Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s battles are best when you break them

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has flashy, thrilling battles, but the best thing about them is how you can twist the game’s many systems to your advantage. The turn-based RPG combat might feel familiar, but it offers a lot of ways to customize your approach to battles so that you can do absolutely devastating amounts of damage.

In Expedition 33, you play as a group of Expeditioners who aim to destroy The Paintress, a mysterious being that erases everyone of a certain age every year. In battles, you can have up to three of your party participating in a fight, and should they all die, you can call in your teammates who are in reserve to try and finish off the enemies.

To show you how deep the rabbit hole can go in customizing your team, here’s my approach to building out just one character, the fencer Maelle. Every character can equip three “Pictos,” which offer passive buffs like giving you the defense-boosting Shell status at the start of a fight. But after you win a few fights with a Pictos equipped, other characters can also equip the Pictos as a “Lumina” by using “Lumina Points,” which you accumulate through leveling up and by using a resource you can find in the game.

When you mix and match Pictos and Luminas to stack complimentary bonuses, things really get going. For my version of Maelle, I set a combination of Pictos and Luminas that could let her deal potentially enormous amounts of damage, especially if a lucky critical hit and a coin-flip 200 percent damage buff went through. But as a counterbalance to Maelle’s huge power, some of the Pictos and Luminas also increased the amount of damage she received, so I added defensive ones that helped her better withstand hits.

In battle, each character also has a unique mechanic that, when used properly, lets you make their attacks more effective. Maelle, for example, relies on different “stances” that you can shift into: an offensive stance that increases the damage you give but also the damage you receive, a defensive stance that reduces the damage you take, and a “virtuous” stance that does 200 percent damage but can be harder to set up.

With Maelle, you can move into the different stances based on which of your six different “skills” you use in battle — and like with Pictos and Luminas, those are also customizable and have their own traits and potential synergies.

It can be a lot to manage, and the game often helps in battles by adding a little sparkle to suggest a move for your current situation. But even within the first few hours of the game, I was able to grasp the potential of what was possible with the battle system. And with Maelle, when I nailed the combination of setting up the right stance and a lucky break from my Pictos and Luminas, I regularly could absolutely demolish my foes by dealing thousands of points of damage. (A late-game Pictos that let me exceed 9,999 points of damage in a single hit was particularly welcome.)

That’s just my approach with one character; each of the other party members has their own playstyles to experiment with and potential skills to use. Your equipped weapons are an element to consider, too. The game shines when everyone’s abilities and skills line up perfectly for a series of explosive hits, and it’s especially satisfying when things come together to melt down a tricky boss’s health bar.

I definitely didn’t use Expedition 33’s battle system, which makes things easy to experiment with, to its fullest. Once I found a combination of characters and skills that I liked, I rarely deviated from them. But I have lots of ideas on how to try things differently for a hard mode run — I’m sure there are a lot more ways to absolutely break the game.