Clair Obscur Mini Review
I could honestly talk all day about Clair Obscur, within 10 hours I had full faith that I was going to have a good time and the 50-hour run really didn't disappoint.
It's sincere while remaining silly, heartfelt without dipping into irony. It's original and yet its influences are worn on its sleeve. It's clever and convoluted but allows the player to piece things together before spelling it all out.
So why not a full review?
Honestly, I don't know that I have much to say beyond what literally everyone has said. Clair Obscur fucking rules.
It's a JRPG for people who don't like JRPGs, and it's kind of a souls-like for people who don't like souls-likes?
It's extremely French in a way that's frankly weird, not because France is weird but because it's weird games aren't Frencher given how many big games are made there.
I have a handful of nitpicks - it's a little unclear when is a "good time" to go fight a boss (just go fight them), and the game is at its best when you're a little underlevelled so this can make the main bosses a little underwhelming. The only saving is via autosave, which can sometimes mean retrying a boss means a pointless sprint from A to B. It's quite unclear how much damage different attacks do, even relative to one another, so you spend a lot of time trial-and-erroring and trying to eliminate variables - this isn't so bad until you come up against a difficult boss and start to care about the margins.
But it's just nitpicks. I've done basically everything a first playthrough has to offer, and had a lovely time in the process.
I'm not a big New Game+ guy but I think I'll come back to this in a few months and play on a higher difficulty to make it a proper skillcheck rhythm game - I've pretty much hit the limit of "just scaling the numbers up" and the last megaboss fight really confirmed that for me, there are a bunch of enemy patterns that I basically just brute-forced my way through.
Anyway yeah 10/10 game. I want so much more of this stuff - passion project genre shit with clear compromises but a clearer vision.