Turn-based combat was never dying. The conversation around it for the last few years has primarily been about its flaws: how slow, repetitive, and sometimes mindless it can be. The leading turn-based franchise, Pokemon, does suffer from these issues, resulting in people generalizing the entire genre. 

Under the surface, however, Turn-based combat is the best it’s ever been. Games are constantly reinventing and experimenting with the genre, as well as making quality of life changes that make them faster, less repetitive, and intensely strategic. Atlus, the studio behind Persona and Metaphor: Refantazio has nearly perfected snappy UI, as well as a great spin on the type-based combat that many other turn-based games like Pokemon utilize. On the other hand, some studios seek to try new things, such as the Mario and Luigi franchise with action based commands and defense. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 falls into the latter category, implementing action based combat with the inclusion of parrying and dodging. On top of that utilizing some of the game breaking strategic enjoyment that up till now was exclusive to Roguelike Deck Builders.

The Action

The most striking thing about Expedition 33’s combat is its defense-oriented combat. Players won’t be sitting back while the enemy attacks their team, instead they’ll be actively dodging or parrying. Dodging is easier to pull off, a fantastic option for keeping your team alive. Parrying, on the other hand, is more difficult to perform, but gives you valuable action points and can even lead to a counterattack if you parry the enemies’ entire attack. There are also quick time events for attacking, but these are easily performed and rarely change gameplay. This heavy focus on defense-oriented combat makes Expedition 33’s combat often feel like a souls game, where your ability to survive is more important than your ability to attack. Any enemy can be beaten with skillful dodging and parrying. Despite this, strategy is the ultimate factor deciding if you win or lose a battle.

The Strategy

While exploring the map and fighting enemies, you collect items called pictos. Pictos give you stat buffs, like health or critical chance, and then a special buff described on the pictos. By equipping the pictos to a character and winning four combat encounters with it equipped, you get the special buff available to equip for all characters. This buff is called a lumina. By rewarding the player for trying new pictos, the devs are encouraging players to think about possibilities of combining some of them. When the players decide to try out a cool combination of pictos and luminas, they just made a build. It is a very fun system that scratches the strange math-enjoying part of the brain similar to games like Slay the Spire and Balatro. 

Pictos and Luminas

When the Lumina and Pictos system is first introduced to the player, it seems like bonus buffs to flesh out your attacks, often giving you extra fire damage, or more skill points, or something of the like. These can be helpful but they scarcely change your gameplan. As you enter the midgame, its discovered that pictos and luminas play the most important role in your strategy. You can stack countless synergistic buffs on top of each other to do ludicrous damage, so much so that it feels like you’re breaking the game. You can play the entirety of the game under leveled with a smart combination of pictos and luminas, removing the need for a grind that other turn-based games rely on.

Soon After Expedition 33 was released, there were build ideas flooding the internet. Some opted to make their characters glass cannons, where your character has a single point of health in order to do some insane damage, or a solo build, where you forgo the team of three for a singular character. Another popular one was the machine gun build, where you hit the enemy with your “gun” attack, which has a chance to cause burning that gives you a chance to regain action points when shooting the burning target. The action points that allow you to shoot the target even more, resulting in a loop that’s enough to win most encounters. 

The best part about this system however, is how it guides players into discovering builds on their own. While many players might feel compelled to look up a build online to make their gameplay easier, others enjoy the process of discovering them on their own. In this game, neither of these players have an advantage. 

The Union

The action element of the game and the strategic element of the game work together fantastically, but players might find themselves preferring one side of Expedition 33’s combat over the other. There are a handful of players who like the action of defending and attacking, while disliking the number-crunching, menu scrolling aspect of the pictos and luminas system. Another group likes only the strategic system while despising the skill based parry and dodge system. Expedition’s combat is both of these, and it is at its most fun when the two systems synergize.

In my playthrough, I made one of my characters a glass cannon, the more they parried, the stronger their attacks became. The other party members focused on recovering from my mistakes, one could do solid damage on their own with a fire build, and the other could play twice in a row at the cost of halving their damage, useful for buffing and item usage.  This strategy married the two systems of action and strategy in a wonderful way. While putting in these two different systems can isolate some of their player base from really enjoying the game, if you are the kind of player who likes both, Expedition 33’s combat is fantastic.

Act 4

Expedition 33 Is a marvel in almost all aspects. The story and writing is some of the best in the medium, the graphics are impressive, and the world is endlessly imaginative. For many, the reason they may decide not to pick up this game is their distaste for turn-based combat. That is a mistake. If you let yourself experiment and enjoy the combat for all that it is, you will see why Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is one of the highest rated games of all time.

Check out Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 on PC, Xbox, and Playstation 5!

Also check out Emma’s excellent My Friends Review

Graphic by Dialma Quiroz

Edits by Lisa Kasabyan and Bentley Bramhall