I finished the second act of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive), and boy, do I have a lot to say about it. First of all, they had a cutscene at the end that went on f-o-r-e-v-e-r. This is not a bad thing, necessarily, but it was, ah, self-indulgent, to put it kindly. Oh, and this is the post from yesterday.
*SPOILERS*
I’m not going to get into the specifics of the story, but I will say that I saw much of it coming. Not the exact storybeats, but the themes, and some major character reveals. To be fair, they were heavily sign-posted, so I don’t give myself kudos for figuring it out.
I have to say I was not pleased that the end of the second act was very combat-heavy. There seemed to be groups of enemies every foot or so, and it was so monotonous. Even though the enemies differ in each area, they’re basically skins of each other. And look. I’m not hating on the repetition, exactly, because FromSoft does it, too. It’s how many enemies there are and how varying their aggro ranges are. Not just how far they will chase you, but how close to them you can get before they will be aggroed.
Side note: I found out that the game itself tracks how much time you’ve played it. I’ve put 67 1/2 hours into the game, and I’m honestly surprised it’s not more.
There is one particularly egregious example of two groups of three enemies that are placed in such a way that once I finished fighting one group of enemies, I took one step and was thrown into a second fight. I heaved a huge sigh and did it, albeit grumpily. And, yes, you can flee from a fight, but the enemy get to have their complete turn first (I finally figured that out today).
I have never liked the combat. I’ve said it from the beginning. Some of it is because I cannot parry for the life of me, and that’s the backbone of this game. Sure, you can dodge instead of parry, but then you don’t get the counter–which is also really important in this game. At some point in the second act, I resigned myself to parrying for the most part and just taking the damage when I miss (which is roughly half the time, if not more–missing, I mean). Wait. Let me clarify.
I still cannot get the parrying down with any consistency. There are some enemies I have down pretty well, but there are others that I miss every single parry. And some enemies do six or seven attacks in a row. I’m not exaggerating. And at some point, I just give up.If I can’t get the first two or three parries, I will not get the rest.
I have to say that more than one person in the RKG Discord has said that they find the parry timing difficult. I watched a video that said the timing is later than it is in soulikes. I don’t think that’s true across the board, and that’s part of the problem. Sometimes, you want to parry just as the attack reaches you. Sometimes, you want to parry as soon as the attack is starting. I think it’s later for melee attacks and sooner for ranged, but I can’t say that with any confidence. Oh, and you want to hit jump as soon as you see the symbol flashing, but for the gradient counters, you wait until the screen flashes gray, the gray fades, and the enemy does the attack. And, again, who the hell knows where the actual window is?
I certainly don’t. I know other people do because I have watched videos of people perfect parrying time after time without breaking a sweat. It’s both amazing to watch and depressing in equal measures. I know that I suck at this for various reasons, and it’s so frustrating that I have to work three times as hard as some people to get a quarter of the effect that they do.
Now, to be fair. I don’t min-max as much as the game wants me to do. Not nearly as much. It’s so not my jam, and there are way too many items in this game. An overwhelming amount, honestly. And they don’t explain the systems well, which is very FromSoft of them.
By the way, one of the devs was a Sekiro speedrunner in the past. I thought that was just an interesting tidbit, but after completing two acts, I think that informs the game to a big degree. Well, at least a significant degree. Why? First of all, because the parry is king in this game as it was in Sekiro. Two, the deliberate obtuseness, which is a trademark of FromSoft, but ironically, not as much so in Sekiro as in the rest of the games. The endless min-maxing is also prevalent in From games–though, again, not quite so much in Sekiro. But mostly that damn deflect.
Well. I’ve fucked around for way too long so I probably won’t get to the meat of my post until tomorrow. However, I can get it started before I abruptly end it as is my wont. It’s about the end of the second act and my growing dread as I continued along with the main story.
I said from the very start that I found the story compelling, if not a tad overwrought in the beginning. The prologue set things up in a heartwrenching way, and the first act started with a bang. It was strong, and I really connected with Lune and Gustav. It took a little longer for me to warm up to Maelle, but by mid-second act, I liked her well enough. The three other party members were fine, fine, and very cool in order of how I met them. I don’t want to talk too much about the latter two because they’re pretty big spoilers. The fourth party member was Sciel, and that’s a surprise, but not really a spoiler.
Sciel was fine, but too chirpy when I first met her. She was a very positive person and tended to quip too much. Some people mentioned that they found it jarring to go from how intense the beginning was to the jokiness that followed soon after. I have to agree. The changes in tenor were not done with a light hand, and while I get that light and dark are the themes (or clear and obscure, if you prefer), it gave me whiplash how far they went back and forth.
People raved about the end of Act I, and I said when I finished it that I shed a tear and that they earned it. But, even as the cutscene played on, there was a thought niggling the back of my brain that it felt a tad bit hollow. And the further I got from it (emotionally), the more dissatisfied I felt with what happened.
Here’s my issues with the storybeats in general. Each individual one makes sense, but when you put them together, they don’t really hold up. The acting is stellar, which is part of the problem. Without it, the flaws in the story would be more apparent. And, yes, I know that they are modeling JRPGs so maybe that’s baked into the genre (how soap opera-ish the story is), but my god. It really went off the rails in the middle of the second act.
I foresaw about half of it, which made me sad. Because I did not want it to be what I thought it was going to be. Why? Because it’s ludicrous. When the big storybeats were revealed, I got the sense that it was supposed to be shocking, which it wasn’t. Again, I figured out half of it, and the other half just logically followed.
Side note: I have read thousands of mysteries and have been able to pick out the culprit 90% of the time by halfway through the book. I mention this because I think that helped me picee together the story.
I have a hunch that Sandfall Interactive are pretty pleased with their story and that they think it’s a grandiose epic tale. And to be fair, most people who have played it agree with them. I thought the opening was strong (if melodramatic), but it’s steadily gone downhill since then. The more they try to make it an epic, the emptier I feel inside.
Plus, there are holes in the story that you can drive a bus through. I don’t want to go over the story spicifically, but it went from a solid B to a C to a D for me. The acting is tremendous as usual, but I find myself rolling my eyes whenever there’s a cutscene. I will admit that it’s also because the cutscenes are after the boss fights, which I completely hate as boss fights. I did three major boss fights today and while one was surprisingly easy, the last two bosses of the second act were fucking ridiculous.
I’ll write more about it tomorrow.