Clair Obscur is really good. The storytelling and writing have been fantastic, the graphics look great (and the art direction is beautiful), the music is good, and even the voice acting is good. It's also fun to play (though some fights are too hard like I mentioned in another comment). Honestly, I hope that it wakes up the devs at Square Enix because this is what Final Fantasy should have been for the last 25 years instead of the hot mess they have made of it.
Not op but having played Rebirth, while overall very good, it suffers from the classic case nowadays of adding repetitive "chores" to do around maps, to artificially increase the length of the game with little purpose.
So far (only 6 hours in, but some friends who went further confirmed), Expedition 33 seems to steer away from that, being a lot more story driven.
It also has, by far, the greatest prologue I've seen in a game.
Worse thing so far, the UI in the menu does take a second to get. Particularly the selected state is way too subtle and a bit confusing at first.
No, but that is because I played Remake and thought it was really bad, genuinely one of the worst games I've ever played. As you might imagine I did not drop my cash on the follow-up to a game I hated that much.
I think a bunch of people would have been more interested in the ff7 remake had it been able to wrap up the story in a single game that's only 30-60 hours.
Played Remake and put that down after a few hours. The combat was just not appealing; it was packed with filler for anyone who actually played the original FFVII; the VA was just typical JRPG wooden quality. Would rather not invest another $70 for Rebirth.
Having just started (and slogged through the interminable intro piece that is tonally completely unrelated to the main game), I'm keeping an open mind, but it feels like this is scratching a very particular itch for a very particular group of gamers who have been largely ignored for a decade or more. It's not bad at all and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes, but the turn-based approach feels _very_ old (in both good and bad ways), and the dialogue system..
"We leave tomorrow." click A
"Huh" click A
"We must drink tonight" click A
"You're a bad influence" click A
"Huh" click A
Someone will probably tell me this is the convention in the Final Fantasy style and that's FINE, and this would go a long way to explaining the reaction. It feels like a well above average game that is a GREAT game to a subset of gamers because they haven't had a game like this in so long.
The game is actually quite innovative compared to the average game. The combat is turn based but it has a large dodging/parrying element akin to Sekiro. The limited consumables but being refreshed on resting at a flag(bonfire), and flask also seem directly inspired by FROMSoftware games. The ability to use your other party members when other ones die feels fresh and makes it feel like there are no "never used" party members. The aiming option in fights feels like it draws from P5. They turned the limit break mechanic into kind of a party super meter, which I'm sure has been done before but feels fresh.
The dialogue is actually humerous(which is unusual for a game), the story is mysterious and intriguing, the music is great. Interesting take that this is average or derivative and just appealing to a certain type of gamer--can't say I agree.
Again, I didn't say it was average and in fact went out of my way to say that I felt like it wasn't average at all but that it was perhaps less groundbreaking than the excitement for it lets on because it appears to share traits with a particular genre that has been neglected for open world games. I also didn't say "derivative" but I would note that, for every feature you're listing as innovative, you're providing an example of where the mechanic can already be found. And, from my perspective that's *perfectly fine*, but it also contextualizes the game as more of a loving homage than genuinely groundbreaking.
> "We leave tomorrow." click A "Huh" click A "We must drink tonight" click A "You're a bad influence" click A "Huh" click A
Good, makes me want to play the game more. As someone that likes to pay attention to story and dialogue, I like to be able to control the flow of dialogue.
In a lot of cases, games like this give plenty of options for dialog speed and automatic continuation. As long as those things are in place, it seems like it should make everyone happy at relatively little development effort. I'm split on this. If there are voice overs, it's insufferable to make me press a button to continue every single line. If it's text only, it feels more natural.
There's few things I dislike more in 3d games than selecting dialogue flow. Especially if there are important hint inside. Cinematic scenes should be a quick break from the flow of the game, but those feels more like reviewing forms. Either gives me a proper cinematic, or a journal/note/description thing for me to read.
> or a journal/note/description thing for me to read
It's incredibly hard to please everyone. I don't like reading in games, the UX is awful. If I wanted to read I wouldn't have started a game in the first place, I read books not games.
I don't mind if there's meaningful choice that can affect later gameplay, but clicking through lines of dialogue feels like an unnecessary step. (Again, I'm completely open to the response that this is just how it is in this genre, but from a more general audience perspective it feels strange.)
It’s so refreshing playing a game that isn’t the N+1 installment in some archaic franchise. I hope the studio survives and makes something else novel and interesting.
Of particular note is the care taken in facial animations. There’s still some uncanny valley (UE5 still sucks at human faces) but they’ve done a lot to make the characters emote believably during in-engine cutscenes.
I wish the out-of-engine FMVs weren’t so heavily compressed, but c’est la vie.
My advice: play this in performance mode. Parrying is significantly harder at 30Hz.
It's a jrpg made by a team of 30 that adds timing based quick time events (block, Parry, Empower) to standard jrpg combat with souls like one shot mechanics. It's a new IP based on a world where a entity has taken over and every year a countdown decreased by 1 and anyone over that age disappears. You are on an expedition to solve the mystery and stop it.
I love that the origin of this game is basically the developers going "hey, nobody makes turn based JRPGs with high end graphics any more", and they decided to be the change they wanted to see.
It's wonderful. went under my radar as well, but i had it through Game Pass. Been playing it on my Steam Deck via GeForce Now. I'm a long time JRPG (turn based) fan and this is, so far, one of the best i've ever played. I'm very happy to be surprised by this one.
I've never been a fan of JRPGs, preferring things like BG3, Mass Effect, Dragon Age (not the new one), and Skyrim. But after 800 hours in BG3, I think it's time to try something else and this looks like it might be that.
This is not very meaningful unless you filter the plethora of 0s and 1s out of games that clearly don't deserve then (e.g. Baldur's Gate 3 - I didn't like BG3 very much either, but even for the crankiest gamers it is not honest to give it below 6/10).
There is some interesting sociology about why Clair Obscur hasn't been dogpiled by bad-faith reviews, but I don't think it says much about the quality of the game. In particular I am sure the score will go down once it wins some awards and bored losers get mad about it.
> This is not very meaningful unless you filter the plethora of 0s and 1s out of games that clearly don't deserve then
Only if you filter out the plethora of 10s that games that "clearly don't deserve them" either.
Who is the judge if a game deserves a score when the aggregator purpose is to normalize it anyway?
If a game sees a bunch of 10s and 0s it means that something in the game is polarizing. The fact that Clair Obscur has such a high rating means it pleased everyone across the board. Nowadays that is quite a feat.
When Astro Bot won GotY, a bunch of idiots who thought that Black Myth Wukong should have won started review-bombing BG3; since Astro Bot is a PS5-only game and you can't review games on PSN, they decided to go after BG3 since their CEO was the one who presented the GotY award to Astro Bot.
You don't often see people review-bombing games positively that they've never played, so the skew is going to be towards the negative and not the positive.
> If a game sees a bunch of 10s and 0s it means that something in the game is polarizing. The fact that Clair Obscur has such a high rating means it pleased everyone across the board. Nowadays that is quite a feat.
100% this. Clair Obscur, by every metric I can think of, is going absolutely nuts. I find it hard to imagine many upcoming games which might compete with it for GotY.
Sure, user reviews are totally useless across the board, not disagreeing with that. My point is that if a game gets exceptionally good critical reviews then a 0 is almost always a hissy fit, not a serious assessment. And often the only thing that is "polarizing" is the game's financial success. (Edit: see my prediction about the game winning awards and seeing its user score knocked down accordingly.)
> If a game sees a bunch of 10s and 0s it means that something in the game is polarizing. The fact that Clair Obscur has such a high rating means it pleased everyone across the board. Nowadays that is quite a feat.
What I suspect has happened is that it is neither "conspicuously woke" nor "conspicuously anti-woke". Probably because it's French. Therefore it has avoided organized review-bombing campaigns, as well as being an extremely good game in a neglected genre.
(re: review bombing, a funny/stupid example of this was when Genshin Impact gave out anniversary freebies that the fandom deemed inadequate. So they started review-bombing it. Google removed the reviews. So they review-bombed https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... instead)
It sounds like:
1. Some people just dislike the qte combat.
2. Some people reject certain plot points. But we can't talk about it that much because it's a spoiler. I'm annoyed at myself for reading too many comments on it.
What is the argument of letting people vote without verifying if they played the game ? I get it since its the usual approach to movies, but when you are used to reviews through stores like Steam, it sounds a bit off (granted, people can buy a game on steam, leave a review and refund it but that's still less of a problem than letting everyone review).
If there is an argument, would that still hold for Steam ? Can anyone review a Steam game even if they didn't play it ?
I might have missed a lot so don't be too harsh
I think its about ergonomics of the review system, not that reviews of non-players are positively valued.
Review sites NEED reviews. Even unreliable reviews are better than no reviews. Otherwise you are dead. On top of that keeping users engaged in the review system drives revenue. All of this means adding hurdles like verification (however that might work for metacritic) or (for Steam) turning away reviewers because they played the game off-platform is a net negative for the company.
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So far (only 6 hours in, but some friends who went further confirmed), Expedition 33 seems to steer away from that, being a lot more story driven.
It also has, by far, the greatest prologue I've seen in a game.
Worse thing so far, the UI in the menu does take a second to get. Particularly the selected state is way too subtle and a bit confusing at first.
"We leave tomorrow." click A "Huh" click A "We must drink tonight" click A "You're a bad influence" click A "Huh" click A
Someone will probably tell me this is the convention in the Final Fantasy style and that's FINE, and this would go a long way to explaining the reaction. It feels like a well above average game that is a GREAT game to a subset of gamers because they haven't had a game like this in so long.
The dialogue is actually humerous(which is unusual for a game), the story is mysterious and intriguing, the music is great. Interesting take that this is average or derivative and just appealing to a certain type of gamer--can't say I agree.
Good, makes me want to play the game more. As someone that likes to pay attention to story and dialogue, I like to be able to control the flow of dialogue.
It's incredibly hard to please everyone. I don't like reading in games, the UX is awful. If I wanted to read I wouldn't have started a game in the first place, I read books not games.
For me - journals/notes/description and even video scenes - is something I cannot focus on, so ignore most of the time.
However selecting (even fake) choices keeps me engaged and more "role playing" as if I am saying those lines and live through the dialogue.
Of particular note is the care taken in facial animations. There’s still some uncanny valley (UE5 still sucks at human faces) but they’ve done a lot to make the characters emote believably during in-engine cutscenes.
I wish the out-of-engine FMVs weren’t so heavily compressed, but c’est la vie.
My advice: play this in performance mode. Parrying is significantly harder at 30Hz.
I don’t know what it’s about but I intend to play it and wanted to share with others.
Not true. Roughly 500 people worked on the game.
There is some interesting sociology about why Clair Obscur hasn't been dogpiled by bad-faith reviews, but I don't think it says much about the quality of the game. In particular I am sure the score will go down once it wins some awards and bored losers get mad about it.
Only if you filter out the plethora of 10s that games that "clearly don't deserve them" either.
Who is the judge if a game deserves a score when the aggregator purpose is to normalize it anyway?
If a game sees a bunch of 10s and 0s it means that something in the game is polarizing. The fact that Clair Obscur has such a high rating means it pleased everyone across the board. Nowadays that is quite a feat.
You don't often see people review-bombing games positively that they've never played, so the skew is going to be towards the negative and not the positive.
> If a game sees a bunch of 10s and 0s it means that something in the game is polarizing. The fact that Clair Obscur has such a high rating means it pleased everyone across the board. Nowadays that is quite a feat.
100% this. Clair Obscur, by every metric I can think of, is going absolutely nuts. I find it hard to imagine many upcoming games which might compete with it for GotY.
What I suspect has happened is that it is neither "conspicuously woke" nor "conspicuously anti-woke". Probably because it's French. Therefore it has avoided organized review-bombing campaigns, as well as being an extremely good game in a neglected genre.
(re: review bombing, a funny/stupid example of this was when Genshin Impact gave out anniversary freebies that the fandom deemed inadequate. So they started review-bombing it. Google removed the reviews. So they review-bombed https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... instead)
Deleted Comment
Review sites NEED reviews. Even unreliable reviews are better than no reviews. Otherwise you are dead. On top of that keeping users engaged in the review system drives revenue. All of this means adding hurdles like verification (however that might work for metacritic) or (for Steam) turning away reviewers because they played the game off-platform is a net negative for the company.
I normally get bored of JRPGs quickly but the game systems, music, artwork and story have all been stellar.