Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's director admits that the team "made it a little bit too easy to get overpowered," but says it's classic PS1 RPGs like Final Fantasy 10 that are to blame.
Speaking with Edge magazine, Clair Obscur director Guillaume Broche is asked whether the ability to get overleveled ahead of the game's final boss was intentional. In response, he says that "the vision" was to have a structure similar to PS1 RPGs, "where the last disc, which is for us the last act, is very open-ended, and you can go directly to the final boss or you can do side content."
In the case of Expedition 33, it seems like more people opted to do side content than go straight to that final showdown – something the team say they didn't expect and they admit led to a slightly disappointing boss fight for some. Broche admits that "maybe we made it a little bit too easy to get overpowered, but we wanted players who want to focus on the narrative to be able to go from the end of Act Two directly to the end of the game."
I was certainly one of the players who didn't do that, rinsing my way through several levels of the Endless Tower before heading into Act Three. As a result, the final fight was a bit of a walkover compared to some of the optional content, but Broche says developer Sandfall still "thinks it's OK – more or less what we wanted."
Some of the reasoning behind that, he claims, is that the team was playing to its inspirations. Right up to its most recent update, Expedition 33 was chock-full of JRPG influences, and Broche's personal JRPG experiences date all the way back to an ill-fated run-in with Final Fantasy 8. In this instance, it's actually a later Final Fantasy entry that drove Sandfall's choices: "If you look back at Final Fantasy 10," he says, "if you get overpowered, you can kill the final boss in one hit."
I never got to that point myself, but I've started seeing people really ramping the damage numbers up into the tens of billions since that latest update. I don't think I'll be fully unleashing Maelle like that, but it's nice to know that it's (almost) what Broche and his team wanted you to be able to achieve.
