Clair GBFort Expedition 33 Review: A beautiful French spin in JRPG format

This Japanese type RPG repeats its icon, such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, those new games In its traditions, it is repeated instead of innovation. It took a studio in the middle of the road around the world, in France, to make JRPG that highlights the shadows of these mighty – a blatant novel in its world and its systems to the point that it tells a story that she does not want to put.

Claire mysterious: Campaign 33The first game of French Studio Sandfall Interactive, achieve a package of favorite. From writing to building the world to fighting to music, it is easy to find excellent aspects individually. But more importantly, it weaves together in a coherent and objective game that tells a mature story with confidence and style, and filling some (forgive me) Je Ne Sais Quoi This was overwhelmed by a world of emotion and loss.

Expedition 33 has a fictional land at the mercy of a strong being, The Pleetress, who executed humanity once a year ago. On a certain day, the residents of the only city apparently remained, Lumière (the devastating Paris, overcoming the rubble and chromium), gathering with their sweet to give bids to their loved ones Adieu. They see, as in the distance, it reduces the march from a glowing number, each one. Slowly, anyone disappears at this age in dust, and the maximum age of humanity is reduced again.

Lumier resists by sending armed groups from volunteers to the ocean to the wild every year to defeat the march – and although they have not succeeded yet, tradition lives, inhabited by desperate believers and older soldiers who choose to use their remaining small time.

The collection of a group of lucky adventurers to take God for the world is JRPG textbooks, but the tones of most games in this kind swing between the utmost naive and satirical nihilism. Instead, the Sandfall Interactive story imagines figures who start a community that is good at despair and is still taking action, which is concerned about the belief in progress in a solution. Throughout the game, the main characters repeat the talisman of their city: “For those who come after that” and “Tomorrow”. Even the meaning, even at the end of the world slowly restricts.

Through the game’s commitment to its color, its perspective lights up. The plot, alternately between sublimer from a vibrant new land and brutal accounts in a world without sympathy, full of surprises. Emotional music with tenderness, with the painful piano and the violin arranged by the composer Lorian Testard and the amazing beautiful singing written by Alice Doport Beers for an original audio car for hours, such as Producer 33 producer Francois Meris told me.

The wild and friendly characters that they meet, the amazing, amazing, light-and-shadow environments, the really excellent English voice-the game is a symphony of the elements that were well implemented in something new.

This alchemy from the grandmother leads to a rare feeling between JRPGS, not to mention games as a whole: often along the way, I didn’t really know what it could be expected after that. For players who were recruited by Trops and Traition, a game struggle with death in an unknown area that resembles the desert.

All of this will not matter if the game is not a riot to play.

Fighting against fate with rotating -based fighting

Contrary to more RPG is open like this year advertiser and Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remaster Or 2023 excellent Portal Portal 3There is no choice in how the Expedition 33 story – at least as much as it has a little more than 20 hours of the game. Where you can control the battle system, which provides some of the most interactive battles based on the rotation you have ever.

This is primarily due to the interactive capabilities in the system. Players can press a button to avoid when they attack the enemies with a very generous window. Those who have greater confidence can try to get rid of attacks, and if done for liberation and narration the entire enemy, the character will deal with severe damage. It took about ten hours to be confident enough at the timing of success attacks, although you can reduce the difficulty or prepare certain capabilities to reduce this. Later in the game, there is more enemy attack mechanics.

The defense system was inspired by the from Dark Souls and the defense system TwoAlthough there are parts of the game inspired by Final Fantasy 10 and Persona 5, the Meurisse product told me. The latter is evident when switching between the sub -lists of fighting, which slightly converts the camera width – “Every button on which you click Click on some camera movement,” said Meuriste.

The group of characters you collect is not great, but each has unique and distinctive mechanical skills that works like a mini game in its role to increase the capabilities of the damage. For the protagonist Gustav, the attack accumulates on unleashing a massive attack of lightning; Lun The Mage gets racist “spots” after throwing talismans that can be spent on enabling subsequent talismans; The MAELLE fencing turns between situations every time you use a skill.

Some other aspects are more traditional, with a set of effects of the condition that can be applied to enemies such as burning timely damage, slow or distinguishing the enemy to receive higher damage. But players can also, through unlimited guns or magic, can shoot enemies to target weaknesses. Each shot cost AP, the supplier also used in energy talismans and skills, so it takes some restrictions on not shooting on items.

It is a lot that must be taken into account already, but the Picto system escalates the complexity. Pictos is basically negative capabilities that can prepare up to three at one time. After a handful of battles, they can cancel the image processing and add its ability to its characters, provided that they have sufficient ability points to bear. This budget is the key to the late game, and by the way, to completely break the fighting: Many of these images offer damage or effect on the reward if conditions are met, just like an enemy that has an effect on the condition. With dozens of these pictures taken through the game, players can make design and synergy between the characters to raise the amazing beauty of the damage.

The proficiency of the deep fighting system and the deepest PICTO system is the joy of the RPG fans who loves to dive into granular strategies, making short battles and long battles more attractive and interactive than most other JRPGs. It satisfies a firm part of the brain that is happy to lift the operating frequency of the system, in good mind, to misuse the specific player. It is a distraction from harmony with the themes of the game – from the companions mired in lifetime who seek no avail to stop it for “those who come yet”, even inevitably, they are also cut.

Expedition 33 dances with death and meaning

When I heard that a French game studio was taking this distinguished type JRPG, jokingly wondered about the number of hats, prostitutes and motives would make them. Do this and claim silly but elegant clothes for the main characters wearing sunglasses, hats and long loaves of bread tied on their backs like swords.

Expedition 33 embraces this strangeness as a supplement to the tone of sadness, all richer. There is something that exceeds the music of French stereotypes that Sandfall Interactive is impressive – a desire to tell a story not only about a different world but how people flow through its intense and unfair borders to reach a meaningful end anyway. In the absence of Trops JRPG like The PLUCKY, the annoying protagonist is heading to the heroic review menu of Joseph Campbell, the Expedition 33 is full of miserable realistic realities that are devoted to each other but they expect a loss, all in dedication to a future they think they will not see.

Meurisse said that Expedition 33 is partially inspired by a 2004 French novel called La Horde du Contrevent (“The Horde of Counterwind”), which is a classic worship that tells the story of successive campaigns for people who were sent to find the origin of the world winds. Likewise, the march that knocks humanity is an unknown force on the edge of the world, and it seems that returning back against it appears to be useless.

Throughout the game, magazines were discovered from previous years, each of which tries a new way to succeed as others failed, some of them end up in the form of humor, others in a dark fire of glory. But I found their bodies, regardless, closed in a final situation, in a strange process as all people who venture outside their city are born – a sign of those who follow, and we hope to exceed.

The strange scene behind Lumière has been changed forever due to the fracture, a disaster that occurred a century before the pain began to fall into the human hour. In its wake, the carrots in the sky and the Anteediluvian buildings are mixed in dirt and rocks. With the presence of light across trees or around the air portable archipelago, it has stopped a lot of landscapes, like a beautifully strange for the game’s character. More than a hundred screenshots have risen, most of which are from the areas where it was dread.

In chatting with Meurisse, I asked him about what was a unique French about the game, and he listed the clothes and architecture inspired by the Belle Epoque in the late nineteenth century and Art Deco Stylings, which are displayed in the amazing gold and mind walls. But there is another perspective that mixes with Expedition 33 which is different and new – the creation of a world whose characters are still wondering even when swimming in death.

I did, too.

The Expedition 33 will be celebrated for several distinctions, and it is worth it. But above all, he tells an adult story about what remains for us when the future drove little by little – and why is it worth fighting against what is inevitable in any case. You never know what to get before the end.

Claire Gambia: Expeede 33 is now available PCand PS5 and Xbox X and S series.