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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I haven’t played it but I can tell it’s not for me. I’ve seen many games in the last decade come out that seem to be a part of what I call a “fantasy island”.
It’s hard for me to describe, but I know it when I see it. In general, most of these story-heavy massive award-winning RPGs are relying on the player already liking the aesthetic and gameplay style. And if you’re not already a big fan of this style of game, they will do little to try and set it apart from the others.
None of the trailers or gameplay I’ve seen is there to convince someone to play it. They just expect that you’re already into this genre and you know if you’ll like it. It isn’t just E33, it’s all the games that fit on my fantasy island metaphor.
And it’s not just JRPGs and not just fantasy specifically, but just this category of games that “all the gamers” are playing that are “the best game ever” based on awards assume you already have the rest of the genre to compare to.
On its own as a standalone game without knowing about JRPGs, it does nothing to bring in other types of players. And thus, I have yet to try a single game from fantasy island.
Would you be able to give some examples of what you mean?
I often forget about them as soon as they release. Part of it also is that they usually fall off the map after the first year of being popular and then are never brought up again. That’s why I commented here is because I was surprised to see someone still talking about this game.
The most recent other examples I can think of are Pragmata, Where Winds Meet and Crimson Desert. I’m not even saying I think these games are bad, just poorly marketed to anyone other than the existing audience for them.
I can’t say I’ve heard of Where Winds Meet or Crimson Desert (Pragmata however, I’ve heard is very good and I’d like to give it a go). E33 feels somewhat different in that it has achieved mainstream success, and I disagree that it has been forgotten about already.
Is it perhaps that those games in particular have this kind of modern generic/bland 3D visual style? So many modern games (usually AAA) look same-y to me nowadays.
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.
So, I haven’t played the game, and haven’t read most of your post because of spoilers. The reason I opened the post (and why I am replying to this specific part) is that most of my friends who have played the game consider this one of the best game in a very long time, if not ever. One of the very few 10/10 game for them. They loved the gameplay, the music, and the story (and probably more, but I didn’t delved deep into it cause didn’t want any spoilers). Oh, and they did find the platforming unnecessary too. I don’t think I heard anyone counting that as positive, it just the game was great despite that.
This is just to say that it wasn’t just the awards, lots of other people loved it too and consider all the awards well deserved. It is possible the game just isn’t for you. I have had similar issues with some very highly rated games (case in point, Red Dead Redemption 2 which I am playing right now). Different people have different tastes. No matter how universal acclaim a game is, there will be people who can’t get into it.
Same here. I can’t get into RDR2 at all. I don’t mind the slow movements (I enjoy most walking simulators), but I don’t care about the characters, the story doesn’t interest me, and the combat feels annoying.
That said, I can still understand why many people like the game, it is just not for me.
Yeah, I don’t have much issue with the story (though I am still in early game), but I agree with the rest.
This should be the top comment.
GTA, Red Dead, Metal Gear, and Souls-like games hold no interest for me. I just find them boring and can’t sustain playing them. At no point would I ever call them overrated because they were not for me.
“I didn’t read OP’s post or play the game, but here’s my opinion” should be the top comment? Really?
I had the same thought lol
Heh, well I didn’t comment to be the top comment, just having a conversation. 😀
Why? I think the game is overrated and I’ve quite clearly listed my reasoning. When I suggest that perhaps the game ‘is not for me’, it’s not because I don’t enjoy the genre in the first place etc. The exact opposite in fact - on paper, this game is everything I’d want out of an RPG. When I say it’s not for me, I mean that perhaps I have some personal gripes that others could overlook; that’s my suggestion for why the game is constantly rated so highly despite my feeling that it shouldn’t be.
If the game sounded like it would hold no interest for me, I simply wouldn’t have played it. I wouldn’t play a football game (which I know I wouldn’t enjoy) and say it’s overrated simply because it’s not a genre I like.
Expedition 33 DOES do a lot of things I like, and it kept me more-or-less interested throughout. I just don’t think it deserves perfect reviews.
I believe the same for the graphics, I just couldn’t vibe with it. Everything else I didn’t mind but the graphics I couldn’t do
IMO the story and acting are absolutely fantastic. It looks beautiful and the music is amazing.
The gameplay is kinda meh.
