Station and Old Lumiere||

[dawn spindle]

I don't think you can miss anything it just accumulates

Like you can have multiple scenes in a row

[rancid dagger]

🤔

[dawn spindle]

Maybe you got bugged?

[rancid dagger]

Last checkup I had was [act 2 probably nsfGlam] || the piano summoning I mentioned earlier ||

[dawn spindle]

hmmm, that is after iirc, so idk

I guess you could go to yt after

[sick yew]

Act 2 ||I'm guessing I'm gonna meet the source of all these glowing swords at some point soon. And it's going to fling them very violently at me.||

[dawn spindle]

I wonder if you had more than one scene and you only checked one and the other got locked out

[sick yew]

Huh. ||A curtailed expedition. Interesting.||

Hmm ||there's a spooky glowing lady with a pet black hole across the chasm. Wonder how I get to her, and how badly I'll get smashed when I do.||

[rancid dagger]

oh...now that I think about it .. Act 2 around where Glam is || I wanted to go back to Old Lumiere cause I think I missed some stuff in there...but I had just "finished" the area right before my month long hiatus and I forgot ||

[sick yew]

||Hmm what was that giant thing with a...sword head?||

||Feels like home. WHAT ARE YOU HIDING VERSO||

||Wait a sec, Verso and Maelle's starting point is super close to the others'||

[sick yew]

Act 2 ||How does Maelle recognize this manor? What is going on with her????||

||Ooh is this the manor that's floating around? And she ended up there and didn't really remember how. Also who wrote that message at the tree? ||

||A journal from Renoir?????||

||OH my. Someone who's like the Curator....and Renoir is already there?||

Hmm. ||Renoir's son. Not too surprising.||

||OOOh this is some bopping boss fight music||

[rancid dagger]

Time to do some Obscuring myself

[pulsar citrus]

I also missed this in my 1st playthrough

Act 2 || Post Monoco Station || || this camp scene happens if you camp after clearing Monoco Station but before Old Lumiere.

And unlike all the other times where either the game forces you to camp beforehand (by saying "I am tired") or send us directly into a camp after exiting MS via a cutscene occuring in "Back at Camp"||

[pulsar citrus]

No this "check up on others scene" doesn't stack. It is lost if you miss your timing

Act 3 all ||
#1365016201465565184 message

Blud is not ready for Simon. ||

[sick yew]

Act 2 ||Old Lumiere|| ||Well that was a fun fight. Was not expecting to fight Renoir this early in the game, he gave mid-Act 3 vibes.||

[pulsar citrus]

||How do you like the mechanics he uses in the fight||

[sick yew]

||Also my glass cannon back up worked perfectly. Took him on as long as I could with Verso, Maelle, and Sciel. Then had Monoco equip the auto-die, and took out the last half (it should have been a quarter, but I didn't quite kill the one petal) with Lune's Elemental Genesis combo.||

[sick yew]

Super cool.

||Not quite as cool as Dualliste. But still cool.||

||Noco ||

||Alice???||

||Okay Verso, you have some explaining to do.||

||I feel really bad about making Monoco take the auto-death now 😭 ||

[rancid dagger]

lmao, I missed a crap-ton in this area, wth

[rancid dagger]

|| Poor Monoco, is also my auto die sacrificial lamb ||

[sick yew]

Act 2 ||.....Verso dies his hair????||

[nova temple]

What, noo

[sick yew]

Am disappointed this didn't pan out. At least for now.

[rancid dagger]

Insane the amount of stuff I missed. I also I'm certain I missed [general mechanics] || Energizing Start II somewhere in acts 1 or 2. I have I, III and IV lol. II would come in handy actually, at I assume 10 Lumina ||

I may just google that, tbh

but for now I just entered [late? act 2] || Sirene, so will be exploring that over the week ||

[sick yew]

Went and found another ||Gestral Beach. Man, these are all jank but make so much more sense than the volleyball one.||

||Technically, this one (the race one) was just another type of platforming challenge.||

[errant wedge]

||The volleyball one was giga cursed. The other ones are just mildly cursed.||

[sick yew]

I walked into ||the volleyball one thinking "oh, so basically a parry-rhythm game with a bit of aiming" and instead got the most demented and abusive lesson in attack cones and animation recovery time in the history of video games.||

||The rest of the beach challenges so far have been platforming in a physics-setup that wasn't really designed for platforming. They're jank but just kinda...work.||

[exotic ember]

I still think act 2 safe for glam || the volleyball game wasn’t that bad. And I don’t know what that says about me ||

[pulsar citrus]

Same || I was only able to clear the volleyball flgame among all the ones

I think I can genuinely do the Only Up game too but I never tried. I was just not in the mood. The racing one, I got silver too.||

[rancid dagger]

Act 2 || Old Lumiere + Falling Leaves || || Besides the boss that can only be killed with counter attacks, which required me to restart the fight dozens of times, I've faced the first enemy that had me restart a fight since I changed my build ... the black hole lady 😭 ||

[nova temple]

||I love the danseuses, their combos can get so hectic||

[errant wedge]

Act 2 Soia ||Is the boss Soia is referring to the Chromatic Ramasseur? I liked that guy. The dude who wields multiple severed Expeditioner arms.||

[rancid dagger]

it is

hated him with a passion

well, just to be clear, I'm talking about both him and the one Argent brought up. Her I didn't hate

act 2 || falling leaves || || Ramasseur was literally the first big enemy I fought after I decided to throw parry in the bin... you can imagine my face when I pieced together the gimmick in that fight ||

[pulsar citrus]

Act 3 all || I also only finished that fight after Act 3. He becomes piece of cake with first strike and awful amount of damage we can do.||

Act 3 || Endless Tower|| - || final paintings || || and then they gave us clea to make us finally play the gimmick again in the end. ||

[sullen quartz]

See, you could have just said "My, what lovely feet", but this works just fine too

[sick yew]

Ugh, another day with no time/energy for E33. I wanna parry it!

[rancid dagger]

Ive been doling out like an hour per night

Act 2 || Sirene || || I'll face her tomorrow, I think I cleaned up her place otherwise...||

and yes, I have missed [general] || energizing start II , seems like its all the way back in the sanctuary, oops... makes me wonder what else I might have missed, I find it really hard to navigate these environments||

Ill be going back for it after this...maybe, its far

maybe I wait for || flying ||

[sick yew]

Oh I've missed that one too.

I think I'm going to wait to do a big map clean-up until [general, late act 1] ||I unlock Esquie's ability to fly. Because swimming+walking is so slow sometimes.||

[sick yew]

Okay. Finishing up a bit of exploring, then (Act 2) ||Time to go fight an Axon.||

||If it doesn't look like this when I find it, I'm going to be sorely disappointed.||

[inner valve]

Omg same

[merry lance]

Act 2 all ||I mean, one of them has masks, that's basically the same, right?||

[sick yew]

Okay act 2 ||Visages|| ||Is there a 'correct' choice, between exploring and taking the other paths? I'm just anxious about the idea of missing things that I won't get to go back and do later.||

Question that I'd like a yes or no answer to please. ^

[rancid dagger]

I can't let Glam catch up! Time to Expedite as well!

-# yes I used that word on purpose

[quaint gale]

act 2 ||I think you're better off taking the other paths first. I don't recall how clearly it's signposted which is the main path though.||

[sick yew]

Quite clearly.

[rancid dagger]

very explicitly 😹

[sick yew]

Either way, thank you.

A hearty

[quaint gale]

I have watched people play the game, not played it myself, so some details stick better than others 😅

[rancid dagger]

I did this last week, and having not looked further into it, I didn't see any reason to not do it

i.e. || I didn't see a reason not to explore the side paths first ||

|| But I can't say whether not doing it locks you out of anything 🤔 ||

|| I'd guess not ||

[quaint gale]

||I'd guess there just isn't anything to fight in those paths afterwards.||

[rancid dagger]

as for myself, I'm Act 2 (Safe for Glam) || About to go face the other Axon ||

NSF Glam || Well, some of those enemies drop some specific loot, so I'd guess they'd still be there? 🤔 ||

[dawn spindle]

Man, I'm not sure but I reckon you should be able to do them after but I guess don't just in case?

[pulsar citrus]

I will advise Act 2 || try to fight the boss without clearing the side paths and if it is too difficult then return back and clear those paths||

[sick yew]

Act 2 ||Will the other paths still be available to me if I end up defeating the boss though?||

[errant wedge]

No correct choice, any order is fine.

[rancid dagger]

Act 2 || Sirene || || This was somehow easier than Visage 🤔 . I absolutely failed to dodge or parry all attacks but each dealt maybe 3% of my health ||

[pulsar citrus]

No

Actually

I accidentally said yes

[pulsar citrus]

|| they both require the same level but that means levelling up from one Axon makes the other easier.

Also if you are using Dark Type weapons/skills then you are absolutely melting Sirene||

[rancid dagger]

I didn't speculate much on the story so far because I like being surprised, so I try not to overthink things too much as I'm experiencing them but, throwing some surface level thoughts out there before I learn any more Act 2 (probably near end || post both axons ||) || The only big thought I had is... there has to be some kind of "resurrection" (not literally) cycle or something of the sort, right? 🤔 Feels like Gustave is Verso, Maelle is Alicia and... idk wth happened at the end of the Visage and Sirene fights, but... Sciel said something really weird about the mask? Almost made it seem like Visage was Sciel and therefore Sirene was Lune . These last 2 is just me grasping madly to add these 2 into my "theory" ||

[sick yew]

Okay. Act 2 ||Visages||||Gonna have to call it at 2/3 alternate paths tonight. The Joy one took friggin forever, I should have just let everyone die to bring Lune in and nuke the boss in two turns. But I tried to do it the "right" way. ||

||I think the worst part is I had to sit through the animation every time the mask went to heal her.||

[rancid dagger]

Act 2 || Post Axons || || Time to go face the Paintress. I'm totally going to kill her and finish the game, right guys? ||

[errant wedge]

🍿

[inner valve]

Act 2 ||Also post Axons|| ||Just beat Visages earlier. It was really satiafying that Sciel basically soloed the boss because of the cutscene after. I think I accidentally made a busted Sciel because she has been carrying me through boss fights this entire Act lol.
Some weird stuff goin on with the Caretaker and Verso and the Mask Keeper (or whatever his name was). There is some interesting stuff with like... I think something with thr Gommage is making people not themselves. Or multiple of themselves or something. It definitely seems like Maelle is related to Alicia in some odd way. Verso might not be Verso. And I dunno why but the Caretaker is maybe Gustave somehow lol. I'mprobably way off but that'swhere my head is||

Act 2 still, same as above ||VERY happy Maelle is the one to get the cool Barrier Breaker and not Verso lol. I kinda wanted Maelle to become the main character after Gustave died, and maybe she kinda is still, but the fact that we are mainly controlling Verso (with the relationships and stuff) kinda rubs me in a bad way.||

[errant wedge]

I love how we have 3 people in almost the same place in the game.

[rancid dagger]

Act 2 || Monolith || || I'll be honest, the story makes absolutely no sense to me so far, but let's throw in some more insane takes before more is (hopefully) revealed. I think the Paintress is supposed to be Verso's mother (or her equivalent in this weird cycle thingie I'm proposing). I had sent the previous message before I saw the camp scene where Verso takes Alicia's mask off, and idk if I'm just face blind or what but come on, she's just other-Maelle. Also at the Monolith Maelle being the first to start burning (in her face specifically) didn't escape me. I was a bit thrown off by the rest of the party catching fire as well, though ||

|| I say I'm proposing a cycle thingie but Renoir literally used that word in one of the obtuse dialogues he has with Verso ||

[brisk orbit]

hows it going soia

Do you like the game so far?

I've been feeling a bit down lately, but I am getting up right now 😔

[rancid dagger]

|| Do I have anything else? Prob not, the game hasn't given me too much to work with (and as I said I'm not much into speculating, I should keep going and let the game show me what it is) ||

[rancid dagger]

Sorry to hear that :/
But if that's the case you probably don't want to hear my honest thoughts about the game so far

[brisk orbit]

no i need a distraction

[rancid dagger]

game has been... fine so far. It hasn't come close to living up to the hype bestowed upon it by several different groups of people I interact with. I'm actually surprised by how consistently the game has been talked up by very different people I know who don't know each other, and that I'm the outlier

and I don't expect that any big reveal/twist/something in act 3 (which I am expecting is coming) is going to meaningfully change that at this point. I have no idea what's coming next, but I think at best it's going to make me go "wow, that is a really cool idea, I love it", which would be nice... but that's not gonna change how I got there which has been just ok

if that makes any sense

to put it into perspective, when I was about 25ish hours into the game I had to take a week break from it due to a trip, and when I got back I wasn't salivating to get back into the game, I actually spent 3+ additional weeks playing other stuff and kind of had to force myself back into the game ;/

[inner valve]

So... near Act 2? ||Should I make sure to do any particular thing before going to the Monolith? Anything permanently missable? :0||

[rancid dagger]

Oh yeah, I just read ERROR's messages before mine and I forgot about || The Curator. First time they showed up I immediately thought they'd be either Maelle's father or mother. If I want to follow through with the insanity that is my current thoughts, based on some recent interactions with the Curator I'd lean more towards it being her "father", which would make him the Renoir analog, which ... feels right based on the cut scene right before he forges the Barrier Breaker? ||

[halcyon elbow]

Nothing is permanently missable except for stuff in the prologue

[inner valve]

Okay that's great! I think I did about everything I could in the Prologue, so that's a relief!

[rancid dagger]

Oh, I do have one more bit of insane speculation I wanna throw out there before I complete act 2 || the monolith||

Tomorrow, tho, I really gotta sleep now

[sullen quartz]

Dang, you're right, the suspense is killing me 😆

Everyone's getting to the end of Act 2 and I'm just excited to see reactions

[rancid dagger]

Act 2 the speculation I ... owe (?) you guys || Unlike what I'd said the other day, I did backtrack a bit even though I can't fly yet (I also think I heard Esquie mention the stone that's gonna allow for that... Sorrie or Soarrie or something). I went aaaall the way back to the beginning to check on some areas that said Danger and I hadn't gone into. They still say Danger, so I didn't go into the ... Black Woods (?) which I regret a bit, I should've at least checked that out. Seems like getting past that area drops into an otherwise innacessible area of the map where there's some weird showdown happening between a lady and some nevrons or something?

Anyway, on my way back I stopped by ... the Red Woods (?) .. it's the Danger area near the Gestral arena, with the chroma fountain. I dropped some chroma in there to get the philosophy dumps. I stopped at the 50k one cause who has that kind of money but...the one prior to that had some interesting things to say... (or maybe it was even the very first one? I don't recall): I don't remember verbatim but it was something to the effect of .. should fabricated consciousness have the same... weight? rights? consideration? of "naturally" occurring consciousness and I was like, uh...

What if my "reincarnation" cycle, which I don't think is literally what's happening, was instead some kind of quasi-cloning cycle or something? What if everyone here is fabricated? "Fake" people built from some blueprint? Would explain my "everyone is everyone else" feeling (i.e. Maelle is Alicia and such). Would maybe also explain the completely non-sensical world so far.

Idea makes sense to me, but I don't know if I like it . I'll of course have to wait and see exactly what's up, but if I'm right it's giving me "Ash was in coma all along" vibes ||

[dawn spindle]

What are you doing next

[rancid dagger]

Im Act 2 || Inside the Monolith atm. That's where I left off last night. Tonight I'll continue exploring there. I've just got through the corrupted flying waters part and stopped at the 2nd flag ||

[sick yew]

Okay. Should be workig right now but (Act 2) ||I wanna finish up Visages here, see how long this takes.||

[sick yew]

||Got to phase 2, will probably get it next attempt but gotta go do other stuff first.||

[inner valve]

Same spot!
||Went to confront the Paintress, got shunted into the Monolith and now all enemies one shot me lol.
Might consider backtracking for more Lumina since I've been mainlining the story and have kinda foregone exploring ||

[rancid dagger]

Oh yeah, I've been quite thorough (or as thorough as I had patience for). I feel like I'm distinctively overleveled for the main story content

Act 2 || both axons were a joke (as were their trash mobs) and the monolith so far has been quite smooth ||

What lvl are you?

[halcyon elbow]

This isn't so much you as it is, this is just an underpowered part of the game

Just about everyone has this experience

[inner valve]

I'll check next time I'm on! (Maybe in an hour or two)

[rancid dagger]

time to itadai

[rancid dagger]

Act 2 || Yeah, the Axons just seemed pathetically weak regardless of level, but ERROR does seem to be struggling at the Monolith where I'm not. I'm curious what level they are ||

[inner valve]

Getting on now!
Act 2 ||Looks like my main 3 are at 40 and the other two are 37 and 38. That said, I have not really utilized Lumina as best I can, upgraded weapons or explored too terribly much. There's a lot of room for improvement, which is what I'm gonna do now I think. Maybe actually use some Colors of Lumina... I only have 94 😅 That's about 20 per character which is like at minimum at least one nice Lumina.||

[inner valve]

I think I might be like... not in headspace to be able to craft builds for my characters. Would anyone have any tips or resources for that?
Right now what I've tried to do is:
Act 2
||
Verso kinda doesn't do anything lol. Kinda tried to turn him into a free shot guy, but he's not good at it.

Maelle is burn-based which works quite nicely.

Lune tries to be a crit mage, but her crit only gets up to 75% so far and she seems like by far the weakest member of my team.

Monoco just has "good moves" and is weirdly naturally strong. Has a regen/heal spell for fun.

Sciel is easily the strongest team member for no particular reason I can fathom lol. She gets into twilight, does her first Gradient attack and then does huge burst damage. Is ALSO super beefy so she never goes down. She is honestly who I've relied on for bosses this entire act...
||

[rancid dagger]

Ok yeah, Act 2 || When I got to the Monolith my main 3 were all above 50. Big difference there. And I've used a ton of Lumina and still have like 80 to spare ||

and yes || Sciel is simply the best. At everything. Period. She is just the best. ||

I don't consider myself much of a buildcrafter, but honestly in my team || really only Maelle and Sciel deal damage. Lune is there just for healing, buffing, providing AP (via healing) and providing burn stacks for Maelle to enter Virtuoso stance ||

|| Verso and Monoco are after thoughts ||

and it's been working pretty well so far

|| This is my Maelle. I swap Spark for Breaking Rules if there's too much shield on the enemies ||

|| My Sciel ||

|| And Lune ||

|| Can share my Lumina as well if you'd like, but possible spoilers there ||

[dawn spindle]

what level are you Soia?

[inner valve]

||Okay so we're not too dissimilar in approach, you're just further along that track than I am. That makes me feel better! :)
Gonna do some exploring and get some levels, more weapons and pictos levels hopefully and that should set me up nicely. It would probably he prudent to turn someone into a healer of some sort... but i don't wanna force any of the girls into that position because they're all such bad asses. Maybe I can finagle Verso or Monoco into a healer.||

[rancid dagger]

55, 54, 53 (edit: and I guess 49 and 45 for the 2 loser boys)

Yeah, weapon level is honestly the biggest flat damage increase it seems. Combo-ing of course is the tactical part of it

but I got a lvl 20 and a lvl 19 weapon and that's pretty nice for damage

[rancid dagger]

|| Oh, ops, Ice Lance should be the revive spell . I swapped for Ice Lance to fight a Petank ||

|| Lune is honestly the best healer, and with energizing heal she can really enable the other 2 gals to just keep pumping ||

|| build works if you are rubbish at parrying like I am, so I need the heals and I need the AP they provide, cause otherwise I'd just run short of AP and of being alive ||

[rancid dagger]

|| That plus rush on heal, shell on heal, and powerful on shell means when I do the aoe heal I apply all 3 buffs to every character. With longer shell and longer powerful duration goes from a single turn to 3. Pretty good value. I just need to find longer rush now ||

(honestly tempted to google it, would make that combo really sweet)

|| all my girls have about 100 Lumina as well, which means I pumped ~50 color of lumina each. I've wasted some on Verso as well, and 0 on Monoco ||

|| Monoco is... just along for the ride, really. He is sporting the auto die lumina for if I decide to continue trying a fight the girls lose, and I'm running an extremely rubbish solo Verso build that is... not very good ||

[inner valve]

Ohhhhhhh my gosh I've been underestimating this game I think. Or otherwise perhaps not respecting it with my full attention because something like that hasn't even crossed my mind 😅
What a good idea. I might steal that :3

[rancid dagger]

go for it!

[inner valve]

||Jeez how many Colors of Lumina have you found!?? I suppose that's the (or a) reward for exploring where I've lacked but dang!||

[rancid dagger]

|| You can almost aoe heal every turn with Lune, btw. Between Energizing Turn and the 2 AP you get from the heal itself, that's 4 AP per turn guaranteed, and the aoe heal is 5. All you need is 1 parry (or 1 Dodger dodge, or in my case take 1 hit with Energizing Pain) and bam, aoe heal is ready for you ||

[rancid dagger]

Yes, they are everywhere

[sick yew]

Act 2 ||Visages. Damn, was really close that time. And now I gotta go through the whole first phase again.||

[rancid dagger]

exploring 3d environments in third person makes me dizzy, and this game in particular has really noisy and confusing environment design. I'm actually surprised I've been managing to find as much stuff as I have

[rancid dagger]

Probably about ~250 so far? Between exploring and vendors (which are also often times "locked" behind exploration)

[inner valve]

You'll get it :3
||On my second attempt the first phase went down eeeasy. Then the second had me scrapping, but still :)||

[inner valve]

I AGREE

[errant wedge]

Your builds are cute. 🥲

Soia has a good idea with the ||healing-based lumina chain|| at least.

[inner valve]

??? :0

Gosh, I bet there are some truly degenerate builds out there huh?

[errant wedge]

Act 2 build strength is actually fairly constrained.

[merry lance]

The head of the studio loves the idea of degenerate builds in single player games, and is probably sad that most games won't let you break them more

[inner valve]

I genuinely love games that invite you to break them. I guess I didn't realize that this was one of them.
(I won't get into it but I am feeling more and more I've done this game a disservice by lack of attention/commitment for outside reasons)

[errant wedge]

Late Act 2 builds basically do 7,9992 - 119,988 damage on a good move. As most folks do you guys are underestimating ||Monoco|| who is actually peak in Act 2. And your Sciels are not as good as mine. 😉

[rancid dagger]

|| I just never farmed feet so he will be forever relegated to Not Used ||

|| Am I correct in assuming the best skills are the ones that have the most hits? Because of the damage cap? Cause... I often hit the damage cap so I've been looking to incorporate as many multi hits as possible ||

also this number makes no sense, Skrim: 7,9992

[inner valve]

This is my understanding as well

[errant wedge]

79,992

[merry lance]

Act 2 ||Yeah, Monoco was my default fight solution for I think Old Lumiere through to the end of Act 2. I don't remember the full setup, but I'm pretty sure I was swinging for ~30k (hitting all) with zero prep on turn 1 with him||

[inner valve]

How lol.
Are these reasonably achievable? Or like very very specific feats that are not for the weak? :b

[merry lance]

This game does math the fun way

[errant wedge]

Yes these are normal Act 2 ||Axons - Monolith|| arc numbers.

[rancid dagger]

is that ST damage or across multiple enemies?

Idk that I've seen any skill that does 12 hits 🤔

[errant wedge]

😔

[rancid dagger]

it's a feet, ain't it ?

[inner valve]

!??? I cannot imagine how 😅

[errant wedge]

It ain't.

[rancid dagger]

ok, Im just blind then

[errant wedge]

||Lune underestimaters|| smh 😔

[sick yew]

Aaand got it. Whew.

[inner valve]

||Sciels first Gradient does like 10 hits, but that requires some setup...||

[merry lance]

Buildcrafting general ||All of the multipliers for all of the feats are distinctly multiplicative (rather than summing first), so 5 hypothetical feats that give you +100% damage give you 2^5 times damage instead of 600% damage||

[inner valve]

||Feat here meaning conditonal multiplier, like "when attacking a burning enemy", etc?||

[sick yew]

Yeah. ||The first phase has relatively predictable attacks, the only one I really still struggled with was Anxiety (lol, lmao even). It just is a long phase though, particularly because I keep Lune and her nuke build in reserve.||

[merry lance]

||Right, yeah, terms of the trade, pictos||

[rancid dagger]

Oh, Thunderfall?

[sick yew]

But it worked, ||I managed to get Mask Keeper down to half health with the team, then they died and Lune rotated in and melted his face off.||

[rancid dagger]

I think I tried that at some point early on 🤔

[errant wedge]

Glam is a good fella, he is not a Lune underestimater.

[rancid dagger]

I mean, I did dps Lune at first, but I desperately need the healing

not everyone can play the parry game 🙁

[sick yew]

General buildcrafting ||Not me! Lune is my favorite, and she's the only one I feel I've managed to "crack". Though I haven't unlocked Thunderfall yet.||

[merry lance]

||Erm, Luminas? It's been a while...||

[errant wedge]

Your Lumina chain is very similar to mine! Your source of healing is different.

[rancid dagger]

ooh, || Verso has a 13 hit skill as well ||

[sick yew]

I need better builds for everyone else though. But nothing's stood out to me like the Lune build I figured out on my own.

Might have to look up guides for them.

[errant wedge]

Elemental Genesis is kinda GOATed on the AP economy tho, it has that edge over Lightning Dance.

[sick yew]

Also should probably use Monoco more, ||he's currently stuck with the auto-die so that Lune can get those solo crits.||

[rancid dagger]

didn't even see Lightning Dance there

[sick yew]

Yep, just need two Powerful Starts (and no parries/other sources of AP) to fuel her nuke.

Okay cutscene time.

[merry lance]

If you want a nudge to investigate into, ||IIRC around where you are, I was seeing a lot of success with Verso using the weapon Dualliste drops (I might've needed to upgrade it for a passive, IDR).||

[errant wedge]

Also a peak Act 2 instrument.

[sick yew]

||Lmao the masks bouncing off of Monoco's stupid face||

||Wait did Verso take someone else's name? What????||

[inner valve]

||I HAVE THE SAME THOUGHT||

[sick yew]

||Good fight overall. Still not as cool as Dualliste, but that's a very high bar.||

[errant wedge]

||Dualliste got that sick cinematic finale.||

[inner valve]

||This is the one that gives extra base attacks?||

[sick yew]

||Also he had two friggin swords, one of which was molten and the other was glowing with the void. And we fought him in a pool of blood surrounded by the corpses of his countless conquests.||

So. Friggin. Metal.

[errant wedge]

||And he wears Expedition flags woven into a cape. Dualliste is metal.||

[inner valve]

||I did not catch that. That's so sick||

[sick yew]

Act 2 ||Post Visages|| ||Okay so if the Curator is Renoir......and Verso thought Visages was Verso....so everyone was turned into a Nevron when the Shattering happend, and then reincarnated or something? Would explain how Maelle was actually born to people and is also somehow at the center of everything.||

Gosh what's going on here.

[dawn spindle]

So there's three of you at nearly the same spot?

This is so fun

[merry lance]

Yeah, they just sorta sprung up out of nowhere

[sick yew]

Yep! Lmao. I'm probably the furthest behind.

[dawn spindle]

I'm glad the channel got reopened

[sick yew]

Act 2 ||Can't start the other Axon tonight, is too late.||

[dawn spindle]

I'd be missing this otherwise among all the other stuff I've been ignoring in videogames lol

[sick yew]

||But I'm gonna try and hammer it out over the weekend.||

[sick yew]

I'm glad I'm not the only one using the channel, was starting to feel guilty there for a bit.

[dawn spindle]

I did use it a bit but it was just me getting 100% so

[inner valve]

Yay! I'm also mostly free this weekend too so I wanna try to get as far as I can while I have the time!

[dawn spindle]

Technically I still have content to do in the game but I just feel quite content and done with it

[errant wedge]

Thank goodness Argent reopened this lol.

[sick yew]

Lmao, I forgot to heal before going to camp.

||So I'm going through a conversation with Verso looking like complete crap.||

||there's blood covering half his face||

[dawn spindle]

Such is life

[sick yew]

Damn. ||These are legit good hair styles on both of them||

[inner valve]

Also! ||Visages was quoting or otherwise paralleling some text from a journal found in the Mansion (Manor?) which I think you access during that section leading up to the fight, that I felt was from Renoir to Verso if I'm not mistaken. He also said "Front and back. Recto, verso" which again has me feeling that Verso is somehow one part of a person. Does the Gommage split someone in two? Does the Gommage turn you into a Nevron? What does being stuck in the middle of thr Gommage do to a person?||

[sick yew]

||I have all the same questions.||\

[rancid dagger]

I too must stop for tonight

Act 2 || Monolith || || This place is so freaking long. Maybe too long. I've been here for what, 3h now? If the pattern of revisiting the areas continues I'm looking at 3 more hours to go ||

[dawn spindle]

I love all of your theories, they're delicious 🍿 please keep 'em coming

[rancid dagger]

|| I'm at the Cliffs part, I don't readily remember what all other areas there were after that. Monoco Station, Old Lumiere, Forgotten Battlefield (order is off I know), uh... idk. Tomorrow ||

as far as builds go... I have a tendency to not change what's working, even if it could be better

I'm also not playing at max difficulty so it doesn't really matter

[dawn spindle]

I played at max difficulty and I was fine not changing stuff until it was quite needed

which was way later than "it could be better"

Like there's a huge margin of me knowing I could have a better build until I actually needed one

[merry lance]

I'm pretty sure you were also parrymaxing though, Soia's parryminning

[dawn spindle]

yeah but he has a build for that

[rancid dagger]

oh yea, screw parry

[dawn spindle]

parry is obsolete in later game if you don't build for it

[rancid dagger]

although, I have brought back parry on my 2 dps girls, just in the off chance I hit it I can get some extra dps in

[dawn spindle]

unless you wanna play for 22384792 h per fight

[merry lance]

I mean, "I don't take damage this attack" is still pretty strong...

[nova temple]

||I will point out that these are painting terms. Whether that's all there, and the Mask Keeper is some weird poet, or if there's more to it, is an exercise best left to the reader...||

[dawn spindle]

is Soia just tanking?

out of curiosity

like I assume he'd at least do some dodging

[inner valve]

I'm on max difficulty and just kinda struggling through it 😅 Dodging as I can, parrying when I feel I can dodge.

[nova temple]

||Monolith is soooooooo long||

[rancid dagger]

so initially I was dodging with Dodger, until I got a Perfect dodge, then I'd make a decision on whether I needed more AP or not. If not I'd keep dodging which is much easier (And still get hit some times), but if I needed AP I'd just tank the hit (Energizing Pain)

[dawn spindle]

I did specifically do only parry the entire playthrough, but the only way imo to get good at it is to force yourself to not dodge

So the beginning was a bit painful but at some point I tried dodging instead of parrying and I was doing it so tight that it made no difference timing wise frmo parrying

[rancid dagger]

I've since taken Dodger and Energizing Pain out of my 2 non healers and have been trying to parry for counter damage (and the AP), but I probably only get like 30% counter out

[inner valve]

Hmmmmm. This is a fun case for me of not knowing about the field at all and being able to just project whatever fun thoughts I have at it, as opposed to someone who actually knows about the things being referenced or having an homage made to them might take something completely different :0

[inner valve]

Masochistic ;b
But I know how some games do be like that

[rancid dagger]

ok, that's why you were getting 1 shot and I was not (besides lvl diff)

[dawn spindle]

I don't usually like parrying in games

[nova temple]

Some moves I just refused to learn the parry timing and defaulted to dodging them, even if I was mostly a parry enjoyer

[dawn spindle]

I didn't do that with anything by the end of it

it took longer to learn to dodge than to learn to parry

Because I was automatically doing them in the parry window and if anything being slightly late

[sick yew]

Act 2 ||Ah the piano summoning.||

Wild.

[rancid dagger]

Right?!

Act 2 || He should just ditch the sword and summon pianos on top of enemies' heads ||

[dawn spindle]

I did however E33 ALL (ALL) ||Blast Simon's final phase with 1 gommage from Maelle, I had been able to parry his triple sword attacks just fine but I wanted all the XP on my main party ||

[halcyon elbow]

I didn't really find dodging to be all that much more useful than parrying

The Perfect Dodge timing is the same as the parry window anyway

[dawn spindle]

just the window is bigger to avoid attacks, I had just trained myself too hard by the time I thought "man I'd like to dodge this"

[halcyon elbow]

If anything, the longer dodge window meant that the cooldown before you could dodge again was further away from the initial button press if you missed the dodge

[dawn spindle]

like, you're not using a regular dodge (not perfect) to get stuff from it but because you do want to avoid damage one way or another?

[sick yew]

Gosh this game has a lot of heart.

[rancid dagger]

I get Imperfect Dodges more often than Perfect ones sooo... it's nice for me when I can't tank the damage

or, in other words, I miss my Parries more often than I hit them, so Dodging is a nice fallback

[inner valve]

||Lol.
Doing some exploring and found a journal from E36. Sciel comments "This world is full of wonders". Maelle, reasonably stressed "AND YET EVERYWHERE WE GO, WE WALK WITH DEATH"
Poor girl||

[nova temple]

||Maelle has a very not good bad Act 2 ||

[sick yew]

Oh. Oh. ||Now Sciel's trying to seduce Verso.||

||Question, does saying yes or no meaningfully change things with the others? Will I miss out on some Lune interactions if I do it?||

[nova temple]

||Yes. You kind of get to pick whether to have a little bit of romance with Sciel or with Lune, and Sciel's scene is first, so if you go with it now, you are locked out of Lune's. Both are veeery minor though||

[sick yew]

Hmm okay.

||I'm not sure I'll say yes to either.||

||"I'll go be adventurous by myself" ||

[nova temple]

||I made a very conscious choice to accept Sciel because a) it felt kind of right that she would want to have a little flingy fun, and b) I didn't want to risk saddling Lune with Verso who doesn't deserve her 😤 ||

[sick yew]

||Lune and Sciel deserve each other, which is why I don't want to do either.||

||I'm sure I'll do another playthrough at some point, maybe I'll make a choice then. And or do some save scrumming.||

[nova temple]

||You are correct, but the game unfortunately doesn't give you that option||

[inner valve]

||So I also had Verso reject Sciels advances. I personally like Lune more, but also don't feel like she'd jive with Verso. Sciel is also amazing, to be sure, like her a lot. But I kinda don't want Verso to get with either lol||

[sick yew]

Also it wasn't until the last time I played that ||I figured out how to sprint with Esquie.||

[errant wedge]

Acceleracion!

[inner valve]

Time for a swim-swim!

Okay buddy 🥺
He's so cute :3

[dawn spindle]

Same Glam tags/topic ||I think Verso makes sense with both but only Sciel makes sense with him? I personally like Lune more but I did go with Sciel||

[sick yew]

Act 2 open world ||Oh there's two mimes on this island. Hmm. Not tonight.||

[dawn spindle]

He's so cute
Also him: ||Let's get wet||

[sick yew]

I'm inclined to agree. ||Both are very crushable, but yeah I don't think it would work with Lune. With Sciel, I think they'd be fine just having a flinb but also could do something more long lasting.||

[nova temple]

||No swimsuit for Esq, unfortunately||

[sick yew]

||Maybe he is just walking around naked.||

[dawn spindle]

||I think he'd have something more long lasting with Lune than Sciel actually||

||And a fling with Sciel||

[sick yew]

||Perhaps....but it'd take a long time for them to get there. And there'd be lots of chances for it to not work out first.||

[dawn spindle]

Agreed

[nova temple]

||There's an artist whose work I run into every now and then who has a whole Verso/Gustave AU thing going on, it's kinda fun||

[dawn spindle]

Hmmm

[rancid dagger]

Self love is very important

[sick yew]

||I'm not discounting it of course, but I'd need to be convinced.||

[dawn spindle]

||Id see Verso more with one of the other guys that die on the prologue if anything?, on the ship that is||

I don't know with who but one of those

[nova temple]

Alan?

[dawn spindle]

||Verso with Gustave's sister would be kinda funny too||

[nova temple]

Oh, just someone

[dawn spindle]

There's a few there that fit my mental vibe better

[rancid dagger]

|| That'd be incest. Scandalous, Usha. ||

[dawn spindle]

Terrible indeed 😇

[candid kindle]

General build stuff: || I think just a general tip is that character levels don't matter all that much aside from unlocking skills and getting a few more lumina points. Upgrading your weapon has a much, much, much bigger impact on your damage than leveling up, even if you invest all your points into might. The biggest impact by far on your tankyness comes from equipped pictos, the stats on those matter A LOT. ||

For a specific build || I had a lot of success in act 2 by investing my resources into Lune's weapon, having her use storm caller turn 1, and then proccing it 20 times with Verso who I gave a lot of basic attack / free aim related luminas and the weapon from Dualliste. Using Lightning dance is probably still more damage, but you can do both going Typhoon --> Storm caller --> Lightning Dance, which gives you healing, a ton of benefits (AP, buffs) from on-heal luminas, the right stains for empowered lightning dance, and a ton of damage. ||

[pulsar citrus]

same. I also went dizzy so many times traversing through this game

[pulsar citrus]

White Tree || I have a feeling that that area makes everyone talk in poems which is why both the Journal and the duos dialogue was in poem||

[pulsar citrus]

same

[pulsar citrus]

I know who you are talking about. I had seen the origin story comic of it at the very heat of the game

[rancid dagger]

Act 2 || Monolith || || So I guess Aline is the Mom and the Paintress. Possibly Verso and Alicia had a brother who died? ||

ok I just had a completely funny moment for a very stupid reason

I'm 50h into the game, these characters have been through a ton of crap, I'm literally Act 2 || Monolith || || Inside the memories of the Paintress ||, but I pick about 4k chroma and Lune goes in an extremely intrigued voice "Interesting."

[rancid dagger]

|| OOOH, that's maybe who the fading boy is ||

... my controller almost fell from my lap and in my reaction to hold it down I accidentally reset attributes on Lune

[halcyon elbow]

Just as an FYI, you'll probably want a good ~3hr when you get to the end of this dungeon to do it and everything that follows kind of all at once

You don't have to, but you'll want to

[dawn spindle]

I got killed by my cat multiple times, however i also did manage to parry blind once or twice (without seeing the screen) so this is life, maybe she needed a reset yknow

[rancid dagger]

Nvm, || saw a memory of her teaching the fading boy the piano, so he has to be Verso. Which doesn't negate the theory that he is the son who died, though. Verso could be the "clone" ||

[sick yew]

Alrighty! Act 2 ||Time to see what's up with this second Axon. Visages was supposed to be the "easy" one. I'm gonna at least make it to the Axon itself tonight, and depending on how I'm feeling/have spoons for, might do some of the immediate aftermath. Hopefully none of the side areas that I haven't explored yet will change significantly after I (presumably) confront the Paintress and start Act 3.||

misc. Act 2 thoughts/speculation ||Since the Act 2 open world takes us all the way up to the Paintress's Monolith, I assume that the expedition makes it to her, then something goes horribly wrong (probably involving Maelle, though I don't know what's up with Sciel either, Esquie recognized her and she was the one immune to the masks). I don't know how much the overworld will be changed by this, but I expect that Act 3 levels are the floating stuff that I need to unlock Esquie's ability to fly to get to.||

[nova temple]

^ ||None of the world will change meaningfully, all the content that's available right now will be available, unchanged, after you confront the Paintress||

[sick yew]

Thanks. I get big anxiety about missing things in games and then getting locked out.

I guess you could say I don't much like meaningful choices.

[nova temple]

mhm, yeah, I feel that

[sick yew]

Same tags ||I still haven't figured out how advanced/known Chroma stuff was before the Shattering was. It was definitely a world different than ours, with the Gestrals and Grandis. Seems to have been roughly 1920s level of things, if not exactly analogous in terms of technology (I've found what I'm pretty sure are shattered expedition airships). There's just lots of art-deco things lying around.||

||The current world is a fake/illusion/painting? of the world that's been twisted, people were somehow turned into Nevrons but also are being reincarnated as humans? And possibly Gestrals? "They know not that they are not." Also I figured out the connection between Verso and the Maskkeeper. In addition to Verso keeping secrets from everyone, it fought like Verso, with a sword and dagger. It even used moves similar to his.||

I am a little sad that this isn't a live service game.

Now, that's kinda a off-the-cuff thing for me to say, but hear me out.

With Destiny, I could get into deep and nuanced lore discussions with my firends between releases/weekly resets. Could go for hours. But with a boxed experience like this, there's no coordination of progression, so most we can do is have me ramble at y'all, and then talk about things only after the ending.

[reef iron]

hmmm i'm not sure there's really a fix for that 😅 i've rarely if never been so engaged with a live service's story that i would WANT to do that

[sick yew]

Anyways, onward. Act 2 ||Sirene|| ||the ambient music here is gorgeous.||

[dawn spindle]

I have been engaged with live service but I don't think i'd have been interested in E33's lore like that all

most live service lore is not that great if you put it all together and it becomes great because of the wait times.

[sick yew]

Let me rephrase since it seems I didn't get my point quite across.

A part of me wishes it was a live service because I'm nostalgic for the way I engaged with the lore of Destiny, and this game has very yummy lore that I wish I could engage with to the same depth.

[fallow geode]

it's weekly vs binge tv releases, right?

[dawn spindle]

When it comes to games I think live service and full release games are different media, when it comes to story telling (not to argue with Glam about this, just null). So I don't think it's the same type of thing 🤔

[fallow geode]

but the vibes of interacting with the community are similar

[dawn spindle]

hmmm, fair, if you watch/play as it comes out

[errant wedge]

This is fine. The rambling is appreciated.

[errant wedge]

I don't think it's typical actually even for live services to provide that experience.

[sick yew]

Gosh this is such a long level.

Act 2 ||I'm just about to start the Rattlesnake fight.||

||Also all this cloth stuff looks remarkably the things Esquie is made of...strange.||

Also my music has glitched out and it won't stop playing the fight music.

Gonna try to close my game and re-open it, because it is getting a bit intense.

||Good god the rattlesnake is thicc||

||Gosh I can't figure out the timing on the tail slam.||

Whew. That took a while.

[sick yew]

Okay. Made it to the boss. Gonna give it one or two attempts, just to start learning the moves. But I'm not gonna finish it tonight.

Act 2 ||Hmm she's mad that Verso didn't accept her vision.||

||Got her health bar down half way on my first attempt. She's way less chonk than her pet rattlesnake, so that almost certainy means a second phase.||

[rancid dagger]

|| oooh, good catch on the fighting style. Earlier in this chat I had speculated Maskkeeper was Sciel because "This maks can't hurt me because it's me" or some such ||

|| There's also that weird "unknown" journal entry that repeats some of the same lines as the mask maker ... addressed to their "son" 🤔 ||

[rancid dagger]

Act 2 || Monolith || Is this whereabouts I'll need 3h? Feels like a spot where 3h will be needed

[sick yew]

Also, question for folks:

||Why do the Axons keep manifesting convienent little totems in front of the Expedition for them to attack????? Are they stoopid????||

[nova temple]

||Thereabouts. You've got some fighting ahead of you, so it depends on how long that takes you. There will be another spot to take a break.||

[nova temple]

Actually, I can be more specific without spoiling you - ||when you see the Paintress on screen, you'll be heading towards the confrontation with her. If you are successful, that triggers what I'd say is closer to 2 hours where you can stop once, but you might not want to||

[tropic cairn]

I went to today's convention as Gustave

[sick yew]

https://tenor.com/view/gustave-coe33-expedition-33-clair-obscur-baguette-gif-13519385428911712143

[nova temple]

Next up: Goosetave

[tropic cairn]

There was also a Clea there. She had a booth at Artist Alley

Apparently i missed a maelle

[pulsar citrus]

You can also look back at previous messages in the forum with the tag Act 2 and see what they have to say

[rancid dagger]

Act 2 || Monolith end || || So I was right, Verso is the son who died. I was also right about the Curator being the Father (of both Verso and, as I had waaay back in the beginning guessed, Maelle/Alicia) ||

Act 2 || Time to face mama ||

[pulsar citrus]

I Implore now to you all not to click at each other's spoilers because this sequence of events is best experienced in vacuum a bit

[errant wedge]

You may all be roughly in the same part of the game but "roughly" is still dangerous now.

[rancid dagger]

could someone send me a video of that camp interaction I missed? Act 2 || The one where Verso cuts himself in half or something?|| I don't wanna risk looking it up and finding the wrong thing

[candid kindle]

Here || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIJirLJKtsU ||

[sick yew]

I do plan on going back and reading everything, but that's not the same as a concurrent discussion though.

[pulsar citrus]

Oh you are free to do that yeah

[rancid dagger]

Act 2 End || Scary how close I was to the truth with my comparison to the Ash coma theory... ||

[rancid dagger]

Act 3 Start || I'll be honest, guys, I'm not quite feeling it. Tempted to lower the difficulty and speed run the main story stuff just to see how it gets resolved. Exploring the "world" was already starting to feel pointless (except for mechanical powerups), and now that it's confirmed to me that it is actually pointless, and seeing how much stuff there seems to have opened up I... just don't have any motivation to check any of it out. The only thing I'm remotely curious about is what happens to these characters (though to be honest the only character I'm actually invested in is Sciel).

I've got Lune's thing in Sirene's island, Alicias thing at the tower and the main thing: going back to face Renoir. Plus whatever comes after that, if anything. Question I'd like to actually get an answer for if you'd be so kind: I'm about lvl 55 with, I think, most of what you can get from Acts 1/2 and a fairly subpar build that just kind of works. If I lower the difficulty could I go through to the end of the game or would I have to either grind some more levels/better pictos/weapons or figure out an actually decent build to be able to beat it? ||

[dawn spindle]

Couple of reccs for you now ||First, go to the camp multiple times, there's a few scenes stacked here, that you need to go in and out for them all to trigger (which isn't really well done imo), and second I do recc doing all the side quests stuff even if you don't do anything else in the world||

||Also my favourite fight is on a bit you won't do if you don't explore the world 😔 but you probably won't like it like I did||

[errant wedge]

Act 3 start ||the main story is balanced for about where you are now, you're not underlevel... the sidequests will probably be a little harder. Do only the sidequests you initiated at Camp, and then proceed the main plot. You can do random exploration later.||

[rancid dagger]

|| I do plan to do all the side character quests, such as the 2 I mentioned. What I don't plan to do is visit the random areas scattered around. I've already completed one of them and it was as pointless as every other optional area in the game ||

[errant wedge]

Good plan.

[dawn spindle]

you're fine to do exactly what you want

[rancid dagger]

thanks friends

[dawn spindle]

To be clear, ||I had to put enemy hp to like 10x for me to not casually oneshot everything on hard difficulty (I was level like 90 though)||

So you're probably just about exactly fine

[errant wedge]

Yes it's balanced for the assumption players do no sidequests.

[rancid dagger]

sweet, will watch some TM with the wife then come back to do some more camp stuff

[sick yew]

Aight. Time to (Act 2) ||Take down Sirene. I went and farmed the anti-charm pictos on that last clump of adds, so that should help if I miss the parries.||

||Hmm. Most of these are pretty straight-forward. Except for the 5 dancers one.||

||....that was it???? No second phase?????????||

||Lady's pet snake guard was tougher than her. I...guess the fight would have been a lot harder if I didn't defeat the sewing machine first?||

||Perhaps it was tuned around your team getting charmed constantly (and thereby reducing your damage)? But the charming was so easy to parry, even without the lumina from the sewing machine.||

[dawn spindle]

I did do the fight without bothering with that pictos

So yeah

[sick yew]

I tried it once without. ||Realized that I could probably do just fine without, but wanted the insurance.||

Hmm.

Act 2 party things ||I might go for Sciel, just because I'm already not going for Lune. And then maybe see what happens with Lune on some future playthrough. Ugh I should have remembered to save scrum.||

Hmm I wonder

[sick yew]

Did it change the dynamic a lot?

[dawn spindle]

Nope, I did the entire game by parrying anyway

[sick yew]

Act 2 party ||Oooh so Verso has daddy issues.||

Huh apparently I've been playing on Expert without even realizing it

Go me!

||Time for some sick saxaphone music||

Okay, time for me to start (Act 2) ||The monolith. I might not have time to finish tonight, but we'll see how far I get.||

||What. They're drinking whine hacked up from Esquie's nose?||

||TF is this game.||

Huh. Act 2 ||Monolith|| ||Is there a reason the rest of my party isn't rendering? I have three characters in the active party.||

||Monolith||||Not who I was expecting the Paintress to be.||

||Wait. The inside of the Monolith is looking like the Spring Meadows???||

||Now it's gone monochrome||

||Enemies here are fairly high level.||

[rancid dagger]

Act 3 || lmao, was surprised when I closed the game I had a bunch of achievements. Turns out completing all the side stories I ended up getting lvl 7 relationship with everyone today ||

|| Now all thats left is to see how this thing ends. Tomorrow, though ||

[sick yew]

||Monolith|| ||There's a Gestral here???||

||I see that it's recreating our journey so far. But the dead expeditioners are weird and unexpected.||

[sick yew]

Aight. ||Monolith|| ||Finished the Flying Waters section. I'm gonna call it there for the night because whew.||

||The Clair Obscur enemies are tough suckers.||

[sick yew]

I guess I just set it to Expert as a "see how I do" and then just never decided to change it back.

Probably made things take much longer for me overall, but most of the fights/enemies have been very satisfying to master.

I honestly think there's space in the game for one more higher difficulty level, something for the ulra-try-hards, the LASO plalyers, the Brandon Sandersons, to really sink their teeth into.

Increase the damage scalers, and tweak the parry and dodge windows down a little more.

[halcyon elbow]

Act 3 has this

You can just crank up the enemy HP

And the superbosses are, well, super

And then NG+

[sick yew]

https://tenor.com/view/bender-futurama-neat-wow-gif-5744318

That's a fascinating feature, but I'm probably gonna ignore it. Fights already take a while for me.

[nova temple]

It's there for people who overlevel the main story by doing all the side stuff

[coral trout]

The threads back?

https://tenor.com/view/godfather-the-godfather-the-godfather-part-iii-michael-corleone-they-pull-me-back-in-gif-5625954

[errant wedge]

||Pale Heart kinda vibes.||

[exotic ember]

You can increase the difficulty with your luminas and build. You can set it up to be built around being at 1 HP and maxing out the damage you take so you get one shot and then also just never dodge. And boom. Quite challenging

Artificial increase in difficulty sure

But very fun

[errant wedge]

Nah just be one of those people who don't realize the Lumina Converter exists and run with no luminas at all.

[exotic ember]

Like my friend…

I think this was right before act 2 || Monolith || for him

He was 43 hours into the game apparently!?

[tropic cairn]

I was in act 2 ||sirene getting walled by snake cloth|| before i realized that equipped pictos boost your stats, and also how to flip to the second page of abilities in battle, so i only had three abilities each

I also didn't spend lumina points until act 3 because i didn't get what they did

[coral trout]

Your friend is waisted.

[sick yew]

Act 2 ||monolith vague||

[sullen quartz]

||What's the other, if I may ask?||

[errant wedge]

||Destiny 2: The Final Shape||

[sick yew]

Aight. Time to continue the climb. ||Up the Monolith we go!||

Act 2 ||Monolith||||No Gestral Summer Party for the Ancient Sanctuary section 😭 😭 😭 ||

[sick yew]

I'm apparently not in the right mood to be playing tonight. Oh well.

[rancid dagger]

Act 2 || Monolith does that to you... ||

Act 3 || As for me... it's Papa time! Tomorrow, though ||

[sick yew]

I mean kinda, but I also sensed something off as I sat down.

Monolith general ||While the last time I played, I enjoyed getting to retry against old enemies, this time I just kept missing all the windows and getting more and more tilted.||

[rancid dagger]

(Not for you Glam) Will say, Act 3 || Lumiere || || Retracing Gustave's steps from the Prologue was a cute choice. Also Lumiere has been maybe the best zone in the game by a wide margin ||

[sick yew]

||I forced my way through the Ancient Sanctuary section but then bounced off the Stone Wave Cliff mini-boss.||

[rancid dagger]

Same || And one funny bit here... so I lowered to Story difficulty just to see how the story ends, and my build is not that bad right now (it's just bad). So it was very funny to me when we came down from the rooftops into the tree square and Sciel is like "oh no...the 32s..." and I proceeded to one shot most of them with basic skills ||

[tropic cairn]

I have only just now realized what's up with those colored rune plates on the ground lol

[sick yew]

||The Petanks!||

[tropic cairn]

idk if others want to figure it out for themselves but ||if you lure a petanks to the rune, it will be stuck there for you to easily start a battle with it. previously i thought you really just had to get lucky or accurate or something to get them mid-run lol||

so I guess yay me for getting the respective achievement without knowing that lol

[sick yew]

||I did manage to brute-force one early on (I think in Esquie's nest), but yeah I also eventually figured the trick to them.||

[tropic cairn]

This game is fun to replay especially when you keep learning new things lol

[errant wedge]

||FYI: the petanks are a reference to the game of petanque: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pétanque||
||this game is very French||

[rancid dagger]

done, its done

[dawn spindle]

You finished?

[rancid dagger]

yes

[errant wedge]

GG

[dawn spindle]

How'd you feel about it also E33 end ||what'd you do at the end||

[rancid dagger]

Sry Usha, I was heading to bed at that time

game was ok...with the power of hindsight I think I'd have preferred to not have played it, and spent that time playing something else

E33 end || I did both out of curiosity, and I think I liked Verso's ending better, despite that causing best girl Sciel to disappear forever ||

|| well, "forever", I'm sure Maelle can go into another canvas and paint her again if she wants? Idk how the mechanics of that work ||

[errant wedge]

E33 end ||She dead because the world was destroyed.||

[tropic cairn]

E33 end ||I think the intended experience was to play through the game first following Maelle and getting the happy-seeming ending, and then in NG+ coming back knowing everything and accepting Verso's ending instead, which feels like the more healthy choice forward||
||Also yeah Maelle's a painter, so theoretically there could be a clair obscur sequel with that, though development of this game was crazy enough that I could also see them not doing it lol.||

[errant wedge]

||I don't think Maelle is a skilled enough Paintress to fully recreate humans in a fresh canvas. Aline was the only one capable of that.||

[errant wedge]

Extreme disagree.

The ||"genocide ending is the mature option"|| takes piss me off honestly.

The intent as they've stated is for ||both to feel bad||.

[tropic cairn]

That just wasn't my interpretation 🤷‍♂️

[errant wedge]

"I think the intended experience" is just a bad way of projecting your personal bias as some kind of authorial intent.

[sick yew]

I really need to play more 😭

[tropic cairn]

Yeah don't click any of these lol

[sick yew]

Oh I'm being good.

[dawn spindle]

I do agree with Skrimit, the intended experience is... well, basically whatever you experienced

And that makes it unique to each player

[errant wedge]

That's also the issue with turning the game into a movie.

[dawn spindle]

if there is a specific way you're meant to play the game then they should force that

[errant wedge]

Everyone says "absolute cinema" but E33 is actually absolute video game.

[dawn spindle]

I don't think I've ever actually watched a game adaptation

There are a lot of games that just work because you're immersed in the story and get to make choices (even if minimal)

if you take the interaction out of it it just... doesn't work, not because the story is bad but because you being part of the story is... well, part of the story?

idk

[errant wedge]

BG3 TV show is gonna be cursed with some arbitrary-ass canon ending choice. 😔

[dawn spindle]

I guess somthing like GoW might work better as an adaptation

but choice riddled stories are just kinda... meh

Idk if I'll watch BG3

I'll probably give it a go

[errant wedge]

GoW can work like TLoU did, it's a completely linear story.

[dawn spindle]

Yeah, the gameplay isn't linear but the story is

[errant wedge]

Yeah

[dawn spindle]

I do think a lot of these stories aren't THAT crazy good? And I don't mean this in a negative way

But it is playing them that makes them crazy good, and they fall a bit flat if you take that out

[errant wedge]

Well I did have a joke about TLoU being my favorite zombie movie that worked for like a decade before they actually adapted it.

[dawn spindle]

lol

I've not played it or watched it so I can't say

[errant wedge]

(the gameplay is not much to speak of)

[dawn spindle]

I've watched the entirety of both GoW games which is why it's what came to mind

[dawn spindle]

I'm mostly aware yeah

I think usually is best to make a new story in a game setting

I suppose that's what fallout did? but I'm not familiar with the games or the show so I can't say

[merry lance]

100%, most good video game stories are built around the idea that they're being drip fed over at least 8 hours of gameplay. If you take the gameplay out of the equation, you're usually left with a skeleton of a story that feels hollow and needs to be fleshed out.

[errant wedge]

I have not watched Fallout (or anything on Amazon in a long time now).

[dawn spindle]

OR make a game from the show/books
excited noises

[errant wedge]

Firerust (in this very thread) IIRC watched E33 and is... I think yet to play it.

Tho they wanted to.

[dawn spindle]

Yep! And this doesn't say anything bad about the story! It's just a different media

Well watching a playthrough is still a lot more like playing than a tv show is

[merry lance]

I believe they tried it at a friends house and had a good time, but still don't have the hardware to play on their own time

[dawn spindle]

you're not interacting yourself but someone is and it's still slow, a you can piece things together, etc

[rancid dagger]

Funny you should say that, cause when I finished the game I thought the story would've worked better for me if it were a movie 😅

but maybe that's because as a game I didn't really like it, so the story ended up taking a hit for me and becoming basically "an interesting idea, badly executed"

E33 end || though yes, if it wasn't a game there would have to be an intended end as opposed to whatever the player prefers, but I'd have been fine with that because to me the choice of ending didn't feel meaningful. Again likely because I wasn't invested ||

[rancid dagger]

Otherwise I 100% agree with Usha on what's good about video game stories

[sick yew]

Okay the grind continues.

[sick yew]

Whew. Finally got ||The Stone Wave Cliffs mini-boss in the monolith. That was brutal. I could probably have skipped it, but my pride wouldn't let me do so.||

Okay it wasn't just my bad mood. ||The Stone Wave Cliffs enemies are much trickier than the Forgotten Battlefield ones.||

[sick yew]

Huh. ||Monolith|| ||Lumiere. Not Old Lumiere, just Lumiere||

||I don't recall these enemies. Huh.||

[sick yew]

Man. By the end of Act 2, these fights just take forever. Everything's so tanky, and damage is capped at 9999. Makes characters with 1-hit focused abilities kinda fall behind.

https://tenor.com/view/harry-top-ive-reached-the-top-gif-11068537

||Renoir again???||

[sick yew]

This is going to take a while...

[halcyon elbow]

After this fight I'd set aside 2-3hr to play through the next segment

[sick yew]

....

Yeah I think I'm gonna try again tomorrow and set it to a lower difficulty. This is just too friggin long.

We'll see how I feel. It was an incredible slog to get to the end of this level.

A satisfying one as ||I learned the Clair Obscure attacks.|| But I can only spend so long in a given session doing the same thing over and over.

[halcyon elbow]

Sounds like you slid to being underleveled somehow

Shouldn't have been the stat check that it sounds like it has been

[sick yew]

I felt pretty squishy at the start of the leve, but I've leveled up a lot.

I'm at ~45. What's the recommend level?

Hmm. Maybe I'll go out and find some side levels to clear tomorrow. But lower level fights don't give as much XP....is there a good way to farm XP?

[dawn spindle]

By just doing side content I reached where you're at now at like maybe 55-58?

But I did do almost all optional areas that weren't too hard tbf

Too hard as in, glaring red, but I did do a few red ones too

Are you playing in normal or expert?

[sick yew]

Hmm. We'll I'll try doing some exploring. Get some of the chromatic nevrons back at the start. Do whatever else I can find.

[merry lance]

It might also just be time to chug some chromas and re-evaluate your build

[sick yew]

Expert! Because I set it to that early on with the mindset of "well if it's too hard I can always change it" and then promptly forgot that fact until like two days ago.

[dawn spindle]

Aaah. Gotcha

[sick yew]

There's a few things I could do. Also might go back to Spring Meadows and farm some Lumina unlocks.

[dawn spindle]

You shouldn't be stat checked in normal but also yeah, fine tune your builds too

[sick yew]

But the big thing is that the enemies I'm on mostly kill me in a single attack.

So I need to learn the moves perfectly.

[dawn spindle]

Ah, I played like that on purpose so can't help there

[sick yew]

And ||Renoir has a lot of different attack patterns, and I've only gotten a taste of his phase 2 attacks.||

[tropic cairn]

Yeah the disclaimer on Expert is that it expects you to already know how to dodge/parry everything

so doing that as your first playthrough gets super rough

[sick yew]

Well currently I'm too prideful to switch it lower unless I feel I need to.

[dawn spindle]

I don't think this is true

[tropic cairn]

I could grab the word for word if you want

[sick yew]

Also as I was half-zoning out learning the boss's moves, I came up with this magnificent quote that I need to share with y'all:

[dawn spindle]

Playing in expert also helps you learn faster through the game

[sick yew]

YOU'RE TELLING ME A CLAIRED THIS OBSCUR????

[sick yew]

Idk about faster overall, but yeah my experience seems to usually be the first time encountering an enemy is like 10 tries, and then the next are just one or two.

Because I gotta learn their attacks that well.

The exception to this is ||Monolith|| ||The reprised Stone Wave cliffs enemies. Those suckers are tricky.||

[tropic cairn]

Expert - Hard difficulty with highly demanding combat.
Enemies deal greater damage and mastering Dodges and Parries is required. Recommended for players who enjoy difficult games with real time mechanics.

But yeah it is accurate that expert helps you learn faster, because you pretty much have to learn the enemies to make progress

[tropic cairn]

E33 act 2 ||I personally didn't get skill checked in the stone wave cliffs in act 1. I didn't like how many shields went up and I somehow hadn't learned the icon where a jump is needed (I don't remember when I realized that was a thing but it was definitely over halfway through the game), but I also just got through it anyway. Only when I got to this stone wave cliffs section in act 2 did I actually have to understand these enemies. And these were specifically the only ones that I had trouble with pre-monolith||

[tropic cairn]

So yeah, you're right, it doesn't say it expects you to already know, just that mastery is required.

[sick yew]

Damn I thought I was cooking with this.

To quote Verso:
"Oh well."

[exotic ember]

The fight after this took me multiple days to beat playing on expert with my masochism build on my first playthrough

Looks like I was around level 45 for the fight

Let’s see…

May 2nd at 6:32 PM I commented about being at the fight for hours. Probably was about 2 1/2 or so hours there

May 4th at 5:09 PM I had beaten it.

Less time than I thought in hindsight. Brutal 2 days though

This was my Monoco build at the time of the Act 2 || Inside the monolith || || Renoir fight || Glam is at

I don’t immediately see uploads around that time period for other characters at that time

[sick yew]

I currently have Monoco on the reserve team, as the auto-death character so Lune can get the solo perks. I just haven't had the spoons to really learn him.

Perhaps I'll swap him out for Sciel or Verso in this fight, both feel like they're really lagging in terms of damage output.

[exotic ember]

Very fair! I think I eventually made some concessions on the next fight and started using one of his abilities to apply shields on everyone so I could be at 1 HP on them but tank a few hits when I missed parries so I had more opportunity to learn the parries before having to restart the fight

Had to cut back the masochism a notch

[errant wedge]

This was my party at the time, about level 50ish.

Lune on a Trebuchim EG build as the damage dealing engine with backup res capability, Sciel on her 'paladin' build chaining buffs off of Grim Harvest, and Monoco mostly doing Bruler Bashes and being responsible for burns and breaks.

Posts after the one linked are NSFGlam.

Posts before it are safe tho.

[halcyon elbow]

https://tenor.com/view/catapult-swing-fire-battle-war-gif-15426286

[sick yew]

Do you have any breakdowns of your builds, per chance?

[errant wedge]

'Paladin Sciel'; Soia had a similar idea but Lune was the healing source for him.

Otherwise the only details I have left from that era are some old screenshots that I think I was using to list Luminas (this is before storing loadouts was a thing).

L50 Sciel

L50 Lune

L49 Monoco (probably less useful if you haven't farmed his abilities)

Notably I did not use Cruler Barrier on Monoco until Act 3, even tho you can get it like immediately after he joins the party and it's a very powerful ability.

[sick yew]

....you can store loadouts?

[errant wedge]

Lumina loadouts yeah.

[sick yew]

....huh.

[inner valve]

Omg

I had NO idea you could do that 😭

Hoping to have some time later to actually pick up where I left off last weekend and set up my Luminas and figure out builds before continuing
[Late Act 2]||in the Monolith||

[pulsar citrus]

Nah Act 2 || Monolith|| || Clair Obscure are really damn hard when together. All of them does double attacks. ||

[pulsar citrus]

Those are a new thing since the December update

[inner valve]

So I wanted to get some Lumina from Pictos (right? jargon lol), so I turned down the difficulty and ground out some fights real quick and went back and . Gonna actually allocate my Lumina points and get goin in ||the Monolith||. And honestly... might just lower the difficulty again if it starts giving me trouble. I kinda just wanna get the story at this point (as much as I do like ghe mechanics and combat system).

[sick yew]

Just finished some lumina farming myself. I went the easy rout and have just been farming fools in the Act 1 area. :P

I do have a minor UX complaint about ||Monoco's skill tree. It needs to show a bigger preview of which Nevron each foot belongs to, so I can figure out if I've fought that one yet.||

[inner valve]

????
||lol wait, is there a way to fogure out who the abilites are from?||

[sick yew]

Idk, ||Besides looking on the wiki maybe? But in-game, you can see the names of the abilities you've already unlocked, which are named after the enemy they drop from. And there's a tiny thumbnail of each respective Nevron in the menu. But they're too small to make out sometimes.||

[tropic cairn]

^ ||When you have monoco out, there's a foot icon that shows on enemies that have a skill that can be acquired for defeating them. Though it is kinda pointless because you need to encounter the enemy first, and then when you win you'll get the skill even if you didn't know about it. I guess maybe if you end up having to flee the encounter, it could let you know to come back later.||

[sick yew]

Act 2 enemies

[inner valve]

A few thoughts I had while dinking around last night and progressing
[Late Act 2][Area: ||Monolith||]
||You have these Clair and Obscur enemies. Who look like people being split in half. This kinda lines up with my speculation that something in this world (The Paintress, the Gommage, etc) is causing people to bifurcate in some way.
I saw presumably the Paintress teaching her kids how to paint. There was a boy and two girls. I'd previously thought thay maybe the Paintress was Renoir wife and that Verso and Alicia were their children (and Alicia somehow also simultaneously existing as the double/split of Maelle). Now I'm wondering if Maelle isn't also their sister? Renoir had mentioned to both Alicia and Maelle herself that it was her fault. It occurred to me that Maelles skill tree is not random and suddenly don't think it's coincidence she has a focus on fire... Her fault could have been burning down the Manor. The people in partial Gommage and Alicia and Renoir and Verso (or at least their scars) all look like ash. A result of the fire?
I'm very curious where it's all going to lead!||

[sick yew]

The sheer volume of ||Clair/Obscur (light & dark) symbolism is a bit funny though.||

[sullen quartz]

Okay, this is the second time I've seen this kind of joke, and the first time was just earlier this morning, so I have to ask, what's this a reference to?

Also, if Sandfall ever makes a horror game, they should call it "Ténébrisme" to commit to the bit

[sick yew]

From what I can gather, it's a redraw of the (hilariously bad) final panel of Chainsaw Man.

[sullen quartz]

Ah. I saw it in Hollow Knight form in a YouTube comment. Now I've gone from never hearing about it to seeing a couple dozen examples in one day, thanks. 😅

[fallow geode]

Pretty sure the original panel was only released a couple of days ago

[velvet fiber]

Tbf that still didn't stop people from...taking sides

(it's me, I'm people)

[inner valve]

Act 3
||Just got here and then to camp. Hoooooo boy! Lots of thoughts wow :0||

But tomorrow

[sullen quartz]

Tomorrow comes

[sick yew]

Okay. Time to do some level grinding.

Act 2 world ||Still too low level for Frozen Hearts,so I'm gonna go back to Old Lumiere and clean up what i can there, then try Falling Leaves and see what I can accomplish there.||

||Hmm am very outclassed by the lady with the pet black hole.||

[nova temple]

||I muscled through Frozen Hearts in my late 40s, I think. I was definitely too low a level, but got tons of XP and it made the rest of the Act easy. I think it's really meant to be something you do in Act 3||

[sick yew]

Act 2 world ||That Chromatic Ballet was a fascinating fight.||

Hmm. Not sure what else I can do though. Maybe go and farm some enemies in ||the monolith itself?||

||Everything else (besides Frozen Hearts seems inaccessible until Act 3).||

||Well technically there's the hand-things where E33 made their landing, but those are even higher leveled.||

[nova temple]

^ ||those are definitely Act 3 material||

[sick yew]

Not sure the folks here would be as interested. But I figure I'll cross-post anyways

[exotic ember]

Monoco slivers deck

[sick yew]

Okay. Did some level grinding, got everyone above level 50.

Act 2 late ||Time to go give Gollum another shot.||

Damnnn. Got lucky with an Elemental Genesis right off the bat for Lune

Damnnnnnnn. Thanks for the advice Skrimit.

||Already on phase 2||

Act 2 ||And Renoir down. Again.||

||More focused builds helped, also I spent a crem-ton of time learning his moves last time I played.||

||The Curator????||

||The Curator is Renoir, Vissages is Verso.....this is so confusing.||

||Maelle can now gommage people at will?||

||And Verso...feels like he's lying.||

Now for the fabled 3 hour sequence.

I swear, ||If there's another even harder fight after this....but of course there will be, the Paintress isn't going to be easy. ||

[halcyon elbow]

This is where I'd make sure you have several hours

[sick yew]

||Oh Verso has mommy problems too.||

[halcyon elbow]

Several cutscenes will play in sequence, so to speak

[sick yew]

^

[halcyon elbow]

Ah yeah missed that

[sick yew]

https://tenor.com/view/dont-worry-about-it-bob-no-no-worries-no-problem-gif-24253149

||You are HIS creations, not mine hmmmmmmmm||

||So the Paintress painted the Nevrons and...the Curator painted the humans?||

Okay. ||Got her down to half health the second time. She feels thicc enough that there might not be a second phase. But who knows.||

[sick yew]

Ugh. ||If I could get the timing down on her three wave attacks (waves of chroma, the black hole, and the rocks) I'd be fine. But they're so damn finicky.||

[halcyon elbow]

||For me, it helped to look at the rocks and parry based off when they flash||

[sick yew]

||Oh not the Void meteors, I've mostly got that one down. Not perfectly, but it's low damage and only stuns on multiple hits.||

||I mean the three rocks she pulls from the monolith.||

[halcyon elbow]

Ah yeah can't help you with that one

I just sort of got it

[sick yew]

Okay. ||Health bar down, but no post-match carnage. Phase 2?||

||VERSO YOU [CENSORED]-FACE YOU HAD HIS STUPID FLYING ROCK ALL THE TIME YOU. STORMING. BASTARD.||

[fallow geode]

I lucked out on a pattern where that only happened once

[sick yew]

Yeah. Sorry to disappoint Kon, but I'm calling it there tonight.

||I don't care how much the story is popping, I only have so much stamina to grind through new movesets in a given play session. The phase 2 is just a bit much.||

[halcyon elbow]

No that's smart

[sick yew]

||With any luck, sleeping on it will help me internalize her phase 1 moves (like it did with Renoir) so it doesn't take me as long to get to phase 2 this time.||

[halcyon elbow]

I think where you've gotten to really is the limit of where you can stop where you will want to

[sick yew]

Late act 2 ||I'm gonna give it another try first, but I might go down to a lower difficulty here. I want to learn her phase 2 moves, but getting through phase 1 just takes so damn long.||

||The tooltip that you can change the difficulty at any time is a lie; it won't let you do it during a fight, even between phases. Because I'd love to set the difficulty to easy for phase one, and then set it back to hard for phase 2.||

[dawn spindle]

I think it is expected it does not mean that when it says any time

[sick yew]

THEN THE TOOLTIP SHOULD SAY 'ANY TIME YOU'RE NOT IN BATTLE'

[rancid dagger]

Yeah, there should be more clairity around that.

[nova temple]

I wouldn't have thought to change difficulty mid-fight

[sick yew]

||I just don't want to spend ~15 minutes grinding through phase 1 to get 1-2 minutes of learning a bit of her phase 2 moves.||

||Especially when I'd estimate it takes me about 10 attempts of seeing a given attack to start to counter/evade it with any sense of regularity.||

||This is something Dualliste and Renoir did well, but Visages and now the Paintress did not. Renoir only got a partially new moveset, and Dualliste's phase 2 moves were all based on his phase 2 moves but now doubled up. So the muscle memory carried over.||

And I know it's ultimately just a feature of the genre and whatnot. I don't mind the intrinsic difficulty of tough and deceptive move-sets. But I have little patience for scenarios where I feel a given game is wasting my time.

[dawn spindle]

I had the same issue

not with the exact bosses you are saying

but at some point I'm like "5 minutes to instantly die to the one movement I need to learn is 💤 "

[pulsar citrus]

Me lowering difficulty whenever it is the enemy turn and then raising it back right at the very end of my finishing move.

[dawn spindle]

There was one specific fight that I enjoyed so much that it was fine because I'll be honest, I could just repeat all the phases non-stop for days just fine (and I did, on purpose)

But for a few I was a bit frustrated

[errant wedge]

The first new superboss (NSFUsha) ||I fought after the DLC came out I reached Phase 2, then everyone but Sciel died while I learned the Phase 2 moveset, but I learned it so well and have such a habit of minimizing number-of-attempts that I just sat there, locked in and parried over 1000 times over an hour with Sciel alone until it died.||

[dawn spindle]

don't worry about spoilers for me (though I appreciate it)

I don't think I'm going back to this game

[velvet fiber]

Why though?

[dawn spindle]

I'm not interested

I got everything I wanted out of it

I'm only missing, E33 all ||The Endless tower bosses after you finish the trials, and the DLC though and I was just done with the game by the time I finished the Endless Tower, and I didn't like the DLC||

And luckily for my completionist ass none of those are achievements

Enough is enough

[velvet fiber]

Oh you finished it

Phew

[dawn spindle]

I did

[dawn spindle]

oh hey, that's a fun number of hours!

[velvet fiber]

33.3 x 5

[sick yew]

You know, it occurred to me today how very clever Monoco is from a design/development standpoint.

||Each other playable character has a pretty comprehensive skill tree. They need something like two dozen different attack animations, several of which are quite complex.||

||Meanwhile, Monoco mostly just reuses enemy attack animations. There's a couple tweaks here and there, but otherwise he has maybe half a dozen animations unique to him. In terms of animation work, he's nearly a "free" character to add, since they had to make all the enemy animations anyways.||

[sick yew]

Welp. Plans for the evening fell through. Which means I suddenly have 2-3 hours of free time....

Gosh the boss is so much less chonky on medium difficulty

[sick yew]

Act 2 ||And second phase down. Feels kinda dirty doing that with the difficulty, but damn that was a hard fight as it was.||

||NO MAELLE DON'T SAY IT'S OVER EVERY TIME YOU DO THAT THERE'S ANOTHER PHASE SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP||

||Okay there is a 3rd phase but it's a pitty phase||

|| 👀 ||

||Damage can excede 9999?||

||You mean Maelle and Verso's kits aren't entirely useless in Act 3?||

||Gradient Attacks can actually do something now?||

||Okay so now happens in Act 3?||

[nova temple]

||2 hours of lore||

[exotic ember]

|| Yeah that fight was brutal. Still haunts me ||

[sick yew]

Cutscenes ||Hmm so the Curator is the big bad?||

(Yes yes I know, RAFO)

||Oh Verso. Oh Verso you storming idiot.||

||Monolith Year 49....the year Maelle was born. Hmmmmmmm||

||Verso....with Gustave's haircut?||

||The real Eifell Tower?||

||"Epilogue" my ass, there's still to many floating islands to explore. Try harder next time.||

||Clea, Renoir, Verso, and Alicia/Maelle....who's the 5th family member????||

[nova temple]

||Well, you have father and 3 children there, so...||

[sick yew]

||Oh this Clea's not the mother? Huh.||

||Hmm those are the Axons in the paintings.||

||I wonder if I should have attempted some of the painting workshops before I did this.||

[nova temple]

It wouldn't have made much of a difference

[sick yew]

Cutscenes ||So where was Clea in the painted world then?||

||Jeez she's kinda a horible person.||

[nova temple]

||Good question||

[sick yew]

||Yeah nah Clea is on my [censored] list. What a horrible sister.||

[nova temple]

||She is also on my [censored] list, I love her 😏 ||

[sick yew]

sigh

Why did I already guess there'd be some people in that camp?

[dawn spindle]

||I did not feel any which way about her, which is surprising||

[sick yew]

||I have very very little patience for abusive family members.||

Lore dump things ||I recognize some of these Axons. But not all of them. Previews of future boss fights?||

[dawn spindle]

||I'm fine with that in fiction, and might like some, but like, she just didn't do anything for me one way or another||

[sick yew]

||Don't get me wrong, I don't think she's a bad character. Just, I like to hate horrible people deliberately portrayed that way.||

[dawn spindle]

No no, I get it

But usually I feel more strongly about these type of characters

which can tip in any direction (or all at once)

[sick yew]

Fascinating.

||Huh? Maelle got gommaged....Verso I understand surviving...was she mashed up with Alicia?||

Do I. ||Ugh I'm gonna have to fight Renoir a third time, aren't I?||

[sick yew]

Aight. ||Feels appropriate to switch to the Pure outfits for the ladies.||

[sick yew]

Hmm. ||There's the one on the third island that Verso mentioned, I'm sure I'll fight that one at some point. And...hmm, never did find out what created all those swords in Old Lumiere. What killed the city Axon.||

[halcyon elbow]

||If you've gotten through the Many Cutscenes Will Play In Sequence, you'll want to leave camp and then go right back to pick up the remaining major sidequests||

||Weird that it works that way but it does||

[sick yew]

Ah thanks for the warning.

[sick yew]

Act 3 ||Yeah I was wondering like...is this gonna be the final level? Is Act 3 just free-form explore and then the ending? Is Lumiere going to be a fake-out ending level?||

[halcyon elbow]

Answer: ||Anything remaining that you want to do you can do now||
Further recommendation: ||I'd do the major sidequests, go to Lumiere, and then do all the rest of the remaining activities. Because of Painted Power (the Pictos you got that removes the 9999 damage cap), you can get some truly wild power going and you can easily outstrip Lumiere's intended experience||

[sick yew]

Yeah. ||I want to play around and murder things.||

[sick yew]

ACT 3 WORLD ||THERE'S A PLACE IN THIS GAME CALLED WHITE SANDS.||

||WHITE SANDS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALLE IMPROVES AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA||

[nova temple]

Unfortunately

[sick yew]

||I went inside and Lorien is speaking to me in a sexy French voice that I don't understand at all.||

Question about this location: ||Is the only thing in here a music record?||

[errant wedge]

And a sense of weird dread, yes.

[sick yew]

||You mean really epic and also confounding boss music for....walking around on a beach and staring at a manor in the distance?||

Man this game.

[errant wedge]

||The poem is Lumiere S'eteint / Light Goes Out||

[sick yew]

Act 3 ||What a weird thing to tie behind Act 3||

[errant wedge]

forgot the second part

[sick yew]

Act 3 world ||Got the last swimsuit, that was a fun kinda jank. There's a portal on the other side of the beach that I can't figure out how to access though.||

||It's wild to me the disparity between the different Gestral beaches. 4 reasonable silly little side-quests, and then the demented hellspawn that is the undying curse of the volleyball.||

Anyways. Gonna call it there for the night. Need to go do dishes n' stuff

[brisk orbit]

lol e33 got a mention in my fantasy class

the professor didnt play it yet and I acted shocked at the front seat

[sick yew]

Also, Act 3 start ||I do still have several unanswered questions (which I'm sure will be answered in time. But despite having a pretty clear idea of the nature of the world, there several mysteries left:||
||- What exactly happened in Old Lumiere? What created all those glowing swords, and by extension what killed the Axon?||
||- What are the pale Nevrons, and why are they different?||
||- Who left the message on the blue tree for Gustave and Lune? How did Maelle get to the Flying Waters?||
||- WTF are the mimes?||

[halcyon elbow]

I feel like I can give you a straightforward answer to the third one: ||Verso. If you go back and watch the beach landing you can straight up just see him picking up Maelle in the background while Gustave is dazed on the ground. Gustave seems to realize this to some degree because after he gets picked up by the homie he looks back at the spot Maelle was as if confused||

As for the fourth, ||the mimes are just weird||

[sick yew]

Ah I didn't catch that. Thanks.

[sick yew]

I don't know why this is sending me so much.

Okay yeah ||I did not know enough to recognize that as Verso. He was heavily out of focus and I just assumed he was another Expeditioner.||

[halcyon elbow]

||Yeah I think that's the intent||

[nova temple]

||He also shows up when you go into the Manor for the first time. You are not meant to pick up on these things the first time around, but I think there's a camp scene that spells it out||

[inner valve]

Act 3
||Wow so I am just getting dunked on as I roam around and try to explore the new world. Am I gonna have to grind or rework my builds again to make it? 😅 ||

[halcyon elbow]

||I'd do Frozen Hearts, and then do the character sidequests, which should be pretty doable especially with your shiny new Painted Power Pictos||

||A lot of what's out here now is, just look around and see what dunks on you and what doesn't. Much of what was theoretically accessible in Act 2 but was DANGER tagged should be a lot more feasible now, is another good place to start||

[tall latch]

Game of the Year Sweep

[velvet fiber]

This should be the permanent channel name btw

[exotic ember]

The GOAT

[exotic ember]

Wait, really!?

The attention to detail in this game I swear

[dawn spindle]

well, idk, it's 2026 now 😤

[exotic ember]

“2025 Game of the Year Sweep”?

[velvet fiber]

Shouldn't stop it from sweeping this year again

[errant wedge]

E33 SWEEP

[sick yew]

Psshhhh. Who cares about GotY 2025? The real news from the game awards, the only anything anyone cared about, was the hit hero raid shooter Highguard.

[dawn spindle]

Hey hey hey in 7 days I'll be at the Painted Symphony concert

[opal junco]

SWEEP

[coral trout]

Out of all the changes, I understood this one the most.

[sick yew]

Didn't get to play much today.

Went and started (Act 3)||On the third axon, to go find Alicia. These weird doods that make mime noises are funny.||

[tall latch]

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

[sick yew]

Did some more noodling around the same space tonight. Still haven't gotten to the boss. This is a long level.

[exotic ember]

Oh yeah that one did take some time

[sick yew]

It's a fun level though. I like the enemies so far, and (act 3 general) ||I've been enjoying unleashing Painted Power||

[sick yew]

Also I switched to (Act 3 build) ||Skrimit's Trebuchiem-fishing build for Lune (as I wanted to play with more synergies) and this was me 3 times in a row last night:||

[errant wedge]

There are a few enemies who you've met already whose asses you might wanna kick if you wanna do some buildcrafting in Act 3.
||Sprong||
||Golgra back in the Gestral Village w. Maelle since it's a duel||

||And while you're in the Gestral Village, talk to the journal collector Gestral since you've probably collected a lot since you last met||

[sick yew]

||Oh yeah that guy. I totally forgot about him.||

But yeah ||My plan was to go try the Golgra fight again (she absolutely wiped me last time) after finishing this level. I was thinking, there's a new Maelle ability that does huge damage but leaves you vulnerable. Combine that with the sword that starts you in Virtuoso....could be a way to cook some folks.||

||I'll try the giant key-head again then. I did bump in the floating sky worm thing on my way north, and I'm almost strong enough to do that fight but not quite yet.||

[pulsar citrus]

Act 3 all || Glam is going to soon realise the power of Medallum Stendhalnat first turn. This is going to be good. ||

[sick yew]

Act 3 ||Time to get back to this climb on the 3rd axon. Am gonna try to make it to the end tonight||

Damn. Apparently I completely lost all muscle memory for these enemies in the past two days

Okay that's a bit better

[sick yew]

Act 3 enemy ||Holy crap these blight things are so tanky. Am I somehow underleveled again? I'm in my mid-late 50s for this level and I didn't feel under-leveled at the start...||

Ugh I think I am under-leveled again. ||The merchant in this level is taking two turns for each of mine.||

How does this keep happening? I'm fighting everything, multiple times even.

[sick yew]

Act 3 ||Alicia is taking 3 turns to my every 1 😭 ||

Act 3 ||Okay but I do like the rhythm of this fight.||

Wuuuuh

What an epic fight that was

Might be my favorite yet.

Act 3 ||Oh that hurt.||

Act 3 ||I honestly don't know who's side on this I agree with. I'm leaning slightly towards Maelle, but only slightly.||

Act 3 ||So if Maman made a version of her family in the canvas, then where's that version of Clea? Verso would have encountered the "real" Clea, the equivalent of Maelle.||

Act 3 ||Oh god how do I choose with this one? I...I think I need Verso to tell Maelle the truth, but this is gonna hurt.||

||A lot||

||Told the truth. That felt like the right thing to do. Would I have not maxed out my relationship with Maelle if I didn't?||

Act 3 ||Huh Clea would hang out with Francois. Was this before or after the Fracture?||

||Oh dear am I fighting Francois again?||

||Gosh, I would die for Esquie||

[dawn spindle]

||yep, and miss on the achievement iirc||

[sick yew]

Uhh. ||Tried fighting Golgra, she's still ridiculously strong compared to me. Like, opened the fight with Maelle's nuke, did over 300k damage, wasn't even a tenth of her health bar.||

||There's a couple more buffs I could stack, but looking at the numbers it wouldn't be nearly enough.||

||I did fight her with Monoco, and that was ridiculously easy. But the normal duel is beyond my reach.||

[sick yew]

That's what I suspected

[sick yew]

Oh god I'm a monster

Act 3 ||Last night, when I was fighting Alicia, I noticed that she was week to fire damage. At the time, the only aspect of that which registered with me was that hey, I can just loop Swift Stride and Rain of Fire to gradually whittle down her life total, and use the pictos that gives health for hitting a burning enemy for survival. I continued this until she was weak enough for me to unleash Maelle's nuke and finish the job.||

||It wasn't until I was lying in bed last night, trying to fall asleep, that I realized why Alicia is weak to fire, and the utter depravity I decended to by having her spend her final duel slowly burning to death.||

[errant wedge]

Ludonarrative synergy!

[nova temple]

||That's a realization I never arrived it, in part because I never explored fire builds, and in part because she was one of the last things I did in the game, so by the time I got to her, I was already pretty busted and there wasn't enough fight for me to explore things. But it's a "fun" little nervous laughter moment||

[sick yew]

||I couldn't help it, so much of Maelle's kit is fire based. Now I wonder if that was her subconsciously trying to reclaim the flames as hers. ||

Side-bar; that is the one thing I've found that I think the game's combat system does wrong, despite otherwise being superb. Specifically combined with enemies that absorb a particular element.

When 4 of the 6 playable characters are heavily focused on a single element, running in to an enemy that absorbs one of those elements basically bricks them for the whole fight.

Resistences are fine, because yes they make the character sub optimal, but you can still do things other than restart the battle and switch that character to a more support oriented build.

But absorbing elements I don't think adds anything to the sandbox.

[nova temple]

I wouldn't say they are focused on that element, you can build them differently

[pulsar citrus]

I get what you are talking about.

[nova temple]

None of my builds were burn-based

[errant wedge]

A lot of characters' elemental "focus" is actually the weapon's focus.

[sick yew]

There are enough physical/weapon element abilities for each given character to make a functioning build otherwise. But that still means you're ignoring a good chunk of that character's abilities. Like, several of Sciel's abilities just inherently do dark damage.

[pulsar citrus]

E33 gen || You were kinda locked to use Lune if you wanted to get some actual Earth or other elemental powers.

But that was really fine by me, because I always ran Lune anyways till Act 2 and then Void based attacks made all of these affinities pointless.

||

|| What I am a little sad about is lack of gimmicks with each element like there are Fire and Ice Element. ||

|| Fire has burn stacks and Ice has either the slowing mechanic or Freezing one. ||

[errant wedge]

||Earth abilities theme is just doing a lot of Break damage and Lightning's theme is crits.||

[pulsar citrus]

Hmmmmm trueeeeee

|| They just are not as interesting especially since Break Damage is so hard to learn the quantity of so I never felt Earth Attacks being good. And when I actually did start to experiment with Lune. The Earth Elemental abilities were too weak in Act 3. They never made a dent in the Break Bar. ||

[sick yew]

And even though you can make functioning builds that bypass a character's affinity/tendency, imo that's still weak game design, because it disincentivizes a good chunk of that character's skill tree if that's the route you go.

[pulsar citrus]

|| and while yes Lune's Lightning attacks use Crit based logic. Gustave's doesn't. Which I know yes is because of Overcharged being main draw but Maelle stances never detracts from the Burn Stacks being important. ||

[sick yew]

There's a fine (and difficult) line of meaningful build choices that lies between limiting player agency or just making buildcrafting meaningless. Destiny has struggled with this forever. And for the most part, E33 straddles this line very well. But I think just this one tiny thing could be changed.

[errant wedge]

Act 3 builds ||Burning Canvas on a burn stacking build is probably Maelle's highest sustained DPR setup, tho most people run her in a burst damage setup. GrimMareeper had a very good Burning Canvas build. In a full DLC-geared synergy party Monoco on a burn-stacking build with his new weapon combined with Maelle with her new weapon can make for some real 🔥 .||

Kind of makes me want to kill the superbosses again with different setups... perhaps someday when I do NG+.

The setup that I used for ||The Divergent Star|| tho was so peak, I'm very happy with how I did that. As the last fight I ever did in E33 it is a good memory. 🙂

[sick yew]

Yeah I think I'll come back to NG+ in a little while. This is definitely a game I want to do another play-through of, but not immediately

[errant wedge]

I'm not gonna do NG+ until I am actually 33.

[sick yew]

Hmm I've got a while left until that happens.

[errant wedge]

@exotic ember I need you to finish the superbosses so that I can live vicariously through your experiences.

[pulsar citrus]

9 years for me. I think that might end up being true for me too. Unless Sandfall publish a DLC update that is meaningfully big but also something that is best experienced in the middle of a playthrough rather than at the very end when you maxed everything.

The December update was similar too that you best play it before finishing literally everything.

[errant wedge]

I kind of don't want them to add more to E33, it feels very done in its current state. I want them to work on a new game, and I think that is what they're doing.

There is actually a French-specific brand of cyberpunk as an aesthetic genre, called Giscardpunk, that is focused more on French-themed retrofuturism with more emphasis on overwhelming bureaucracies and atomic energy than the Japanese/American-centered 'standard' cyberpunk aesthetic. That might be a cool thing Sandfall could do if they ever wanted to go sci fi while remaining aggressively baguette.

[sick yew]

E33 all-ish/premise ||Obligatory "I haven't finished the story yet," but there's been a lot of mention of this rivalry between the Writers and the Painters in the "real" world. And it's clear that chroma/magic of some sort exists outside of paintings. So if they wanted to do something set in the same universe as E33, a sequel set in the outside world exploring this conflict is something I could see happening.||

[errant wedge]

Yes. Expedition 33 is the name of this game. Clair Obscur is the name of the franchise.

[sick yew]

Oh silly me, I forgot about that. It's not like Alice is singing it to me every time I die or something.

[errant wedge]

It's still completely possible that different Clair Obscur games actually have absolutely nothing to do with each other in terms of narrative continuity tho.

[halcyon elbow]

We don't know if they're Final Fantasying it or not

[sullen quartz]

A horror game called "Clair-Obscur: Ténébrisme", perhaps?

[exotic ember]

🫡

Perhaps I’ll jump on a bit tonight after I get home from Easter celebrations

Though Saint of Bright Doors is also calling my name

Also Pokemon

But perhaps I’ll do some superbossing

[pulsar citrus]

Oh where are you on Pokemon?

[velvet fiber]

I will only do NG+ on my second save file/playthroufh because all spoilers ||as a vehement Maelle ending fan I'll symbolically keep my original save file as is||

also cause ||I only did all the act 3 side stuff after finishing the main story||

[dawn spindle]

That's so good, but also numbers go brr, so...

[errant wedge]

Usha in a few days: https://www.kkinstagram.com/reel/DWUKYE6CBJ8/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

[exotic ember]

Jealoussssss

[dawn spindle]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1194838543747530872/1433821203054858403/ezgif-55f98130818863.gif

[dawn spindle]

I'm at the airport listening to the OST while I wait for boarding and just hyping myself up

[sick yew]

Aaah that's so cool. I hope they come somewhere in the states soon.

[fallow geode]

I hope they come back to the UK soon 😔

[exotic ember]

Ayyyy

Yeah I hope the concert is good!

[dawn spindle]

I'll let you know, I'm tone deaf enough that it has to be horrible or underwhelming for me not to enjoy

[fallow geode]

that is such short notice 😩

[halcyon elbow]

That's what sick days are for right

[fallow geode]

so it turns out they were live RIGHT NOW

https://tenor.com/view/i-guess-memes-meme-gif-17950413

anyway, now I need to have a conversation with the boss

[dawn spindle]

https://tenor.com/view/fire-gif-10341555270454130792

[errant wedge]

(spoilers all) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeQsAKDc7qc

Not as good as his Cyberpunk edits alas.

[fallow geode]

ok, since I get to see the music tomorrow, I should probably get on with (Act 3) ||killing papa||

[velvet fiber]

Looks like you get to face the music

[dawn spindle]

I'm so aaaaaaah

Hype

[fallow geode]

and that's a wrap

I feel like I may have done myself a disservice by leaving such a long gap in game time

[dawn spindle]

No way, who would do that cause they keep postponing side content? Sheesh

[halcyon elbow]

https://klipy.com/gifs/sus-rock-2

[sick yew]

Hmm I should play some more tonight.

[cold swan]

Just finished act 1 and damn

[nova temple]

indeed

[dawn spindle]

Damn is right

[exotic ember]

Wait. Are null and Usha going to the same performance?

[sick yew]

https://tenor.com/view/nodding-crossed-arms-pikachu-eyes-closed-pokemon-gif-15194868

[fallow geode]

unless Usha's at a secret second london performance

[dawn spindle]

Yes

[exotic ember]

Oh, wild haha

[dawn spindle]

We are in opposite corners though

[sick yew]

Okay today:
||Gonna go and clean up loose ends in the Monolith, and then try Frozen Hearts.||

[sick yew]

Huh. Act 2 ||I wonder how Expedition 70 got inside the monolith.||

Alright, cleaned out ||the monolith,|| think I'm going to call it there for the night.

[dawn spindle]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1194838543747530872/1433821203054858403/ezgif-55f98130818863.gif

[errant wedge]

HYPE

[exotic ember]

A day of whee for you lucky folks

[fallow geode]

It starts with some woo 😔

[dawn spindle]

https://tenor.com/view/hoecat-bunny-fast-zoom-gif-17159621360561728072

[nova temple]

Usha isn't looking very woo, she seems all wee

[dawn spindle]

I'm all wee

I'm all suited up too

I'm so excited I feel antsy lol

[dawn spindle]

I just saw a Clea

E33 ALL ||painted Clea too||

[errant wedge]

[pulsar citrus]

Act 1 || https://tenor.com/view/clair-obscur-maelle-chase-weeeeee-expedition-33-gif-7634862462704503655 ||

[dawn spindle]

This is so hype, there are many people cosplaying or semi cosplaying

[errant wedge]

If they ever came here I'd definitely go in baguette at least.

[sick yew]

I'd try to pull something together, but baring that I'd at least bring a baguette to the show

[halcyon elbow]

Its "en baguette" I believe

[exotic ember]

Same

Act 1 || Lampmaster but the arms are baguette? ||

[dawn spindle]

Okay here we go

[fallow geode]

Weeee

(a painted symphony pics)

[dawn spindle]

Its so aaaaah

[fallow geode]

If I'd had more notice, I think I could pull together a decent low effort Renoir

Though my hair is closer to Verso

[dawn spindle]

I did just talk to a Maelle on the toilet whom i told her her fit was good af

[fallow geode]

(I'd need a hair cut either way)

[fallow geode]

in the toilet, I hope usha

[dawn spindle]

And she said "you look f- sharp yourself" (I'm just wearing a suit)

[dawn spindle]

... at the queue

My brain is currently off

[fallow geode]

She's right though

[dawn spindle]

I have a few short videos ill upload when I don't have to pay for data

[dawn spindle]

I know 😌

Silksong all ||I heard Trobbio in my head while saying that||

https://tenor.com/view/bunny-cute-bun-rabbit-dance-gif-12204421675478327501

Here we go again (?)

[exotic ember]

Good performance?

[dawn spindle]

No words

[dawn spindle]

Holy crap

[errant wedge]

👀

[dawn spindle]

All my thoughts are curse words (highgly)