Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s Story is Absorbing, But Don’t Miss Its Testing Endgame-Latest New 2025

This post includes looters for Clair Obscur: Exploration 33 side material. It does not spoil the main story.

Many thanks to its astonishing, entirely taking in story, I located little time for Clair Obscur: Exploration 33’s side web content. For two loads hours I remained real to the mission and pushed onwards in the direction of my objective of beating The Paintress. Not that I could see much else to do; optional regions and purposes appeared scarce. Yet upon getting to the last stage of the story, in which you unlock the capacity to fly around the overworld map, my presumption concerning side content was proven absolutely incorrect. This world is so much bigger and much more impressive than I became aware.

Soar up right into the clouds and you’ll discover scattered floating islands, each one home to the likes of a gladiatorial sector, gambling establishment, crimson woodland, or something stranger. Push beyond the borders of the major continent and you’ll uncover concealed doors, wild platforming obstacles, and sophisticated puzzles. And, deep below the sea surface, there’s the hardest manager of them all. Yes, there’s what appears like an entire other video game beyond the major course, a lot of which is designed to be Exploration 33’s endgame. Clair Obscur isn’t entirely a story-focused experience, at the very least not for those who attempt to proceed.

Designer Sandfall Interactive has taken an affordable method to side pursuits (easy to understand, taking into consideration the studio’s little dimension.) You won’t find any of the expansive side tales that make video games like The Witcher 3 so precious. Most of the optional areas are tiny– some are even a solitary ‘area’ checked out from a static cam, designed to stimulate the pre-rendered backdrops of PS 1 -era Last Fantasy greater than provide any type of kind of exploration worth. For the story-hungry, there’s valuable little beyond the lots of Journals that recount the tests of failed expeditions before you. Tiny however however intriguing tradition declines (such as, for instance, the beginning of the Nevron enemies you face throughout the story) do, on occasion, make the side content narratively richer, yet this is not a quest for anybody anticipating the very same grand story aspiration as seen generally pursuit.

Rather, Exploration 33’s MO for side content is gameplay-driven. However while it’s all built on the very same core concepts as the primary campaign– easy expedition, turn-based combat experiences, and personality buildcrafting– the activities readily available absolutely have an extremely different flavour. Essentially, it’s all developed to push those fundamental ideas as for they can possibly go. Expedition comes to be harder many thanks to labyrinthine environments that require challenge solving to advance, while incredibly effective bosses require both full proficiency of the battle system and deep understanding of how to assemble your characters’ stats, capacities, and equipment.

As with the primary tale, there’s area made for both the enigmatic and eccentric. Random doors located in both levels and the overworld will certainly deliver you to the Chateau, a grand house full of locked spaces. Each new door found breaks the seal on one of those areas, giving access to the collectables inside. Opening up the entire house is naturally the objective, yet there’s more hiding within its halls. A collection of secret bars in the dining hall activates moving architecture, which not just gives access to a covert passageway, however additionally recommends there’s even more hidden in the Manor than it initially appears.

Stranger still are the Gestral-populated areas, where sentient paintbrush-like animals ask you to address quirkier troubles. At the Traveling Casino, as an example, a Gestral holed up inside refuses to speak to any human– conquer that issue and you’ll be compensated with one of the more funny costume options. In a similar way, heading to the Gestral coastlines will see you rewarded with bikinis for your team (certain to become “fan favourites”, I’m sure), however you’ll require to prosper at a little bit of running and leaping to internet them. Several of the moment that’s reasonably easy– a race via a standard challenge training course, for instance. But one coastline asks you to climb up an impossibly tall tower of precariously well balanced junk, an accomplishment that demands patient and exact platforming, not least due to the fact that a single slip-up sends you right back to the begin.

Combining concepts from those abovementioned areas is the Painting Workshop. A monochrome realm hanging within a void, you must meticulously browse its paths made from canvases and photo frameworks in order to approach a threatening sculpture. Locating the Workshop’s numerous entrances in the overworld will certainly permit you to finish the sculpture and activate a manager fight against the Lampmaster, a terrible mass of arms, lights, and a substantial sword that requires you to address a light puzzle in between fight rounds. You combated this monstrosity much previously in the game, however this variation is considerably tougher.

That difficulty does not simply apply to the Lampmaster– it affects Exploration 33’s side content virtually universally. Abandoning the ruined course early on just to find a manager plainly designed for the endgame is something, but it’s one more to reach the endgame and still really feel totally underprepared. It rapidly comes to be clear that high-level difficulty is significantly the approach whereby most of the activities live by.

The Dark Gestalt Field and the Limitless Tower are timeless JRPG-style battle onslaughts, asking you to be successful through a variety of progressively difficult fights. Meanwhile, hiding around the overworld are a range of incredibly powerful foes, such as the spiritual Serpenphare drifting around the skies islands to the north, or the titan-like Sprong that learns the ocean. Even after you appear the 9, 999 damages restriction, causing pain on these animals needs amazing skill and persistence. There’s no cheat code to bypass this– falling to tale mode difficulty does little to increase your opportunities against them. These managers demand that you put in the initiative to train, enhance, and fine-tune your personalities. In several instances, you’ll need to respec and reconfigure your team in order to focus on a boss’s weakness and boost your protections against its specific strikes (all of a sudden it makes sense why you get so much respec currency during the campaign). If you’re a fan of the Japanese RPG work, you’ll be in ideal region below.

Because of this, Clair Obscur’s endgame feels very much like its own experience, rather than the a lot more normal “wiping up” of side quests that takes place in an RPG’s twilight hours. I might have started my journey through it at degree 50, however that’s successfully level 0 when it comes to the obstacles that wait for. My method has actually been to go back to the project’s starting factor and systematically complete each optional location I missed out on or prevented, which has developed a more approachable obstacle slope. What was as soon as a near-impossible job, noted with red “THREAT” message on the UI, is currently a quickly surmountable one. Finishing obstacles in this order will help raise me to the appropriate degrees required to tackle the endgame’s true test; an additional major boss who hides deep below the sea within the pages of Renoir’s Drafts. From what I recognize, you need a party of degree 90 characters to stand a possibility against him. Now, reasonably fresh out of the tale’s finale, it feels like there’s an entire 2nd game in between me and it.

As I arised right into Expedition 33’s endgame, I was struck by the same feeling I had when I dived into the Depths that hide underneath The Tale of Zelda: Rips of the Kingdom’s Hyrule. All those sky islands, all those colonies, and all those ocean whirlpools signalled a wide range of added points to do. I was additionally carried right back to my youth, when defeating Sephiroth was much from the verdict of Last Dream 7 for me. Clair Obscur has its very own versions of the Emerald green and Ruby weapons, the Gold Saucer Fight Square, plus numerous of its very own concepts ahead. If you’ve absolutely fallen for Expedition 33, specifically the battle and RPG stats side of points, then its side content and challenging endgame are an absolute must. Make certain to take a look at our Clair Obscur: Exploration 33 overview if you require any assistance along the way.

Matt Purslow is IGN’s Senior Features Editor.