Expedition 33 engages you immediately from its prologue while slowly revealing small key information through story cutscenes giving you a clear objective to achieve. While it’s hard to describe much of it without spoilers thus I will avoid any and all story details in this review. What I can talk about is how phenomenal the music is in this game. Right off the bat with Lumiere the key track of the prologue it starts off strong. And as you move to different areas most of them have an unique soundtracks along with boss ost which are somehow even more epic and further enhances the challenging encounter that you face at the end of each act of the story. The visual aesthetic is surreal here with all the different areas that you get to explore.

The gameplay is pretty simple in terms of a turn-based system but innovates over it in terms of buffs like pictos & luminas and not just being limited to tradition potions. This opens up so many opportunities on theory crafting for different builds for each character. All this along with all the different moves, weapons, gradients make this turn-based system even more engaging than some of the traditional turn-based games. And on top of all this you don't just wait out the enemy turn but instead are given a parry and dodge mechanics making the whole combat scenario even more engaging as you can just take no damage and instead deal damage back to the enemy instead if you hit all the parries on the enemy's turn.

It does have its set of minor grievances such as a lack of a build save for an individual character or for your party, a simpler pictos/luminas (passive buff effects) sorting screen. These are some of the quality-of-life features that definitely would benefit players as some end-game builds that use around 30-40 different luminas (passive buff effects) can be a bit difficult and tedious to switch each time you want to try out a new build option.

One last thing that I would like to mention is the game's dialogue and how the all the characters interact with each other and the story narrative. These interactions feel genuine and real instead of sounding forced and taunting. Different story moments have characters responding appropriately to the scene, when it needs to convey sorrow or sadness it doesn't force a funny dark joke or two in order to break the moment instead it lets you as a player experience it along with the characters. This is refreshing to see as compared to other form of modern entertainment media, most of which has gone down the route of comic one-liners to provide relief in any moment that they can.

Expedition 33 is definitely one of the top modern rpg games released in the last decade no doubt. I definitely would recommend Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to everyone if not just for the gameplay but to experience the story and the music that the game has to offer. The praise that this game gets isn't just over-hype but well deserved. Its worth the price even without a sale. I would love to see what Sandfall Interactive have in store for the future.