Back again with yet another post about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive). Here’s yesterday’s post in which I talked about some of my frustrations with the overworld. I want to be clear that I think the overworld is mostly pretty great. It’s just has a few things that make it excruciating, sixty-plus hours into the game. I mentioned some of them yesterday, but they are still irritating me.
I. Want. Markers. In. The. Fucking. Game. For fuck’s sake! Even when I was looking at a guide as to how to get the Lost Gestrals (don’t ask), and I had no idea where some of the areas named were. At all. Even when I looked at the map, I could not remember the places. I literally had no idea where they were or what they contained.
To be clear, some of these were one-stop caves that didn’t have much in them. Which, I have to say is another thing I do not love about the game. There are several side dungeons that, quite frankly, feel like filler. Some of them, a half-a-dozen or so, aren’t actually dungeons in the classic sense. There aren’t enemies to fight or a boss at the end. Instead, there is just one item to pick up. That’s it.
To be fair, they are usually really good items. Still. I wouldn’t have missed them if they weren’t there (I mean, if I knew about them. Obviously, if they weren’t there, I wouldn’t miss them because I’d never have seen them). And with a game that has so much other contente, I don’t think they were needed.
I keep thinking how they would have benefitted from an outside voice saying, “Hey, this doesn’t need to be here.” I maintain that I appreciate that they had a vision and stuck with it, but that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be some tightening up here and there. I would have cut out all the one-item dungeons. They didn’t really add anything to the game and they were difficult for me to navigate through because–well, I’m not exactly sure why. There was something about the dimensions that fucked up my brain.
I’ll be even more honest. I didn’t feel the need to have the extra dungeons that were just a few rooms and then meet the boss. I can’t think of any that really stuck out. I mean, there were a few that did, but not in a good way (because they had those damn charismatic bosses I mentioned in the last post). The rest just blended together.