Game 13: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

I'm very excited about this one, I've heard great things.

Edit after I played: If you yourself have not played Expedition 33, I recommend that you stop reading now and do that first. I have tried to avoid the absolute worst spoilers but you owe it to yourself to experience this one as unspoiled as possible - I regard this game as a 'must play' and I think you will enjoy it all the more if you do that before reading further. Ok, now that you've either played it or disregarded my advice, let's do this! This is Gustave.

With wavy hair and a faraway look, we meet our hero.

He has a robot(?) hand, and I think we're in the future, year is unclear but we have some pretty cool 'ropes' which consist of suspended light, so we're either using magic or some neat tech. Gustave is about to leave on an expedition to attack the Paintress, some sort of entity that's slowly killing humanity because she's painting a number on her monolith.

The Monolith is visible in the distance.

When she paints your number, everyone of that age gets 'erased'. So aside from the first year or two people presumably saw this coming. There have been other expeditions (may as well send X-year olds every year, they're dead anyway otherwise) that have died, but they 'paved the way' for us. Gustav wants to give a rose to Sophie, who is also 33 - he has some unresolved love interest there. Sophie is about to go on her 'Gommage', which may or may not be the expedition? Could be something else. It involves lots of flowers.

How many French flags died to make these outfits?

There's also Maelle, who wants me to 'loosen up' before talking to Sophie. She does so via a 'friendly duel' which serves as the combat tutorial.

That's a 'rope' in the background, which happily work much faster than normal ropes.

THIS IS ME DUELING IN A FRIENDLY MANNER DIE DIE DIE

The Paintress appears to have had a lot more effects on the world than just erasing people - there's floating islands, debris and buildings, buildings that have 'twisted', and lots of blue-green hardened goop around the town.

The game is quite beautiful visually, and the music and voice acting are excellent so far.

The fashion is older, 1800's? And there's been no electronics or possibly even electricity, so this is alternate universe with some magic.

Florists must be he richest people in this society.

We arrive at the harbor, and in a gorgeous piece of cinema, the Paintress stands, the world fades, and she paints the number.

If you don't play the game, go watch this cutscene anyway.

The 'Gommage' is basically if you're older than the number that's painted, you turn to ash and flower petals.

The petals fly off into the wind to add an element of beauty to the horror.

Sophie spends her last moments with Gustave, resigned to her fate.

Imma make a suggestion for future expeditions: Set sail the day before the Gommage, for morale reasons.

I guess it does help if everyone is even angrier at the Paintress.

So we're on an island (I think) called Lumiere. One of the conversations indicates that there was a 'fracture', I assume 67 years ago when the Paintress showed up (Or is she older and just started murdering people then?). Another expedition member at this mini-festival wonders if there are other survivor groups out there, apparently Lumiere got lucky with its placement after the fracture and had time to get a shield-dome operational. At this festival you can buy three things with tokens, you start with one and I obtained two more so I got all three things, a 'wierd picto' (spell?), an old key, and a hairstyle. Then it's time to go, and these cinematics... if you don't end up playing the game, they're worth seeking out and watching.

I love these uniforms, they look so good.

We arrive on the Paintress' island, which looks pretty bleak, with strange rift-lights in the sky.

We couldn't find a better landing spot?

And... what the hell? There's an old guy here from a prior expedition?!?

How is he alive at all?

This man is asking the right questions.

By way of answering, old guy starts murdering us. Also many other things start murdering us.

Like whatever is causing this explosion.

And things from under the ground. And this... huge hand thing.

Are those pants from a prior expedition?

All of which is to say, Expedition 33 is off to a rough start. Hand-thing hits Gustave with a spell that makes his chapter start.

He knocked me right out of the prologue.

And... we wake up somewhere...

Somewhere... beautiful?

At first I thought it might be a dream, but I was still covered in dirt and blood, so probably not.

This is a damn fine looking game.

It's not all good though, this guy was not happy to see me.

I ended up having to kill it, if it's even alive.

A little further up, this is not quite so pleasant as the forest.

Looks like 33 is not the only expedition that had a bad time.

There's no numbers on the armbands so I'm not sure which expedition this is. Looks like the people have been turned to stone.

I assume this expedition was entirely wiped out right here.

Ever get a bad feeling about continuing forward?

I would like to go back to the happy forest please.

Yeah that's... that's a lot of bodies. At least some of them are Expedition 33.

A LOT.

At least some of them are Expedition 33.

Most of us didn't make it off that beach.

It's all too much for Gustave.

Pull the trigger and the nightmare stops.

But he's saved from himself by the appearance of Lune, another member of 33.

Glad she showed up, I wasn't ready to stop playing just yet.

And then both are spurred to action by the appearance of a powerful enemy.

We've got a lot of team members we'd like to avenge, starting with you.

Looks like each character has their own separate game mechanic for their special actions.

The game never mentions 'Magic' but Lune's pretty much an elemental mage.

After winning, Gustave sucks the thing up into a device he invented to turn it into a usable ability.

I will turn your corpse into power!

And then in just a few steps we're outside of the Cave of Death and back in a beautiful world - some really hard, abrupt contrasts in this game.

Lune is barefoot but that may be by choice, she hovers during battle and moving around.

And the transition between those contrasts is everything, not just visual - the hollow, fleshy gurgling sound of whatever the body-construct structures are gives way to lovely music, chirping birds, flowing water - the sound design and music are wonderful.

Each character has their own entirely separate skill trees too.

I would describe combat as 'flashy as hell'. Weapons leave mystical streaks in the air, characters move to attack enemies as though they were Cirque du Soleil performers, and it's fun to watch. There's a parry / dodge / hit harder system so timing some button presses will give you an advantage in combat.

Nobody in this Expedition would ever do something so common as simply running forward and stabbing someone.

Those who explore a little are rewarded with shinies.

The 'rest' system works a LOT like a Soulslike game - you can rest and heal at these camps but doing so respawns enemies. You have life-refilling elixirs that reset at these camps but you can only carry one of each elixir at the start, I would not be surprised to see that capacity increased later. Actually, there's a lot going on here that reminds me of Elden Ring, those hand-monsters from the beach wouldn't look out of place at all in that game. The devs here were clearly inspired by it.

A bonf... er, Expedition camp.

I've found the Indigo tree! This is Expedition 33's rally point, where everyone was supposed to do if we got separated. Or massacred, I suppose.

Giant glowing tree in the distance, check.

A friend had me stream just to watch me die to this 'Chromatic Lancelier', unlike other enemies he'll insta-kill you at my level unless you can manage to dodge his attacks. He's optional, thankfully - seems like you can simply avoid the hardest fights if you want to.

Feels like I'm not 'intended' to fight you yet, but if I can just get the timing right...

Attempt 5 - so, so close.

He won with a sliver of health left.

When an enemy attacks, you can watch the animation and try to either dodge or parry it to take no damage. In either case if you do it correctly there's no damage to you. The reward for correctly timing parries, which are harder than dodges - is you get to unleash a powerful counterattack if you parry every one of the enemy's attacks in the series.

I have you now!

Nail the timing, nail the monster.

The theme of paint and color is suffused throughout the game. The people who I thought were 'turned to stone' earlier have actually had their 'Chroma' drained, which is really just a fancy word for 'color'. An item that lets you respec a character is called a 'recoat', and itself looks like a cracked ball with fresh paint dripping out.

Menus like this are painted over the background.

And the game world itself creates endless works of art - I'm doing something I did in Elden Ring, where I'll just stop for a few moments just to gaze at a captivating world.

Every frame, a painting.

First boss isn't too difficult.

He hits a lot less hard than the green guy did.

At the Indigo tree we're supposed to rally to save survivors, but there's no other survivors there aside from another expedition member that the boss already killed to show us that he was dangerous. There's a message there that says Maelle is elsewhere, taken to a hut north of here among some weird corals. Lune wants to stay here and await other survivors, suspecting a trap. Gustave insists on going after Maelle, and since Lune can't stop him she decides it's better to stick together. Just past the boss battle is another area, and this one prompts me to bring up a map. I haven't explored much, not sure how big this will be.

This could be a pretty big world.

Given the expedition's losses Gustave just wants to find Maelle and go home. Lune still wants to try to finish the job with just the three of them, if necessary. Part of the deal for everyone here is that they're dead anyway within a year if they don't succeed, I'm with Lune.

I love that the characters are constantly dirty, it's a little detail that adds a lot.

Setting camp, the Monolith is still very far away from here.

Is it... even farther away than when we were in Lumiere?

the sun rises and we see our first dawn on the island of the Paintress.

We should probably have a better name for the place than that but if there is one I haven't heard it yet.

This 'overworld' section is slightly different from the 'level' sections, it feels more open with more places to go, the camera is zoomed way out, and you can't jump.

Maelle is in the 'weird corals'? Looks like the place. 

I head into Falling Water and we are most definitely underwater. This is not nearly the impediment to Gustave and Lune that one might assume.

Just walking and talking underwater, it's fine.

If only scuba diving were this easy.

Gustave recognizes the boat and nearby deceased as Expedition 68.

I'm glad someone knows their history.

I've suffered a bit of a setback - due to a power fluctuation my computer turned off while the game was running and I lost my save file. Guess my battery backup unit is dying because it didn't manage to prevent the outage. One thing I've been wondering is - if the Paintress already has your number up and you turn that age, do you die immediately or do you live until she switches the number to the one under your age? I found a guy back in Lumiere who mentions that this is the anniversary of ALL their deaths, which would argue to the latter. Now my enemy is the game itself, or issues with it - it's now crashed twice after getting to where the expedition departs. You know how games always warn you 'Do not turn off the power when you see the saving symbol'? Those things are not kidding - you can really hose up a game! Expedition 33 won't even start now after a reboot. Verifying file integrity did nothing, I'm reinstalling it. Thankfully checkdisk didn't find issues with my hard drive. The reinstall worked and I'm now caught back up to this point in the game. Onward! The dark side of Falling Waters are mines, and a floating body tied to a chain.

From a beautiful underwater wonderland to this, the contrasts continue.

There are some fun enemies here that carry mines like balloons for you to shoot - boom! We come to an underwater hut with a door inside.

Much like the Tardis, it's bigger on the inside.

Maelle is indeed here, we found her!

Nice to see you've been hanging out in an underwater mansion living in luxury, I was in a cave of bodies.

And we found OH HELL NO

Though he turns out to be quite nice.

Back outside we meet Noco, who Maelle already knows.

Noco is Gestral (a race of painbrush-people?), and a merchant.

High on the list of 'don't try this in real life', you can battle a merchant to get them to sell you their best thing.

This is the second time I've encountered a white Nevron ('Nevron' appears to be a catch-all for 'monster'). Like the earlier one, it isn't immediately hostile - does being white indicate that they've been drained of 'Chroma' or perhaps that they have too much of it? Apparently being drained of Chroma is a common fate for many of the prior expedition members.

The white Nevrons give you quests but you can also choose to fight them. I've been doing the quests.

This system of weapons having a 'rank' tied to your stats is a familiar Soulslike mechanic - I don't know if Fromsoft pioneered it but it's also in the Dark Souls / Elden Ring games.

Agility D, Luck C means this weapon gets more powerful mostly based on Maelle's luck stat followed by her Agility stat.

This means a high Vitality-connected weapon is going help a character that's very tough also dish it out. And since healing abilities are percentage based, it also scales how much health a character recovers. I've also noticed that you get increasing amount of hitpoints per stat point in vitality - the first one gives you like 5 HP, now they award over 10 each. The journal entries are nice so far but it's looking like there's one per expedition.

This is a really unique world and I would love to see more written about it.

Some Nevrons are big. Really, really big.

I probably shouldn't try to fight that but the consequences for dying are relatively minor.

The boss of this area only appears to be hostile due to us picking a flower on the sea bed. Gustave's efforts nonwithstanding, we let it live after defeating it.

Maelle seems to feel a connection with this Nevron.

Camping after the level, I find that we have a new fellow who's joined us in camp.

Look, I'm not a face-ist, but I'm really not comfortable around this guy.

Expedition 63's journal mentions that they brought cars with them, which is not a good idea given the state of the roads here (current state: there are none).

Found one of the cars though, a very early analog to Earth cars.

I've reached the Gestral Village! One of the Gestral kids out front mentions that they were just revived, so maybe the Gestrals have a way of coming back to life.

They seem dumb but they're doing a lot better surviving on this island than humans are.

The 'Chef' wants us to fight in their arena to prove our worth. There we find Sciel, another Expedition member, and the party grows to four.

Fancy meeting you here!

I suspect I met Sciel briefly in the prologue but she didn't stand out as much as Lune, who was both playing a beautiful guitar tune before the Gommage and was running some sort of magical experiment afterwards. Then Maelle... hallucinates? She sees the old man that wrecked our expedition and a woman with him. He tells Maelle to give up, go home - tells her she'll just make things worse.

Old dude knows Maelle? How?

On the advice of the Gestrals we go to find Esquie to help us cross the sea.

He's big and friendly and seems to know Sciel, though she doesn't recognize him.

Esquie agrees to help us after we greatly anger a turtle. There's been a lot of places on the map nearby that I've never visited, before we continue with the main quest I'm going to go back and check them out.

The map is bright, colorful and helpful.

Most of the unexplored zones are above my pay grade. This guy appears to want to be a sheep.

He will utterly murder your party if attacked.

Ask me how I know.

I thought Gustave was joking around when we found a ferris wheel by claiming that expedition 50 was riding it around... nope, he was absolutely serious about it. It went as well as you might expect.

Some of these expeditions were trying pretty zany things.

After finding Esquie's swim-rock, a bunch of stuff happens, and a new character joins the party - Verso, from the first expedition.

Apparently he and the old guy and others have stopped aging.

This is why the old guy attacked us - he thinks the Paintress has made him immortal and wants to keep it that way. But now Esquie can swim! That unlocks more areas to explor, like this Gestral parkour course on the beach.

Took about five tries, I got some swimwear out of it.

Exploring these areas above my level and avoiding enemies results in a pretty significant reward - I found a Pictos much higher level than the ones I currently have.

There's no level requirement for equipment so I can use this bad boy right now.

There are a ludicrous amount of Expedition bodies at the 'Old Battlefield', apparently all felled by a single Nevron. Verso 'Hasn't seen it for a few years' so I'm sure we'll run into it at some point.

And I thought there were a lot of bodies in the cave, this is ludicrous.

As expected, the big bad Nevron comes for us.

It stands no chance against attack posess like these!

Did I describe the earlier amount of bodies as 'ludicrous'? That's left me with few adjectives to choose from here.

These don't have Expedition uniforms, so maybe a bunch of people lived here before the Nevron attacked.

We're through the entryway into the main continent. Verso wants to go recruit a friend of his, and then attack the Paintress' heart. It's neither attached to her nor will destroying it kill her, but it'll make her approachable - so it's more like the Paintress' shield generator.

Even if we could it would be rude, we should ask permission first.

After a rocky introduction, Verso has won Maelle over and she gives him a spare Expedition 33 armband.

This is what the map looks like now, going after the heart continues our journey north.

Verso's friend is Monaco! I'm not sure what he is - possibly a strange Gestral or a large Baboon? He can turn into monsters (sort of, he get monster-based attacks).

Monaco and Verso are old friends and tease each other as such.

This place also has a new race, the Grandis. They're big, rocky guys with hair.

Who did he find to make a beret in this size? It's like a 2-meter beret. 

So I've pieced together that the Grandis, Gestral, and humans all once lived on this continent - I'm currently headed to a place called Old Lumiere. The Fracture, coinciding with the appearance of the Paintress, split off our territory and sent it away, which I presume we renamed Lumiere afterwards.

Unlike the Gestrals, the Grandis seem to have some grasp of history.

The Gommage, which is a fancy word for 'The Paintress subtracts 1 and everyone that age or older gets subtracted' only seems to affect humans - these Grandis appear to be immune, and the Gestrals haven't mentioned it much but we know they can be reborn in a river so I don't think they're going through an annual vaporization ritual like we are. Since we stopped at the tailor to get clothing made we may as well put on bathing suits and try the beaches!

It's another Parkour course, with more verticality than the last one.

Someone on the dev team clearly enjoyed 'Only Up', Bennet Foddy, and similar rage games.

Thankfully these are optional sections, I've only ever gotten cosmetics. One of my favorite things about this game is finding and reading about the other expeditions, all of these journals are voice acted by the way.

Expedition 47 is best Expedition.

I've reached Old Lumiere, the place where the Paintress' heart is located.

Maybe the shield dome is to protect from all the glowy swords that fell everywhere.

A screwup - for which he is appropriately remorseful - splits the party, so it's Monaco, Lune and Sciel as the party for now - the others are missing. But eventually we reunite, and find the center of Old Lumiere... a manor. THE Manor?

Wait... is this THE manor where I found Maelle? I keep finding alternate entrances to it.

But the old man, who I find out is named Renoir, shows up and stops us.

Renoir has some crazy attacks.

Together we're enough to give him a fight, and so instead he teleports the whole manor elsewhere - after he kills Noco, the bastard. The heart of the paintress was within, so it's out of reach now. The Expedition comes up with an alternate plan - to defeat powerful creatures called Axons to give the Curator (no-face guy) material to build a weapon powerful enough to penetrate the barrier.

I don't hear any better ideas, Verso.

Lune had a sister Stella and a brother Sol - guess her parents really loved astronomy.

Thankfully there's not really a death penalty, as powerful, optional foes scatter the land.

This guy? Absolute death for my party. The zone behind him? Perfectly doable, glad I checked it out.

One of the Axons lives on the aptly named Visage Isle.

Maybe we could bring a spare face back to the Curator. Dude could at least wear a mask.

Some very cool themes in this area, there are masks you enter with various emotions that lead to places that reflect - outwardly - the emotion. 'Joy' is a place of green fields, Anger is a lava-fire theme.

'Joy' meaning the Nevrons are smiling when they try to kill you.

This guy is WILD. He just continues attacking forever and never lets you have a turn!

I've rebuilt my party specifically for parries to try to beat him.

Nail the timing, nail the monster! Appropriately enough you get a better counterattack Pictos for this.

The next Axiom, Sirene, lives in a coliseum with impressive architecture.

Sing for me, my enemies.

She dances and messes with your minds, Lune seems especially vulnerable to being whisked away in joyous abandon.

Fortunately you, the player, can simply enjoy the music.

Every so often I've encountered these 'Fading' people that seem like they're stuck mid-Gommage.

They're generally up for a conversation but seem lost in their own world.

I keep finding doors to the Manor that unlock additional rooms within it. I think my initial thought that this and the manor in Old Lumiere were one and the same may be wrong, because Renoir and the Heart of the Paintress were in the other one, and this one is uninhabited.

I've also found a secret passage that I can't get into and a painting that's missing, there's stuff to do here.

Did I mention the music in this game is top-notch? Just listen to it. I am about to fight a sewing-machine man.

There was a debate within the party about whether to do this or not as it was not hostile, but destroying it will weaken the Axon Sirene and I was persuaded to choose the path of violence. I'd love to know what happens if you leave it alone.

That's a hell of a status effect! I better kill it fast!

Customization of your characters and abilities is high, so high that I've had some analysis paralysis settling on a build and actually choosing which weapons to level up - and the game hasn't been hard enough to necessitate that I actually make that optimization, so I've been muddling through and playing around with my options. One thing this game could really use is the ability to save a setup, there are specific fights like with Petanks that you just want to optimize your damage for because they just run away, and it would be nice to be able to hot-swap between configurations for those sorts of battles.

There is always room to improve a game and this game would be improved by a 'Save Skill Configuration' option.

We approach the Axon.

Its beautiful singing only delays its demise.

The Curator uses the Chroma from the axons to forge a weapon for Maelle.

And with that, we're ready to face the Paintress herself.

I decide to respec the characters for a more focused build. I have enough respecs by now to do it several times if I don't like this one. The main party is Maelle, Lune and Verso. Maelle is a defensive protector, using a skill that will take hits for the others and focusing on her defense to take hits, along with a weapon that will spread AP to the other party members whenever she gains any in defensive stance, making her both a tank and a battery for the others. The other two are glass cannons, focusing on damage output using the AP Maelle generates for them. It's not perfect by any means but it works well enough to take out some of the nastier enemies that I'd previously bypassed. There's a lot going on with character customization and therefore a lot of viable builds that one could try out...

But what sort of madman would create a build that uses this?

I wonder if there's actually a theme to the Pictos for a given area - I also found a 'damage all enemies on death' Picto in the same zone. At last we arrive at the Monolith and face the Paintress herself.

For Lumiere!

Our attacks don't affect her... and she doesn't seem to care. She's... not the real paintress.

We go inside the Monolith.

It's trippy in here.

Really, really trippy.

There things in here that should be unique in the world, like the 'Ferris Wheel' that one expedition brought, but it's here again inside the Monolith.

Either things are duplicated in this place or some other expedition thought 'Let's try assaulting the island in a Ferris Wheel again... it didn't work for them but maybe, just maybe, it can work for us."

Even a version of Lumiere is here.

Sadly it did not recreate the nice people of Lumiere.

Renoir appears to stop us. At first, to his credit, he tries to reason with us.

But it ends in violence.

With Renoir incapacitated, nothing stands between us and the Paintress, and we finally see her.

At last, face to face with the object of every Expedition.

The party is far from optimal for this last battle and I really have to muddle through it - having a tank doesn't help when the boss just hits everyone with their attacks. Muddling through it turns out to be just barely good enough and I win on the first try.

Victory.

A triumphant return to Lumiere!

This ends Act II, and I simply refuse to spoil what turns out to be something incredible that I didn't see coming, but a lot of things in retrospect make a lot more sense now. It's brilliant, and honestly? Just play this game. It's excellent, and you need to see what happens here for yourself. The Paintress may be defeated, but the story continues....

Esquie can fly now! The whole map is open to me.

With all the new areas that opened up, there's plenty of them that are still very dangerous to my party. The 'endgame' battle is clear (Renoir is still a problem at this point) but I want to explore for a bit first. This Crimson Forest area is barely doable for me, but the enemies keep killing my damage dealers leaving Maelle to slowly finish the battles.

I'll have to revise builds at some point.

Wandering the map proves fruitful as I happen across a tough but very doable battle where the Maelle-tank build works as intended, and the rewards are a huge leap in power from what I've got - the highest level weapon I had prior to this is 19 and I only had one other level 23 Pictos.

The path to power comes from whatever you are strong enough to obtain.

I muddle through a couple zones with Maelle stomping things and manage to get a serious boost in power from additional finds. I’ve decided to try a party build using a likely unusual configuration of Verso and Monaco as front-loaded ‘shock troopers’ - Verso got a really powerful sword that starts him at his most damaging rank, but he can’t be healed at all in exchange. So he and Monoco start the battle and their job is to just do as much damage as they can before dying, then a reserve of the remaining party members can step up with more robust self-healing builds that should be able to still dish out respectable damage while staying alive for longer endurance battles. It works well. Each of the characters are strong enough to get through this series of 1v1 battles (Monoco needs a temporary rebuild, his weapon is still quite bad as I haven't found one I really like yet).

This was a cool area, each character has to individually fight something nasty.

But on a boss battle like this Monoco and Verso can do a lot of damage before going down and sending the rest of the characters in, and by then I've had a chance to practice the boss parry timing several times.

Verso and Monoco as suicidal shock troops works frighteningly well.

I haven't been camping as much because the way to upgrade weapons is no longer in camp, but it turns out to be important - conversations with characters there lead to some third-act side quests, like visiting the final location of Expedition 46 - the one with Lune's parents in it.

I tried to get in here before but I couldn't enter until a camp conversation unlocked the way in.

Now we can... traumatize Lune. Maybe this wasn't a good idea.

Love the monsters in this game! Lookit this guy!

Back when we were hunting Axons, Verso dismissed going after one out of hand. The Reacher, which grew incredibly tall because it was always reaching for the stars. Verso's sister is at the top.

We have a long climb ahead to meet her.

Really long. Maybe we could just attack the feet?

Pans-on-head will not stop me!

I've modified the Verso build slightly so he always goes first and leads with a nasty multi-target attack.

It's good enough to wipe out most standard enemy groups immediately, leading to very quick battles. 

The Pictos (Skill) system is really well designed, each one has tangible benefits and there's interesting ways in which they can serve to customize your characters.

This one starts to make me think a Gradient Charge (Ultimate attack) build may be viable.

At the top, an encounter with Alicia and the third Axon.

Verso is not happy with how this turns out.

Verso finds some consolation in his friendship with Esquie, who remembers where one of his special rocks is! His special rocks give him powers, like the ability to swim or fly. It's in... Francois' cave, right next to where Esquie lives. Where we already got another rock near the start of Act 1.

Great memory, Esquie.

But this time we won't have to battle that dangerous turtle.

We can offer him a bribe.

The new rock lets Esquie dive to find things under the sea.

Conversations with Maelle reveal how she survived the beach.

Verso saved her.

Camp conversations in Act III drive the story forward and fill in a lot of the mysteries from the first two acts, so I wonder if there are players out there who missed them because camping isn't strictly enforced or required. Plus, we decide to resurrect Noco, so we can see how the Gestrals come back to life.

Monoco waxes poetic about bringing back his friend.

Also I uh... repainted the monument.

A little milestone - Maelle cracked a million damage with her best Gradient attack.

Despite all this power, there are still enemies out there that destroy me.

For example, this unspeakably evil Mime.

Noco returns to us!

He doesn't remember everything though. It's sort of him and sort of not.

Wandered into a cool place, nice swords, kind of dark.

Ah, Simon is here - my friend mentioned yesterday that he's the hardest battle in the game.

May as well give it a shot.

Got it with some build tweaks on the third attempt!

Oh, well, that was just phase 1.

Doesn't he look cool? He looks very cool.

Phase 2 utterly and completely wrecked me.

We'll call it a draw and move on.

This is probably the best option for a Burn build, holy smokes.

I've returned to where we began - the original landing point of Expedition 33, to take revenge on the foes that slaughtered everyone else.

They stand no chance against this party.

All along the game there have been these white Nevrons which don't want to fight, and give you small quests instead. You have the option to fight them afterward, but I never did since they weren't hostile.

Such kindness is massively rewarded here.

And finally, I figured out how to get to the center of the Painting Workshop and fight this thing.

You may think you're badass but you're no Simon.

It's been great fun romping around Act III, and I've at least visited everywhere. This party is ridiculously overpowered at this point. Renoir isn't going to know what hit him. I've greatly enjoyed my time in this game, and it's time to finish it. Welcome back.. to Lumiere. The denizens are a little different.

Renoir's creations and Maelle's expeditioners battle in the streets.

And now, the actual, final boss...

I KNEW IT. I KNEW THAT GUY WAS SHADY.

After beating up almost everything else in Act III and gaining unreasonable levels of power, the big bad bad ends up being a 1-round kill. Maelle has one, final, awful choice to make, but in my effort to avoid the worst of the worst spoilers I will leave it at that. Once again I will say that you should play it. For anyone curious as to what I did, I chose to save the world, with all the consequences that entails. I still don't know if that's the right choice. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Phenomenal music, an enchanting world, great combat, an excellent story that I have done my utmost not to spoil, and all the really difficult stuff is optional - Expedition 33 is a masterpiece and should rank among the greatest games of all time.