they got timed hits in this final fantasy
Lost Odyssey af imo
Clair Obscur is like if FFX was good
8 Likes
Is it good to look at? I know I am deep in the Ps360 era but it sure does look if not shit brown, then red brown HD Graphics all over.
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it’s fine imo. not nearly as ugly as anything of that era
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Clair Obscur – It’s on gamepass and looks nuts, so why not?
My notes from the first two hours:
- Seems to hit that goofy-epic pulp sci-fi Final Fantasy feel, refracted through a French lens.
- Your tutorial friend is basically wearing a mime outfit, and between every somber line of Proper Noun spattered dialogue she suddenly SPEEDS off at mach 5. She’s like “ah, let’s go check on your love interest” all casual but then hauls ass to the next checkpoint like her life depends on it.
- Music isn’t bad. The opening city area’s BGM takes the Pokémon route 1 melody and plays it on a melancholy guitar, so that’s funny. In the first real area there’s a vocal track that’s right out of Nier.
- I like the battle system. They’re giving me a lot of moves really quickly, so I don’t know how sustainable it’s gonna be, but it’s working for me so far. It’s a real grab bag of mechanics. A little Mario RPG, a little Magic the Gathering, some Final Fantasy. All over the place.
- You can set the dialog to French. I didn’t even bother with the English dub. It feels novel to play a big ambitious French jrpg in French.
- Did I mention this game is FRENCH? They’re really playing it up. Everyone’s wearing stereotypical French clothes. I found a challenging hidden side enemy in the first area that was just a fucked up little mime, and his battle music is an accordion ditty.
21 Likes
dude I love this game. like someone finally made one of those design by subtraction modern JRPGs that makes only decisions that I like. I almost never play games for more than an hour at a time these days and this goes down so smooth
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Really wanna try Clair Obscur cuz its art director’s list of fav games is so impressively bad that the game must have something weird in there somewhere
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this explains why a game that has a creepy bobble-head mime enemy still looks sickeningly boring
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because of my limited exposure to french i keep calling that clair de lune before remembering other words can follow clair
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Clair Obscur is really good… I just finished the first area. Story-wise, it seems like it’s grafting 2010’s dystopian YA novel vibes onto Final Fantasy structure. It works!
The battle system REALLY emphasizes button press timing, especially for defense. Dodging/parrying is paramount. I know we have some parry-haters here (I’m parry-agnostic). This might not be the game for you. It’s kind of working for me here. It means you can take on a super overpowered enemy if you can read its animations well enough to dodge most of its attacks.
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Oh, also it rules that most of the main characters are 33 years old.
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I haven’t played either yet but Clair Obscura coming out the same time as Hundred Line (the new big 999/Danganronpa collab) prob has a 50,000 word essay in it somewhere.
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Am also aboard the Clair Obscur: Expedition Trente-trois train.
I’m not seeing the sauce that’s got everyone’s goose yet but have only made it up to the first boss. It took me a very long time to realise that shooting expends charges that are needed for special moves. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why Gustave was so mana poor. I think the UI could probably do better to highlight really important battle system information clearly. A lot of elements are just very small and innocuous. As others have said, the amount of mechanics that are being built up at this rate gives me the impression this is going to be a real JRPG salad, though not incomprehensible.
It feels like they’re setting up a two-stage skill check with the dodge/parry. Use the dodge while practising patterns and then the parry when you get really good at them. The dodge has a more generous window but the parry gives you high damage. Dodging also is one of the only ways to farm mana aside from a basic attack. I think the telegraph animations of the enemies are a little bit fuzzy which may or may not have been deliberate but I would appreciate a more metronomic feedback system. Feels too often that I am still in a dodge animation start-up when I am fairly sure I pressed the dodge button before the attack swing begins its arc.
The premise is very sticky. Aside from the giant magical monolith that kills everyone who is above the age stated upon it, there are lots of surreal questions posed like why certain approaches are(n’t) possible with the technology/magic they have or simply the fact that society has an inherent orphan problem. If anything it reminds me of a lot of speculative fiction that has a mysterious continent or magical zone that is explored but not fully understood. Shades of Roadside Picnic/Annihilation/Journey to the Center of the Earth.
The pace is very good so far for this kind of RPG so if they keep that up it will be on par with Chrono Trigger before long, like Jacob Geller seems to claim.
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the problem with the dodge/parry battle system here is I’m a degenerate so the fact that it exists means I’m not going to put any points in vit/def for any of my characters because git gud
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the only thing I don’t really love about Clair Obscur is that its approach to level design is weirdly similar to the couple hours I played of Wukong: no minimap, and you actually have to look around pretty hard to notice hidden stuff (or else realize that you just took the actual main fork in the road a minute ago and the other one was a side path that you didn’t mean to skip, which happens a lot). that said, I love their approach to having a real world map between zones, I think the world design is still visually and spatially better than wukong (which was just not good imo) overall, and there’s just the right amount of findable skills and weapons and such, so in practice it never feels like you missed stuff.
apparently it’s only like a 15 hour game which is awesome because the first 3 have been super smooth.
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btw for @daphaknee I would say its other primary influences are shadow hearts and Mario RPG
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this is tempting but all the aesthetics in all the screenshots are so ugly
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it’s very UE5 looking, lots of shimmery wispy distorted character models an environments, but I think it’s fine in practice, good colors etc
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