How Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s turn-based combat pays homage to all-time great JRPGs
3.3.2025
By Owen S. Good, Contributor
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 honors this bargain with a combat system that presents a fair, stout, and ultimately cerebral challenge. I recently got a look at Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 in a three-hour (or so) preview slice provided by developer Sandfall Interactive, whose debut work is scheduled to launch April 24 on the Epic Games Store. Though Expedition 33 will arrive packed with dense lore, inscrutable proper nouns, and over-the-top fantasy set design, this preview was specifically intended as a gameplay showcase.
The good news for fans seeking a meaty homage to the JRPG genre’s finest traditions is that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's moment-to-moment gameplay works and has strong intellectual appeal. I even played through the demo twice to see if I could learn from my mistakes and perfect some of the battles I stumbled through the first time around. Learning from these errors, omissions, or faulty assumptions is a core part of winning later on, and even feels like it’s referenced in the Expedition’s in-world credo: “Even if we fail, we lay the trail for those who will come after.”
Handling a party of two (and later three), I focused less on particular traits, attacks, and buffs and more on their context and effect.
The most effective attacks in Expedition 33 build on your opening moves, a series of setups and payoffs. For instance, Expedition 33 encourages you to use a free-aim ranged attack to knock out an enemy’s glowing weak spot, but this consumes action points and limits how you can follow up. Better to use your character Gustave's "Marking Shot," which—although it only costs 1 AP and doesn’t do much damage—multiplies the damage dealt by his teammate’s next attack. It’s a far better choice than the standard, always available, and no-bonuses attack option.
These feedback loops become apparent as soon as you use each character. Gustave's companion Lune, for example, casts attack spells that leave “Stains,” similarly teeing up subsequent attacks for larger damage. In fact, Lune’s big (4 AP) Ice Lance attack is worth deploying as early as possible, despite its high cost. Not only does it dump a slowing debuff on your target, but it leaves behind a Stain that can multiply the damage of a future Immolation spell (and add a Burning status effect too).
Maelle, encountered later in the preview, changes up her stance as the situation requires. One stance can leave her ready to deflect more attack damage on the enemies’ next turn, while another might double her own strikes when the battle cycles back her way. Again, thinking at least a move ahead is critical to victory. Simply dropping the highest-damage attack on enemies doesn't come close to the compounded damage and knock-on effects needed to dispose of the largest, weirdest Nevrons. (Those are the dark fantasy creatures in service to Expedition 33’s big bad, The Paintress.)
This chain of cause-and-effect is more complicated than it sounds, as there’s a lot of visual information you need to decipher in-battle. Moreover, a lot of the work happens before you even face an enemy, as you set up each character’s skill tree. Optimizing these is naturally a trial-and-error process, and while there will be a means of re-speccing builds in the final release of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, it requires a certain consumable that wasn't available in this preview.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 does feature some skill-based inputs that put a metaphorical thumb on the scale, and these helped sand off some of the inefficiencies I’d inadvertently built into my characters.
Adventuring through the interstitial portions of a level, or Expedition 33’s overworld (called The Continent), players can run up on an enemy’s avatar and whack it. Getting the timing right ensures that players start the turn-based combat portion by attacking first, which can be a huge benefit.
Hitting an enemy's weak point with those ranged attacks I mentioned earlier can also give you a huge head start, especially when outnumbered. Certain enemies, like Flying types, will dodge standard attacks and can only be damaged by free-aim shots or counters. And said counter attacks—which require parrying every part of an enemy’s attack—end up being a critical part of a successful offense, especially when a boss attacks the entire team. Nail the parries and everyone will gang up on the boss, creating a huge momentum swing for the next round.
Counter-attacks and dodges give a bit of a determinative edge to the player, and it proved comforting to know that fully parrying a boss's attack was enough to keep me in the fight another round. The action points they restore also enable you to hit harder the following round, making their mastery absolutely essential.
Execution is far from automatic though, even after three hours with the game. Enemies go through attack patterns with feints and delays to throw off the player’s timing, the way a great baseball pitcher gets a slugger to swing out of his shoes on a curveball. And at higher difficulties, the window for a successful dodge or parry is razor-thin. Sandfall’s Creative Director cited 2019’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice as an inspiration for these mechanisms shortly after revealing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 last June.
For this reason, PC players will want to pay attention to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s specifications. Despite the richly illustrated world and its characters, players should prioritize smooth performance during combat animations so they can hit those narrow dodge and parry windows.
As if that weren't enough, a third evasion becomes available for certain attacks later on. Some attacks can only be jumped over rather than dodged or parried, and discovering that by trial and error was one of the few frustrating moments in my time with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
Well, let me revise that—Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 will be plenty frustrating for those who are going through the motions with their turns. That said, I appreciated and understood that I was responsible for my predicaments, rather than feeling punished or blamed by the game. And there were always ways of extricating myself, even if only the time-honored tactic of playing out a doomed battle to learn more about enemies' weaknesses and attack patterns ahead of the inevitable rematch.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s elaborate worlds and levels are still linear, with very few deviations to explore. Some paths led to sub-bosses whose power was so obvious from the drop that I knew I wasn’t supposed to uncover whatever they were gatekeeping just yet. Others were perfunctory side trips paid off with the acquisition of a modest amount of Chroma, an in-world resource. Mostly, traversal and exploration serve the purpose of admiring Expedition 33’s stylish shattered landscapes before funneling the party to the next throwdown.
As for the story, Expedition 33 is ultimately about doomed people confronting an existential threat. Set in a dark fantasy time inspired by France’s Belle Epoque, the titular Expedition is the latest group of heroes sent forth to destroy the Paintress—and the Paintress’s big problem is that she writes an arbitrary number in the sky every year, which wipes out anyone of that age in an instant. The Expeditions are sent out to put a stop to that, but none have succeeded. Maybe you'll be the first.
Sandfall Interactive is leaning hard into the specifics of Expedition 33’s bespoke world, its creatures and characters, their costuming, the landscapes, and the crises everyone else is trying to overcome. But in the end it doesn’t really matter if I understand why one of my teammates is hanging out in a transdimensional manor with a fencing tutor that looks like a large mannequin with its face broken off. If I didn’t enjoy the core gameplay of Expedition 33 I never would have made it to the point to wonder about such things, or what allegory they might stand in for, if any.
That, I suppose, is the real victory of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s gameplay design. It became an incentive for me to overcome the inherent exclusion posed by such a preciously and personally stylized world, with an inaugural chapter that tries very hard to seem like it’s the middle chapter of an established saga. Expedition 33’s detailing and narrative beats are nice to observe, but they're easier to take with a big-picture perspective. The points the game makes that are really worth lingering on, pondering, and decoding are in the liturgy of its gameplay, not its lore.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is available to wishlist now on the Epic Games Store.