I'm pretty glad I did, despite the dodge and parry mechanics being a major issue for me (as I'll go into later, I basically eschewed the tighter parrying mechanics entirely and tried to just get by with dodging and by using various other techniques to limit the damage from failing to dodge). Clair Obscur has a largely really great story (I think the ending is a failure, but everything leading up to it, especially the characters and plot development is excellent) and combines that with largely excellent gameplay that kept me enraptured....I picked this one up under the promise that the game was on the shorter scale for JRPGs and only 30 hours long and probably played closer to 70 hours since I did an extremely large percentage of the side content. The battle system is largely excellent, even if it does get to insanely unbalanced in the final act (a problem in a lot of JRPGs, such as my favorite series Trails), and much of the way the game works is intriguing and rewards someone who just wants to find one more thing to keep the game going. There's a lot of things that don't work in the gameplay as well, many of which feel like the things a more experienced game maker might've fixed, but the complaints are - except for one bit - mostly minor annoyances that I forgot about a short time after getting past them. This game is highly acclaimed and for largely good reason, so I definitely recommend it.
More specifics after the jump - note that I won't be talking graphics or music really down below as those aren't my things, but the graphics here are very good (even if I found them a bit too dark for my taste at times) and the soundtrack is incredibly French but also incredibly excellent and I have been listening to the OST for quite some time.
As with my review of other games (Trails games largely) on this blog, I'm going to split this review into gameplay and story parts:
Story: 8.5 out of 10 - Clair Obscur's story is very French (it's made by a French Studio, and you can tell, and not just from the melted Eiffel tower in the original city you start in) and in general is told in a very compelling way. In this fantasy world humans live in a city called Lumiere, which 67 years ago was part of a larger landmass known as the Continent. Then the "Fracture" occurred, splitting Lumiere off from the Continent, where strange monsters called Nevrons started to appear, and a giant being known as the Paintress first showed up at the end of the world, painting a number on a big mountain known as "The Monolith". That number started at "100" and each year it drops by one...and every time it does, every person who is as old as that number instantly dies, turning into flowers and disappearing, in an act known as the "Gommage". To try and stop this, each year some of the oldest citizens in Lumiere go out on an "Expedition", numbered by the year on the monolith, seeking to get to the continent and to defeat the Paintress, so as to stop the gommages.
And yet, none of the Expeditions have ever succeeded...or even managed to return to Lumiere alive. As a result, Lumiere is slowly dying as its oldest citizens become younger every year, and as we begin the game, our staring POV protagonist Gustave is about to spend the last day of the year with the love of his life, his ex Sophie, who is 33 years old...and is about to be gommaged when the Paintress changes the number to 33. Gustave, who is 32, is planning to go on Expedition 33, along with several similar aged adults and his adopted sister Maelle (who is 16). But when they land on the continent, Expedition 33 is attacked by an old man with a cane (which should be impossible due to the gommage) along with some insanely powerful Nevrons, and the expedition is seemingly all killed, with Gustave waking up on his own, having to search for survivors. Needless to say, he finds a few and they make their way towards the Paintress, in hopes of saving the day, with more than a few surprises along the way.
I'm going to stop my story summary there, because the game relies upon quite a few twists and surprising developments, usually in excellent and well done ways. The story is interesting in that it rarely tries to give you a ton of exposition and instead very much trusts the player to figure things out from the dialogue and events. And most importantly, for any good story, the story is told with the help of some really tremendous characters. We have our main cast - Gustave and Maelle, who we're introduced at the start, as well as Lune and Sciel and then the surprise Act two additions of Monoco and Verso - and we really get to know them through dialogue during the main required parts of the game and based upon largely optional dialogue and scenes while the character are at "Camp" - an area they can go at any time on the overworld where your characters can talk, upgrade equipment, and have moments to themselves and scenes. And you will quite easily fall in love with each of the characters, whether that'd be searching for some place for herself Maelle, the determined to carry on her research and the research of her parents Lune who gets excited to find out the legends of the Continent are actually real, the supposedly easy going Sciel who cracks jokes but has a real serious side, etc. And those are just the main playable characters, there's a whole bunch of side characters, enemies, and spoiler characters who are similarly built in depth.
And the world itself is just wonderfully detailed with fascinating elements. You have the various species of creatures you will meet - not just the enemy Nevrons but also the hilarious seemingly walking paintbrushes known as Gestrals, who are both traders and obsessed with fighting, and are found in a bunch of just stilly situations all around the world (either providing you with gear to buy if you can beat them up or perhaps setting up outrageous platforming side area challenges). The world is filled with wondrous locations like one that looks like it's underwater, one that's a deadly battlefield full of corpses, one that is a city destroyed by golden swords, etc. And all of it comes together in a very fascinating character based story, one which is largely fulfilling even if you ignore the side content and, if you do the side content, can become even more fulfilling, like the best RPG side content. And so the story, which starts as one seemingly just being a quest to save the world, turns into a more personal one, dealing with grief, struggles of what do so with one's life, and how one must may move forward.
Really the biggest issue with the story comes just from the story's ending. The ending relies upon some of the game's reveals to force the player into a difficult choice, the end result of which affects your ending. But the game seems to assume that a certain trope's implications have been established in this world so as to make one choice the "worse" one, when the game has not established that at all - in fact, it arguably has established the opposite. So it doesn't work and just feels wrong. It doesn't change how great the story is too that point and how much I loved the characters, but it's a bit of a downer note.
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Gameplay: 8.5 out of 10 - I'm a big fan of turn based JRPGs, particularly ones where there is no time pressure element (so I'm less a fan of the active time battle system that a lot of Final Fantasy games use) and you can figure out your actions on your own pace. This is a reason I fell for the Trails games, which more recently have some action-esque parts melded into them but still can be pretty much entirely turn based in terms of combat, in addition to having terrific characters and stories. Clair Obscur's basic combat shell combines that turn based combat with dodging and parrying mechanics that other reviewers have compared to the Souls games (or to the mario rpg/paper mario games) - basically every enemy has a series of attacks with different timings and animations where you can avert damage by dodging in one of a few different ways within a certain timing window. The timing window is shorter for parrying, which allow you to do damage in turn and get other rewards for pulling it off. And the game delights in having its enemies attack in confusing and disorienting ways such that they can fake you out so that you miss your dodge/parry windows and instead take damage.
For a person like me, who prefers challenging games - so doesn't want to play on Story Mode even if he can't play on the highest difficulty setting - this was a bit of a struggle, especially in the early part of the game, where dodging to survive is largely required unless you massively overlevel. This is especially the case because the game frequently offers you the chances to take on optional boss enemies - they're basically all over the place and you'll run into them by accident a lot of the time - who will frequently one shot your characters if they miss a dodge. It can be extremely frustrating for a completist and a challenge addict like myself to skip this content, but at the very beginning of the game I basically had no choice but to do that. Thankfully, by the end of the game's first act, and definitely by the second act, there are enough abilities you can obtain such that you can counteract your struggles with dodging, or at least can make it so that you can survive by dodging like say 30% of attacks rather than say 70% (also some second act optional boss enemies feature attack patterns that I swear are more predictable and easier to learn).
It helps that the combat system is ridiculously complicated in a largely good way. Each character features a completely different mechanic that you are introduced to one at a time - Gustave charges up a super powerful attack each time he hits an enemy; Lune is a mage who gains elemental "stains" each time she casts a skill of a certain element and then can use those elements to power up her later attacks; Maelle uses different stances that each of her skills shifts her into to do either extra damage or gain defensive buffs etc. Some of these are more thought out and complex than others - Maelle's stance system for example quickly becomes utterly pointless because her third special Virtuose Stance is clearly where you always want to be so you'll never be really shifting through stances like the game seems to want - but they provide a ton of gameplay variety, even if you can only use three characters at a time (annoyingly, while your backup characters can join the fight if your main trio are killed, you can't rotate in characters mid battle, which resulted in me picking a main trio I preferred and ignoring the other two by Act 3). Similarly in variety is the game's picto/lumina system, which is basically a materia-esque system: As you go through gameplay and travel the world, you'll find "Pictos" which will give your characters stat boosts for equipping (you can equip 3 at a time on each character) as well as a passive bonus called a lumina (like +1 AP, the resource for doing things, for taking damage instead of parrying). If you win four battles while a picto is equipped, all your characters will "learn" that lumina and will be able to equip it even without the Picto - although each lumina costs a certain number of points and you'll have to figure out what abilities are worth the cost, especially as the sheer amount of abilities you obtain becomes kind of ridiculous while your lumina point total is never going to be quite high enough to equip them all.
When all of this comes together, it can result in some really amazing experiences, although that will depend upon the player. But even with my inability to basically ever parry, I had some truly fantastic moments of gameplay here with the combat, especially when facing off against some of the optional bosses who were meant for higher level parties but were entirely doable, if time consuming, if you prepared appropriately. There were a couple of truly fantastic points where I ran into some really powerful seemingly unbeatable enemies, acquired some pictos and lumina that I realized could be used to give me a chance (combined with learning to dodge some of those enemies' attacks) and then put those together for some truly epic moments of battle. The game's three acts sort of limit these moments - act 1 you're very limited in where you can go, so there's only so much and you can reach the damage cap easy; act 2 you can go to a ton of places (but not everywhere) with optional interesting challenges and working with the damage cap (which applies per hit, meaning certain multi hitting skills will do more than single hitting more powerful skills) preventing you from completely breaking things too much (although with the optional content completed, you can become so powerful despite that like I was that some of the story bosses were kind of jokes). And then act 3, where the damage cap is essentially removed....well there are a few challenging moments in some superbosses and areas, although the player will likely need to deliberately limit what abilities they use so as to not just one shot everything. But the highest moments - for me that was probably my victory against Sprong at way underlevel for over an hour - are so high that they kept me craving for more.
There is more to gameplay than combat and this is where the game is sometimes a bit more miss than hit. The game features occasional platforming challenges, including a quintet of side areas with extreme platforming challenges that only get you costumes for succeeding, and the platforming is truly awful and I hated every time I saw an item I wanted locked behind some tricky jumps. Just terrible. The game sometimes goes for a more is more kind of approach in terms of overwhelming you with resources - some of which are useless by the time you get to use them - or ways to dodge/parry (there really doesn't need to be two different types of dodges and two different types of parries ugh) and it's like why. And most notably, the game does not contain a minimap anywhere, which is just EXTREMELY annoying. While the game tries to use lights to hint at where the main path you need to go through is in dungeons, it's not always super clear, and well you may want to branch off the main paths in order to find extra items, minibosses, or content....except that without a minimap, it is way way too easy to get lost and utterly confused. I wound up making a rule for myself that if I found the exit of a dungeon I'd just go in it and never go back simply because of one early dungeon I got lost in for hours, but this made me feel like I was missing out on a ton of content and items if I wound up getting through a dungeon too fast, which happened occasionally. Even the overworld/world map doesn't have a minimap, even if it does have a map you can press a button to access...but what this means is that you'll often be switching to the map screen to make sure you didn't go in the wrong direction, especially when you're in Act 2 and 3 exploring all the optional content.
That said the bulk of the gameplay, as it leads up to combat and new discoveries and developing the characters' abilities, is wonderful. I should give special mention here to something I was pleasantly surprised with - blue mage character Monoco, whose gameplay of stealing enemy abilities after defeating them is the easiest blue mage setup I've ever seen...and is terrifically enjoyable. I felt like I couldn't leave him out of my party at first when I got him for fear of missing out on abilities - if he's not in the party you don't get the ability for beating a new enemy - but soon enough I had enough abilities on him that worked with the rest of my team (as a support character, but I know others use him as a main attacker) that I never wanted to remove him from the party.
Overall the gameplay and story of Clair Obscur is truly excellent so if you haven't yet decided to give the game a try, it is WELL worth your time. I'm super happy it exists and is bringing back more attention to the turn based RPG genre, even if I hope it doesn't result in too many copy cats trying to add dodge and parry mechanics haha.
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