The Expedition 33 Review Post

Belsprout

I am going to spoil the shit out of this game. There's your warning.

**

Expedition 33 opens with a moment of sublime cosmic horror.

Across the sea from the city of Lumiere, there is a Monolith. On the Monolith's face there is a golden number, radiant. At its base, an enormous woman made of stone sits with her head bowed and her arms wrapped around her knees. Thus the horizon remains until sunset of the gommage day, when the Paintress rises from her seat, wipes away the number, and everyone of that age in Lumiere vaporizes in a cloud of flower petals. 

A new number is painted, one lower than the last, and the Painter's returns to stillness. Lumiere sends out an expedition the next morning, in desperate hope that they might be able to cross the sea and the shattered continent beyond and stop this.

All of them have failed. This year is Expedition 33, but it’s not the 33rd Expedition: the numbers count down to match the monolith - no one older than 33 is still alive in Lumiere. The gommage spares no one. No one has a fucking clue why it happens.

Within the first few minutes of the game, as main character Gustav is walking his ex-girlfriend Sophie to the harbor for her own funeral, you have a conversation with an NPC about preparations for the “Final Generation”, when there will be no more adults at all. It's that sort of game. It's a game about art, and death, and grief, and the end of the world, and the arbitrary, unknowable horror of a universe that will inevitably kill you for no fucking reason and how all you can do is fling yourself in desperate hope into the void that is the future and it is a video game about wanting to stab God in the fucking face. Who knows if it will do any good,  but you’re tired and sick and that bastard has killed everyone you have ever loved and they’ll kill you too and you just have to hope that you can get in knife range.

It's so fucking good.

Mechanically, graphically, narratively, musically, certified banger on every single front and this is grading it against a year packed with incredible releases. Do you like JRPGs at all? Go play it. Took me 42 hours, sidequests included, and I saw most but not all of it. Good size, leaves you satisfied but not exhausted.

**

I can’t be, and refuse to be, the only one who sees the parallels between Marika and the Paintress. I can’t say if there was intention behind the similarities but damn is it close: goddess with golden hair and a fucked-up stone body breaks the fucking universe in grief after the death of her son.

**

 
Naming a favorite track is impossible, so I will have to just shout out the funky fresh bassline in Rain from the Ground. The feeling when it transitions into the electronica during a perfect parry sequence is absolute peak.

**

I lied. My favorite track is Paintress. Wait, no, Visages. God there are so many bangers on this soundtrack, it’s nothing but bangers.

**

Lune was my party lead from go - you can settle into some excellent bread-and-butter 1-2-3 combos with her. And she’s just a cool character. But also because she doesn’t make any noise when she sprints.

**

Monaco teaches us all a valuable lesson: Blue Mage “get powers from monsters” is a good mechanic, and it should be featured in more places.

**

The dialogue in the game is excellent across the board - naturalistic in ways that many comparable games aren’t.  It doesn’t feel stilted or performative, and the comedy swings way above its weight class when it wants to. Verso and Monoco in particular have some fantastic banter. 

**

Esquie is a perfect marshmallow friend, Sciel is everyone's favorite bi icon, Renoir is one of the most menacing motherfuckers to grace a screen in a good long while. 

**

I love how weird everything is. Set design, monster design, the landscape itself. They use “the world is a painting” to fantastic effect. Yeah! It should be weird and surreal! It’s a magic painting! Just have some big abstract-art headed bronze colossus wading through the ocean and name it "Sprong"!

**

Gestrals - the model maquettes with paintbrush hair - are such a good type of goblin. They love fighting, but not out of anything as petty as malice or greed or ideology; they just want a good tussle. No harm no foul if they die, they’ll just be reborn at the sacred river.

It’s hilarious, until it also becomes deeply sad as you find out that resurrected gestrals don’t retain continuity with their previous selves; they’re similar, but not the same. And the damage done to the Canvas has backed up the resurrection line, where there aren’t enough adult gestrals to look after the newly-resurrected one.

**

I loved how each character had a dedicated combat gimmick but shared in the same skill unlocks - the amount of build variety you can pull off is probably the greatest I have ever seen in an RPG. You can break the game entirely and wipe endgame bosses before they even get a turn in, if you want to.

To elaborate there: everyone has three slots they can equip primary skills in, which give them a stat boost as well. If they go through four fights with a skill equipped, that allows every character to add that skill (with no stat boost) to their list of secondary skills (the only cap here being your number of skill points). Everyone is able to use every skill, and the key is finding the build that works with their core combat gimmick.

**

I’ll admit, I was taken by surprise when Gustav gets merc’d at the end of Act 1. They got me, and I thought “yeah, okay, it’s that kind of game, I see what you’re doing.”

And then they hit me with that trick again with the end of Act 2 and just kill everyone.

**

As for the endings, I picked Maelle’s first, then went back and did Verso’s. The latter I find more narratively fulfilling but morally monstrous, the former a hollow victory. I appreciate that there’s no good ending, but there’s the feeling that there could have been one. Maybe, if Gustav were alive, he could have brokered peace with Real!Renoir or Real!Clea. 

Verso’s ending sees him committing genocide; Maelle’s sees her losing herself in a sea of puppets. Neither of them - or any of the other Dessandres, really - see the inhabitants of the Canvas as people. 

I normally don’t like narratives where characters meet their creators. They either turn into farce or tread a repetitive existential crisis. No need to relitigate it when Conan figured out in Queen of the Black Coast: “If life is an illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me.”

Here, I feel better. Because the encounter with the gods leaves the very clear lesson that they will destroy you as collateral in their own squabbles. Even the ones that seem to care about you. The game ends on the same note as it begins: raw cosmic horror. The gods will kill you en masse for arbitrary reasons you have no context for - and once we get the context that your lives are all collateral damage in their squabbles amongst themselves, it just makes it all worse because the you’re not just dying for unavoidable and pointless reasons, you’re dying for petty and stupid and selfish and completely avoidable reasons.

I’m convinced that the party was well and properly dead after Act 2: Maelle didn’t resurrect anyone, she just made puppets based on her own memories. The wave at the end of the Verso ending is Maelle trying to assuage her own guilt with a mirage of her dead friends going “it’s okay, we understand”. 

The game starts with the characters going "fuck the gods", and ends with the player going "man, fuck the gods."

**

There is so much to say about this game and it’s been a couple months, so it is extremely difficult to focus and summarize my thoughts. All the same, game good.