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.