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.
Bashed my head for a long while with parrying until a friend made me notice: every enemy makes a sound cue for every attack
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dragon Quest XI did very well in the US
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.
Good thing everyone is entitled to their own opinion ;) Personally, it is one of the best RPG experiences I’ve had in a long time and I felt all the awards were well-deserved.
That’s totally fair! This is just my personal opinion, I’m glad you enjoyed it :)
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 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.
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.
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.
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Yet another GOTY I have no interest in because it doesn’t overlap with my favorite games in any way.
I hear the story is pretty good, but sadly for me the gameplay was a real bummer. Just incredibly boring to play after a while
I think a lot of turn based RPGs suffer with this - once you find a combo that works you get into a rut of using the same moves and not having to think too much in each fight. The dodging/parrying did add some flavour, but I still found myself getting a bit bored by the end of the game.
It was definitely worth of goty for me, but I still think bg3 is my favorite game personally, I’m a huge sucker for crpgs, because I play a lot of tabletop. I do agree with the art style gripe. I feel like there are prettier games out there, E33 felt idk how to describe its look, jank? I still think something like Witcher 3 next gen or cyberpunk 2077 or Alan wake 2 look way better.
I actually played this just after finishing BG3, which I thought was an incredible game and perhaps one of the best I’ve ever played.
Perhaps it’s just that no RPG is going to quite live up to that experience, so E33 in comparison I couldn’t help but criticize a little harshly in my mind.
But even now, BG3 feels like a 10/10 game to me, whereas E33 is perhaps a 8 at best.
Funny that I had it the other way around. First I played E33 and liked it a lot (maybe not as a best game, but rather as a relatively “fresh” experience). Then I started playing BG3 and it somehow didn’t click. It took me probably 2 months to get through 1st act and then I simply dropped it, because I didn’t want to continue at all. And at some point I considered BG2 as one of my most favorite games of all times, so I really wanted to like BG3.
Ah yeah bg3 is very different from bg2, it’s more the spiritual sequel to DoS2.
Yeah stiff competition for sure. It’s unfortunate that it feels like big scale games of that quality are so few and far in between and much of the AAA size games end up being garbage. I’m somewhat hopeful for Witcher 4 despite being burned by cyberpunk, but we shall see. And divinity will be exciting whenever that releases im sure.
KC:D 2 was my GOTY of that year. E33 took away its spotlight, which I found pitiful. In my circles almost everyone knows E33 and follows the bandwagon of praise and most of them never heard of KC:D 2. Shameful, really.
I still have to try E33 though. I’m still curious what all the fuss is about.
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.
