Special experience off the bat.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 starts off strong with a very emotional and beautiful but chilling world, art style is fantastic and the music really brings it together. My first several hours playing it, really felt like a special experience. Gives that feeling I look for when starting a new game, of something new, exciting and totally gripping. Though this started to wear off for me after the first day of playing it. Don't get me wrong it's still beautiful, but I started getting a bit bored faster than I was expecting. At 25 hours in, i'm having a hard time getting myself to hop on and play it, been heading back to other games a bit. I'm playing it on the hardest difficulty and it's a bit overkill, having to perfectly parry every single attack or end up getting one shotted quite often.

Having to edit this, as now im at 50 hours, decided to give it more of a chance.

Where there are some things I don't necessarily love, like the difficulty curve and the main map having really high level areas and boss monsters sprinkled throughout the levels you can go to. Makes it a bit weird roaming back and forth through the game, seeing if you are high enough level to go to the places yet. Though, if you just follow the questline, progression is fine - you will miss some areas you can complete at lower levels though, which have more items and upgrades etc... You just kinda have to keep circling around the map as you progress if you want to hit everything.

Some areas are clearly marked "Danger" and most hold enemies that are incredibly strong, even at lvl 40 with my characters - my hardest hitting attacks don't even seem to touch the healthbars. Though there are some areas marked danger, that have no enemies in them at all. so thats a bit weird. Im guessing they intend for us to go back and explore those areas after a certain amount of main quest progression. I thought I was going to beat the game before seeing everything, so I keep going back to check on the areas.

Another difficulty curve thing is simply the parry mechanics and boss monsters (nevrons) sprinkled around, some enemies are laughably easy, others are incredibly hard to get the timing down to parry their attacks. IF you go for the harder difficulty, expect to get stuck on some fights for a few, or up to several attempts, before you can parry every single attack. Keep at it, and you will start to get the hang of it, but it can be a bit aggitating at the start when your party gets one-shot a lot.

Aside from the difficulty being all over the place, It's simply a beautiful game, with a unique story and very unique zones, each with its own distinctive art. Architecture and scenic appeal is overwhelming, there's too much to look at. I wish I could explore the zones more but most are fairly small, and you are stuck in a path with invisible, and visible, barriers all around the edges. Obviously not an open world game, though that would be awesome.

At first I thought it a bit tedious and overwhelming reading through all the pictos/luminas and trying to devise builds for my characters, but now im enjoying it. Every character has a certain style to it, and requires management of resources and using abilities in the right combinations, makes for interesting gameplay. There are lots of abilites and passive buffs to assign, so you can really play around with it a lot. Some fights might require you to swap things around.

Im glad I decided to give this game more time, as I got a bit frustrated with it and bored early on. Now im looking forward to playing it each day and will probably clear all content available. Kudo's to the team for making something beautiful, unique, and engaging.

p.s. I was a bit thrown off by all the goofy shit they sprinkle around in the game, which throws of the beautiful but dark theme of the story, i'm not really a fan of comedic relief stuff in settings like this. Almost like if you put a bunch of clowns in Elden Ring, happy go lucky characters. Just doesn't make much sense. I'm getting used to it though, it has its own charms.