Back in May I saw the release of this game I never heard of trending on Twitter, and got curious about it. Made by a small French indie studio with a team of 50 devs and a small budget (at least compared to AAA games from a big studio) Clair Obscur is everything I’ve wanted to see in a modern Final Fantasy game. It’s got turn based combat similar to what we once had in Final Fantasy’s 9 & 10, Chrono Trigger, and other classic jRPGs while also blending in a dodge/parry system you see in games by FromSoftware. The story and characters are outstanding, the voice actors are all amazing (they got Charlie Cox from Daredevil to play Gustave!) and the graphics are as good as any big studio title.

I have been binging this game every day for hours after work, some days I spend hours just trying to defeat an optional boss until I’ve timed the attack patterns down enough to parry. You could spend weeks just grinding through the world map before even continuing with the main story because there are a bunch of optional locations to explore with their own unique monsters and bosses.

It’s a 10/10 from me. Best game I’ve played in a while. It’s everything SquareEnix said wouldn’t work in modern gaming working perfectly.

 

If you don't play this game with sound on it is a crime against humanity.

 

Recently played through it myself & it's a masterpiece. The art director should win all the awards because it's gloriously beautiful. Gameplay is the most fun turn based RPG in a long time. Music is amazing too.

 

Of course I forgot to mention the music. Easily the best soundtrack in a game I’ve ever heard. It’s like the Forrest Gump of video game soundtracks except all the music is original. The battle music when you fight

Spoiler

Renoir

alone deserves recognition from the any and all awards available. Do they have a Grammy for best game soundtrack yet?

 

Finished the main story over the weekend, still a bit of side content to do. Overall, I've got to agree with the praise: great story, great art, great characters, incredible music, great combat...it really is the complete package. The only real negative I can say is that balance gets a bit weird in the third act, although on reflection it's arguably more of a direction issue than balance.

Spoiler

The third act is one mission, but the overworld is also opened up completely (assuming you've had a few camp conversations with Esquie), so if you're anything like me, you'll naturally assume that you should do a lot of the now available side content in preparation for the final boss...at which point you'll be massively overlevelled and likely curbstomp the final encounters, which did rather undercut the emotion and drama of the whole thing for me.

Definitely want to play through it again to see it again with full knowledge of what's going on, and do the other - probably better - ending.

 

Powercreep is definitely real in this game, probably my main gripe with this game gameplay wise. Once you get to the third act you have to virtually gib yourself to have any semblance of a challenge and thats just me throwing a few picto combinations together, let alone anyone who actually looks proper builds up. Especially because the combat was so focused around learning the dodges/parries in fights and than bam, everything including bosses just dies. It was extremely fun until you just started 1 shotting everything, and if you don't remove the damage cap than fights take ages and go into the boring category. Definitely needs better end-game balance, maybe something as simple as not removing the damage cap completely but just increasing it by a certain value.

 

Dunno what ending you picked, but the devs very clearly thought of Verso as the correct ending. If you didn't pick that one, it's worth at least watching it on youtube.

 

Yeah, that's not the ending I picked...