Parry haters, rejoice! You don't actually have to play Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 like it's Sekiro if you want to beat the RPG, even on its hardest difficulty. An unbelievable "all hit" run has proven that it's possible to finish the game on expert, even including that infamous Simon fight, without a single dodge or parry. (Well, okay, you do have to dodge once, but that's in the tutorial.)
The YouTuber known as ymfah typically makes videos about absurd Soulslike challenge runs, but "how to all hit Expedition 33" is pretty much the exact opposite. People have beaten the game before without dodging or parrying, but pushing things up to expert difficulty is a whole new ballgame.
The big issue at the start is that no parries means no extra action points, so you're both taking more damage and dealing less. But focusing on first strikes, always leveling vitality, and making sure you "don't mess with mimes" will let you get through the early fights without much trouble.
One early roadblock is the fight against Eveque, which there is "mathematically no way" to beat without an absurd amount of grinding for the piddly XP drops you get from the enemies in the starting area. So ymfah proposes an alternate solution: a ridiculous out-of-bounds skip to bypass Eveque, head out into the world map, and grind for meatier XP gains and better weapons. Then, of course, you're free to return to Eveque and beat the boss for real.
There are still a few more hiccups in the route from here, like the fact that the Curator scales with your level, so you're much better off bypassing fights for a bit to stick to level 7. There are a few more boss fights with potential skips demonstrated by ymfah here, but those are mostly efforts to bypass a few more level grinds.
From there, it's mostly a matter of getting the right build together – which mostly means supercharging Maelle with all the crits and damage boosts you can scrape together at this point of the game. Most important, of course, is the Picto that gives you AP every time you get hit, finally fixing the action point imbalance.
I'll avoid going into too much detail on the rest of the run from here for fear of spoilers, but as the game opens up, the increasingly absurd builds you can put together make the all hit strategy more and more viable. By the final boss, ymfah is able to more or less nuke any obstacle, and that includes even the final challenge. The devs at Sandfall Interactive seem happy to let you break the game to pieces, and all those one-shot builds work just as well without parries as they do with 'em.
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