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You can count me among the many fans begging for Final Fantasy – or really, any big-budget, lavishly produced RPG series – to return to its turn-based roots. Slowly, strategically fighting your battles while being told an epic story with AAA production values was core to the whole appeal of JRPGs for years, but with big budgets on the line, developers gradually shifted to more and more action-driven games.
When Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was revealed last year at the Xbox Games Showcase, I thought my prayers had finally been answered. But after spending four hours hands-on with a recent preview build of the game, I found that it's not exactly the turn-based RPG I was longing for. Instead, it's something even more exciting.
Clair Obscur does have turn-based combat, but its battles feature active elements, where well-timed button presses will help you deal extra damage and avoid getting hurt by enemies. This is a system we've seen in plenty of other games, from the Mario RPGs to the cult classic Lost Odyssey, but Clair Obscur ratchets up the challenge several notches. It's absolutely wrecked my dreams of a chill turn-based time, but now I'm completely obsessed with its blend of classic JRPG combat with what I can only describe as Dark Souls parry and dodge mechanics.
The Dark Souls of turn-based RPGs
Yes, I am engaging in the ultimate game journalism cliche by immediately comparing Clair Obscur to Dark Souls, but hear me out. Each enemy has a variety of different attacks with different tells, and while you can simply tap a button to dodge most of them, these strikes typically come in the exact kind of weird, off-tempo combos that have buttered FromSoftware's bread for years. Each new monster – whether it's masked horror with blades for arms or a mine-toting wisp – is a new set of combo timings to learn, and they are deceptively challenging to get a handle on.
Simply dodging gives you a reasonable window to get out of the way of most attacks, but if you really want to take it to a monster, you need to start parrying, which requires much tighter timing. If you parry the right part of an enemy's attack, you'll turn it around into a big counterattack, but perhaps even more importantly, parries give you extra action points to start unleashing more powerful offensive skills much faster.
Each time I'd enter a new area with a new set of foes, I'd rely on dodging to avoid most of the damage and get a read on the enemy combos. Once I started to find the handful of attacks I could predict reasonably well, I'd swap over to parries for those and absolutely wreck house. Yeah, sure, I was spouting a few profanities when I'd inevitably screw up the timing and get my clock cleaned, but nailing that timing and destroying your opponent is every bit as satisfying here as it is in a hardcore action game.
Where defense in Clair Obscur is a stiff test of your reflexes and pattern recognition skills, offense is all about strategic thinking and effective character building. There's a timing element here, but it's a pretty superfluous one which - unlike the defensive commands - you can simply disable in the menu. For the most part, dealing damage is all about picking the right moves at the right times, and there's some delicious crunch to your strategic options here.
Each of your party members gains a variety of skills that you can buy with points earned at level up, and you build a loadout of six skills per character. Skills each cost a certain number of action points to use in battle, and you gain more AP by using weak, basic attacks - or, as mentioned earlier, by mastering parries. Skills deal far more damage, and can deal status effects like burn to enemies.
Each character also has a unique mechanic tied to their skills. Leading man and profound sad boy Gustave builds up charges he can unleash on uber-powerful attacks, while dueling specialist Maelle's skills set her in various combat stances that let her deal extra damage or shore up her defenses. These then start chaining together with status effects. By the end of my time with the demo, I'd built a burn-based offense that relied on magic specialist Lune setting enemies ablaze. Then I'd use a Maelle ability that switches her into a high-risk, high-reward offense stance when she attacks burning enemies, and immediately start unleashing her most powerful attacks.
All these combat systems layer over each other, with skills and statuses and each character's unique mechanic helping build a chain of causes and effects that last from the start of each battle to its final blow - and the white-knuckle pressure of impending active parries and dodges constantly looms over all of it. It's great stuff, and definitely the part of Clair Obscur that has me most excited to play more.
French fantasy
It's the exploration and the connective tissue between these battles that I'm a little less sold on, at least so far. The parts of the game I played take place over what are essentially a set of winding tunnels – absolutely gorgeous tunnels with awe-inspiring art design, mind, but tunnels nonetheless. There are alternate paths to explore with items to find and optional mini-bosses to fight, but you should probably set your expectations toward something like a more linear Final Fantasy, like 10 or 13. There is a much larger, fully explorable world map linking all these locations together, and it's certainly possible that the game might get much more open-ended later on, but my time with it was largely spent going point-to-point with only occasional distractions on the way.
But a bit of linearity might not be the worst thing with just how beautiful the world is. This is a gorgeous kind of ethereal, abstract fantasy, and each location will give you some thoroughly unexpected delights before your time with it is done. "Delight" is a bit of an odd word given just how melancholy the tone is, but I was constantly mesmerized by the visuals. There's a feeling of decay fed by ancient ruins, punctuated by wonders like forests of undersea vegetation found on land, great orbs looming ominously, and portals to strange mansions lurking in the forgotten wilderness
My demo offered a pretty truncated version of the story setup, which sees your party heading out on an annual expedition to destroy a godlike being known as the Paintress, who's been cutting down humanity's lifespans year by year. I'm already invested in the central cast thanks in large part to excellent performances from actors like Charlie Cox and Baldur's Gate 3's own Jennifer English, and while this demo didn't offer a ton of storytelling meat, the concept is so intriguing I want to know more.
Clair Obscur might not quite be the exact flavor of turn-based AAA RPG I've been longing for, but after a few hours getting to grips with its battle systems, I've fallen with its combat regardless. If the game's world and story can make good on the promise teased by its early hours, RPG fans are in for something truly special.
Clair Obscur draws inspiration from some of the best JRPGs ever made.
