One of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's big innovations is adding a dodge, parry, and counter system to its otherwise traditional turn-based battles. It’s a clever tweak that helps keep combat engrossing for its 30+ hour journey and also an incredible opportunity for the game’s developers to troll the crap out of players.
You don’t need to have played the fantasy RPG about an evil Goddess in the sky for long to have encountered exactly what I’m talking about. Enemies get a turn, their attack animation begins, and then lots of winding up, stutter stepping, and other hijinks to throw you off your timing ensue. While a generous dodge makes it easy to escape many of these attacks, the window for a perfect parry and follow-up counter attack is much, much narrower.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and its team at Sandfall Interactive, seemingly love to exploit that by playing around with the speed of attacks, accelerating or deaccelerating an enemy’s movements to trip players up, or occasionally separating an attack into separate parts that don’t move in sync.
Take the Robust Sakapatate for example. Many of its attacks share opening patterns but quickly diverge. His club attack is a multi-hit changeup. An AoE attack doesn’t have any wind-up at all. And the boss version, Ultimate Sakapatate, has an electric ball attack that slowly speeds up before rapidly hitting in just a couple frames. It does not mess around. The Chromatic Troubadour is even worse.
This pattern of trolling players who try to parry has become one of the more infamous aspects of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. My feeds have recently been full of people similarly parodying the game’s enemy attack animations.
There’s an element of FromSoftware-level trolling in Clair Obscur’s combat. The Dark Souls franchise is notorious for baiting players into letting their guard down and then squashing them. It wasn’t uncommon in Elden Ring for bosses to keep an attack going with extra swings just when it looked like it was safe to reset, and Shadow of the Erdtree was even worse in that regard.
Clair Obscur engages in a similar dance, albeit one much more circumscribed by the turn-based format. There’s no 3D arena to move around in. You can jump, dodge, and parry, but are otherwise, for all intents and purposes, glued to an invisible rollercoaster whose tracks have been blown out at precise points. Needing to be able to memorize where those obstacles are independent of an enemy’s visual fake-outs can make Clair Obscur a mean game at various points, but also a very satisfying one. The trolling can also be so borderline silly at times it’s hard not to laugh.
This is why even though Clair Obscur has a similar failure screen to Dark Souls’ “you died,” dying in a fight feels more like getting pranked than being defeated. And for anyone who doesn’t want to put up with all of the enemies’ bullshit, they can always try to tank their way through the Continent instead.
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