An Ode to Expedition 33

Warning: Spoilers. If you like JRPGs and have not played Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, I ask that you click away from this post.

The real painter was Guillaume Broche.

I find myself lost in this painting, unable to pull myself out of it. It's been about a week since I downloaded and installed Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and I haven't really eaten, slept, or meaningfully engaged with base reality since then.

Other places online have sung the game's praise better than I can. It has won all five GOTY awards and perhaps more significantly, received a 10/10 score from Edge magazine. A magazine that I've been reading from the first issue in 1993, when I would have been eight years old.

As a child coming to terms with abuse and isolation, one of my only escapes was video games. The big milestones were Street Fighter 2 Turbo, Donkey Kong Country, a short dalliance with the Amiga 500 handed down from my uncle, and then eventually, the PS1. We had Resident Evil (Japanese title: Biohazard), Tekken, and a number of other titles that were revolutionary for the time. But none really made my heart soar the way that Final Fantasy VII did.

Back then we just didn't know. FFVII didn't exist yet, so we had nothing to compare it to. I thought the whole game was going to be a dystopian, cyberpunk-inspired adventure with this menu-driven battle system. But at the end of that first disc, where you leave the city of Midgar, and the world map opens up, there was this incredible feeling of adventure. Like you have no idea what you're going to find around the next corner.

That first playthrough was pure. In E33 I found myself wondering, what did the developers want me to do in this section? Do they care about my feelings of loss at not getting important loot in this area if I miss an optional path? But back when I was twelve and playing FFVII for the first time, I had none of that. I'd never heard the term "level up" or "grinding", we didn't have a meaningful internet in those days.

So much of that depth was thanks to Uematsu Nobuo's score for the game. It was an entire musical world, emotive, haunting, scary at times, dorky and playful at others. I don't think I noticed it back then, but the musical landscape was the emotional landscape of the game. Like a prompt: you're at this point in the story, now feel this. We had so much innovation in that moment: an unreliable narrator, 3D graphics on pre-rendered backgrounds, interleaving storylines, a solid battle system.

I wanted to be as in love with VIII as I was with VII but it just didn't happen for me. But VIII and IX set the stage for X. X wasn't VII, but it had the same emotional depth, that haunting score with a consistent voice, and moved the area map to fully 3D environments. And it's roughly around here (perhaps allowing for Souls-likes for the parry mechanism) that we have all of the raw materials we need to make a Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

Around the first or second act of FFVII we lose Aeris, a character that the player would have built up some rapport with thanks to the plot points so far. In E33, within the first ten minutes of the game, we gain a deep emotional connection with an unreasonably likeable protagonist in Gustave, only to lose him at the end of Act 1.

FFVII wasn't really broken down into "acts" so to speak, but it was instead broken down into three separate discs. To progress the story you had to physically put different discs into your PS1 depending on where you were in the game. If you squint though, Clair Obscur's "Acts" are analogous in plot to FFVII's discs, the same things happen at roughly the same moments. We lost a main character around the end of act 1, and by the end of act 2 we have an airship we can use to explore the world and take in all the optional content and story lines before getting to the last boss of the game and viewing the ending. This is mirrored exactly in both games, twenty-eight years apart.

So it's a poem or a song in a structure I've seen before. It's not the same story, but it rhymes with Final Fantasy VII.

Final Fantasy VII was about self-discovery, of breaking through the illusion of identity and your supposed ego and discovering who you really are. It's also from the first moments, an underdog story about a team of misfits fighting a good fight against an evil mega-corporation. These are fun, stimulating themes for a twelve-year-old. I might not have caught everything or been able to articulate them in the moment, but they were positive and opened my world up. To wit, I probably would never have started this crazy, unbelievable adventure in Japan were it not for that feeling of adventure that FFVII gave me a taste of.

On the other hand, for better or for worse, the central, over-arching emotional motif of Expedition 33 is grief. It is grief in the small, where the citizens of Lumiere lose a portion of their population to the conflict between Renoir and Aline every year. And it's grief in the large: the entire world is a mother mourning her son, losing herself in the canvas that he painted as a child.

Part of the reason the game affects me as much as it does is because of that rhyme, that format. The execution of the mechanics is utterly flawless, it fades into the background. I can make more or less invincible builds without thinking too hard about it. My wrist and fingers on my right hand are sore from parrying so much this past week.

But the other part that resonates? It's not the gameplay mechanics, or the three-act structure of the story. It's the fact that in the nearly thirty years between FFVII and E33, I've had plenty of time to build up life experiences, and those, like anyone's experiences, are filled with grief.

Grief for a relationship you longed for but never had. Grief for someone you lost, or you being lost to someone. Grief for a dream you dared to dream that will never come true. And contending with that grief, and how you contend with it, well, that's the entire story of E33, the central plot is a family coming to terms with insurmountable grief.

There is something unsettling about the game after that second act that I never really recovered from.

In the first act, it's plausible that before the fracture, the world we're in was some sort of Earth-analog. We have a wavy Eiffel Tower in the background of Lumiere, so it was believable that some event happened that turned the Earth we know into the world of Clair Obscur. Some alien life form came to Earth, started the annual erasure, and that's what our heroes set out to fight against in the expedition.

But by the end of Act 2, we're to understand that the entire world is make-believe, the citizens of Lumiere, the fantastical characters we've met so far, all the Nevrons that we've battled, the dreamy, distorted landscapes we've ventured through: all of it is a family drawing things on a shared canvas. Verso started the painting before he died, and Aline jumped in so she could be with the remnants of Verso's soul, and everyone else is ostensibly trying to get Aline out of the painting for her own health, by potentially destroying it and all of the inhabitants of Lumiere.

I felt a sense of, I don't know what you'd call it, perhaps existential bankruptcy? If all of these characters are make-believe even within the plot of this story, then why should I care about them?

But careful with that thread, as there's a kind of vertigo when you start questioning layers of reality in either direction. E33 shows a bridge between two layers. To the citizens of Lumiere, the Dessendre family are gods, they can weave reality into intricate tapestries, of beautiful gardens or terrible hellscapes.

In the Buddhist or Hindu tradition, there's no base reality to really grasp at. Any cursory examination of real-life experience results in you not really having an existential bedrock to lean on. We ourselves might live in a simulation, and in Clair Obscur we have a story about two layers down from us. Does the suffering and grief matter any less if it's felt by entirely make-believe characters?

Flying around this make-believe continent on Esquie with a vaguely melancholic score, only serves to underline how ephemeral and precarious the existence of this whole world is. And, as with Aline, that perhaps it's time to put the controller down and step back into reality.

From a young age, the only art that ever really caught my eye were those that made use of chiaroscuro: strong contrasts between light and dark. The French for chiaroscuro itself, light and dark, it turns out, is Clair Obscur. And for eleven years I was married to a concert pianist who only ever played Debussy: the background music for my failed marriage was that of belle-epoque France.

So the resonance with me was not only deliberate, but coincidental. On many levels it feels as though the game was made for me because there are so many lucky congruences of fate, not least to do with the format of the story, the game mechanics, and overall themes.

But the part that really, truly pierces my soul, has to be the music. In a YouTube interview I saw that the primary composer, Lorien Testard, went to bed at night for years listening to video game scores. In his work on Clair Obscur, he understood the assignment clearly.

From the first few bars of Lumiere in the opening scene, I was emotionally overwhelmed. From those first vocals from Alice Duport-Percier that set the tone for a 40-hour adventure, all of the music in the game gives it a profound depth, that echoes in one's heart long after you put the controller down.

There are fun variations and the composers demonstrate a lot of range. There are funky battle bops that are still on theme but lend a more playful tone to the game in the midst of all that grief. And there are grand, operatic battle themes for the set-piece boss fights. These are all perfectly executed, they heighten the experience, and you can know that the developers have deep experience with JRPGs when you pay attention to the music.

I don't know much about classical music, or music theory in general, but to me the most evocative part of the musical world of the game is the central themes and melodies, their variations, and how they interleave with each other throughout the game. FFX did this with To Zanarkand, that theme was a through-line from the first few themes straight to the end. E33 does it with Lumiere I think, it's the theme and melody threaded throughout the entire game from the opening scenes to the endings.

I've been in this painting for the past week, not really wanting to leave. My characters are up to around level 80, my wrist hurts from parrying so much. I'd like to get all their outfits. I've seen Maelle's ending once and Verso's on YouTube, and I'm not sure which I like better.

To say the game is a masterpiece, the best game of all time... I don't know if I'm qualified to say that in a way that means anything to anyone but me. But in as much as art is a mirror held up that says I see you, it resonates with me in a way that not much really has up until this point in my life.

Part of me looks forward to seeing what Sandfall Interactive will make next, but another part doesn't know if he has the emotional energy to sit through it at this age. For now I think it's time to step away, to think of other things and dream other dreams.