Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a good game. But I’m not sure it deserves all the hype it got last year.
It does some very clever stuff in terms of gameplay, with each character having their own unique battle system that synergise with the others.
And yes, the soundtrack is incredible.
In terms of the story, whilst it was interesting, the way the game drip-feeds you knowledge in the first two acts quickly became frustrating. There were multiple cutscenes where characters speak in such a vague, superficially poetic way. In reality it just felt pretentious.
Major story spoilers:
spoiler
The overall metaphor for grief is unique. I liked the concept of the characters being creations in this painting, and how that layer of reality feeds into the one you begin the game in. But it felt like everything was revealed all at once in Act 3. The game gives you very little up to that point, so it’s hard to emphasize with many of the characters. Perhaps replaying the game knowing what you know changes the perspective of it, but for a new player I’m not sure it’s the best way to tell a story.
Perhaps this is an unpopular opinion but I found the game aesthetically quite ugly. Many landscapes had a feeling of copy pasted Unreal assets that looked so same-y at points they became confusing to navigate (especially given the lack of a mini-map). The characters had these blank, uncanny stares half the time and the designs for some of them (Esquie in particular) just didn’t look good to me.
Oh and I’m really not sure why the devs decided to add entirely unnecessary platforming elements!
I found certain enemy attacks to be inconsistent and not well telegraphed, leading to some frustrating encounters were you had to memorise the parry timings rather than learn them from a valid cue.
I think the game deserves good reviews, but I’m not quite sure how it won so many GOTY awards. Perhaps it just wasn’t the game for me.
IMO the story and acting are absolutely fantastic. It looks beautiful and the music is amazing.
The gameplay is kinda meh.
For me it hit the number one game I’ve played of all time. I went into the game cold not really knowing anything about it beforehand. The beginning hooked me right away. The battle system I loved (I was a big fan of super Mario rpg and its remaster). The characters I connected with quickly and the scenery I thought was beautiful and quite artistic and varied. Music was also fantastic. I also appreciate the company having the full 8 hour soundtrack on YouTube without ads and that they added so much new and fun post game stuff for absolutely no cost whatsoever. I thought the story drip was fantastic, and had me trying to figure things out like a murder mystery and being confused when my conclusions still didn’t fully add up. The platforming mini games I enjoyed and thought were a nice silly break from the regular loop. I ended up 100% it because I enjoyed it so much. I even bought some merch which is a rare thing for me.
I had some friends that agree with me 100%. I had some friends that thought it was good but not great. I finally had some friends that also thought it was alright but not for them. Everyone has different tastes :).
I’m not quite sure how it won so many GOTY awards
Which game should have won GotY for you? Because I think some years just a very good game is the best one that came out. I think that’s what happened with this one, it was the best game to play for a season so it got a lot of hype but in a different year it might not have been even a top 3 game.
Blue Prince perhaps? I haven’t played Silksong yet so I can’t fairly judge it at the moment, but Hollow Knight was such an incredible experience to me that I imagine I’d rate the sequel highly too.
But yes I agree, it very much depends on which games came out that year.
I expressed almost the exact same thoughts around the game’s release after playing it (before it won the awards). The main thing that kept me going was the music and the story; and the story kinda fell flat for me once you discover the truth of the world. Certainly a 7/10 game, but not a 10/10 like the media around it suggests.
Yeah, game of the year for the equivalent of “It was all a dream”. The storyline just pissed me off more than anything because if they’d told it from the perspective of Renoir for example it might have been much more compelling.
I liked cause it was refreshing being a French inspired rpg. Don’t get me wrong, I like jrpgs too but CO:E33 was a really refreshing breath of fresh air.
My one and only problem is the parry/block timing mechanic in a turn-based game. It’s not good. If you can’t successfully time it, you are screwed. There’s no other way to mitagate damage. So this game becomes a twitch-based button mashing experience and it hurts my hands. I couldn’t do it.
In the last 1/2 of the game I lowered the difficulty to easy for this exact reason. I wanted to experience the end, but couldn’t the bothered to memorize attack animations and timings to try and successfully dodge a boss 20 times back to back.
I’m a souls player, so I’m used to parry mechanics. But CO:E33 really missed the mark for me. I head into brick walled that first optional guy you come across after the intro. 1 hit ko? Ok I’ve dealt with this before. Took like 5 tried, but as the game went on it felt super clunky and way too punishing. I also switched to easy about half way through, but then it was wayyyy too easy and thus the game was less engaging.
Agreed. And sadly now every indie turn based rpg game will be copying that and I find it extremely unfun. At least give us a toggle that adds more armor and an evasion stat to the game
It’s there, it’s called easy mode.
There’s a menu option to do some of these automatically. I guess it can’t be the defensive ones though.
Isn’t that basically the same as Paper Mario? (I’ve played PM but not E33, btw)
You could still beat Paper Mario if you were bad though. Grind to get loads of consumables and just tank through the bosses with revives and healing items and being overlevelled. In E33 it felt much more punishing to be bad
Eh, e33 on easy mode is less challenging than TTYD was if you’re bad at dodging/parrying. And even the harder modes can be strategized around forehead blocking because a lot of the defensive picto/lumina are very powerful and your “consumables” (revives, heals, energy boosts) recharge automatically every combat.
Easy mode and defensive build is basically a Let’s Play (and that’s a good thing imo)
Oh yeah sorry when I think Paper Mario I remember the original on N64… TTYD was actually quite difficult, I remember struggling with it.
For some reason I don’t remember E33 having an easy mode. Was it added in a patch or something? That’s pretty cool, wish I’d waited then 😂
There was an easy mode from the start, i think it’s called “Casual” difficulty. An early patch made that easy mode easier - the first version just made enemies do way less damage so that you didn’t need to parry/dodge, the patched version also made the dodge and parry timings much more forgiving.
Yet another GOTY I have no interest in because it doesn’t overlap with my favorite games in any way.
It broke inertia in a genre that had been struggling for a long time. A lot of folks have mentioned games like Super Mario RPG which was (one of) the last SNES Squaresoft game(s).
With the Square-Enix merger the franchises of the companies kinda merged together alongside adopting the innovations of MMORPGs.
And so the turn based RPG fell along the wayside, much like the RTS, until E33 renewed interest. So I think E33 is important for what it represents: the viability of a once popular genre ignored by major studios. There’d been smaller time pixel art games, but that was the sort od timecapsule realm it was stuck in.
Absolutely, it’s great to see smaller studios trying something new with a traditional format; an F-you to the AAA studios that have grown lazy. And I hope it kickstarts more innovation in similar games going forward.
Maybe in the US. I’m pretty sure they still have a literal holiday in Japan whenever a Dragon Quest game is released
That is true. We never got much Dragon Quest at all in the US. (I’ll just keep my Startropics and cope.)
But nonetheless, if it is just Dragon Quest left in Japan, I think it still was a stagnant genre.
I quite like the combat but the game got boring REALLY quickly. I just sort of stopped playing once I’d unlocked the fourth party member.
I didnt even get that far. I think i killed the 2nd mime thing, or maybe just kept dying to it i cant remember. I was pumped for “unique never-before-seen real-time turn-based hybrid” that was getting hyped uo hard. Then I found out its basically hard-mode Mario RPG for grown-ups.
I’m sure its great but its not for me. I either want one or the other. If its edge-of-your-seat reflex checks i want more action, if its turn based strategy I want to be able to play while also petting the dog or eating my dinner.
I bought it without knowing the hype, only seeing a score and wanted to play a JRPG.
It’s one of the best games i’ve ever played. The emotional delivery of the story is on point. The gameplay is solid. The build variety is quite fun.
It’s difficult but not too difficult. The art is absolutely on point for me (art is always subjective.)
I would love to see a followup, and given the story there could be one given the openings left in the story to expand upon.
It was quite refreshing seeing the endings too. They are an awesome talking point and the fact that it’s not just a boring “good ending”, “bad ending”, “golden path” like most games fall into is great.
Easy 10/10 for the story, and total package.
I respect that i just never gave a shit about any story in any video game ever lmao. Like I grew up on NES mario, “save the princess from the monster” that’s the whole story and it’s more than enough.
I grew up with an NES as well. I started playing when I was a couple of years old, but I also remember going to the library often and reading a ton of books. Reading assignments in school were tough because i’d want to read ahead of the class, and the teachers were somewhat willing to allow it but they always wanted me to write reports about it and the one thing I would never do was homework.
I love good stories. I started reading a lot of the big epic fantasy and science fiction novels out there. Stuff that we’ve seen turned into movies, books and TV many years later. Game of Thrones, Sword of Truth, Wheel of Time, Mistborn, The Expanse, Ready Player One, American Gods, Gone Girl, Hunger Games… all kinds of stuff. I love a great story.
It takes a lot of patience to play story focused games, but when the systems in them are entertaining enough to keep me engaged I can’t put them down once i’m hooked. The end of the first act in expedition 33 hooked me so hard, and the overall art and extremely french story won me over despite my preconceptions.
It helps that I have a sizable amount of patience, and i’m usually pretty good at games of all kinds aside from the ones that require memorizing combo moves beyond monster hunter or something like dynasty warriors. Dodging in E33 is incredibly forgiving, only parrying requires precise timing imo, so you don’t need to memorize it much.
Right now i’m playing the shit out of warframe. The story is effectively nonexistent for me and the whole game feels like ADHD, and i’m reveling in it. I don’t know many people who play almost all genres though like myself.
Perhaps this is an unpopular opinion but I found the game aesthetically quite ugly. Many landscapes had a feeling of copy pasted Unreal assets that looked so same-y at points they became confusing to navigate (especially given the lack of a mini-map). The characters had these blank, uncanny stares half the time and the designs for some of them (Esquie in particular) just didn’t look good to me.
I get shit every time I bring this up, but you are not alone! This game is undeserving of the “best art direction” accolades it recieved and they cheapen the other awards it got.
Game looks fine, but every game nowadays looks fine. 90% of the time when i ask people who say that E33 looks like the best thing they have ever seen. What other games they have played, they univesally say games that are 10 years old. If not older. E33 doesn’t look like an 11/10 its just that peoples standards are shit / they are use to old games / they play low graphic games normally. Or a combo of all 3. Of course its going to look great when you compare it to a ten year old out of date game that wasnt cutting edge even when it was new.
I played it a few months ago. I enjoyed it. As a Sekiro player I liked, but didnt love, the parry system. Thought the game was gorgeous, loved the story, music, environments.
Was kinda meh re: most of the gameplay. It was disappointing how many areas just didn’t tell any story, i enter it, and theres this dramatic explosive environment, I ooh and ah, and its just a cul du sac with an item. Dozens of.locations like this, and most of the other ones weren’t much more interesting.
The jumping puzzles were not very good. The beach puzzles just weren’t fun. I especially hated the one where the guy launches explosives at your platform, and you have to use the world attack button which has a ridiculous cool down.
Power scaling was completely broken. The endgame enemies have a trillion HP, and you do 10 billion damage per attack, and the strat is to create a build so broken that you can do a trillion and one damage on the first hit, because you only have a million hit points and if you don’t kill them first hit, the enemy attacks 20 times in a row and does 3 million per hit. Like at first the combat was too easy, then it was too hard, then it was easy again, and then it was impossible unless you equipped 300 luminas. Just like zero consideration for game balance.
Coming from Sekiro, the parry timing was pretty wonky. I think there was influence from Sekiro, but also from stuff people already mentioned like Super Mario RPG (a game I absolutely loved as a kid.) Don’t really know how to describe it, but Sekiro was literally the last game I played before Exp 33, and I played it 7 times through, beat it charmless on ng6, platinumed and completed everything but the immortal journey. Before that i played Nightreign, like 300 hours only Executor. My shit was tight, Exp 33 was not.
It really just came off like an advertisement for Unreal engine, which is I assume why it won such accolades. It was a good game, I was in the mood for a jrpg, which I hadn’t played one I really liked in a very long time. Was expecting multiple playthroughs, but it was a one and done for me. Good, but not goty imo
I agree with most of your criticisms, but the jumping puzzles and beach challenges I don’t really think should factor into the overall rating too much. They were deliberate nods to inane and frustrating minigames in older Final Fantasies and I think they succeeded in that regard. Anyone who has tried to assemble all the ultimate weapons in FFX knows what I’m talking about. They’re also completely optional in E33, contributing neither important lore, plot or item rewards. They can be totally ignored without consequence by anyone that doesn’t enjoy them.
Sure, I mean, I did end up skipping them. I wanted to play them but found some of them impossible, and put a lot of time into some of them.
The Wimp Lo, “we designed these areas badly for nostalgia,” doesn’t really scan for me but whatever. I played FFX, but don’t remember of I tried to get ultimate weapons, I was a completionist back then too, but honestly don’t remember very much from it
The ultimate weapons for each character in FFX are all locked behind minigames, most of which are unfun (barring Blitz Ball), most being extremely difficult and some being almost broken (looking at you, chocobo racing). You might remember jumping to dodge lightning bolts 200 times in a row or chasing down butterflies in the trees.
I vaguely remember Blitz ball! But maybe I skipped the harder ones, I honestly don’t remember.
So much. So So So much.
I agree. This is a fantastic video essay that goes through everything in more detail than I could here, and I recommend it thoroughly. It’s a good game, that manages to enthrall most players into thinking it’s a great game through a combination of a phenomenal soundtrack and some standout moments that sort of jolt their critical thinking faculties out of order. I was victim of this too - I liked the game way more as I was first playing through it, but the more I went back through it and the more I actually thought about it the less I liked it.
I still appreciate E33 for what it is (overrated does not mean bad), but for me Blue Prince was the GOTY 2025.
Let’s just say I bought it but watched a Let’s Play lol. Like most JRPG (or is it FRPG here?) it was exhausting and time consuming to play and I got tired. I really enjoyed the beginning 20% but couldn’t finish it myself
