This is the kind of project that is not made anymore. Something like this just does not happen. And yet it did, by what I’d call the unlikeliest people (and no, I don’t mean the French).
So I thought I’d talk about this game real quick so I can pretend I still run this website. Yeah, I did say I’d post sometimes, and this is a good occasion.
Quick review
The game places you in a world that seems very realistic (a town called Lumière), obviously very french-inspired, with french voice acting (playing this in english is like playing Yakuza in english, you just don’t do that) and a celebration seeming to happen. But then it happens… What the festival was for, the “Gommage”, is a yearly event where the Paintress wakes up, brings a counter down by one which can be seen at a far distances, and everyone that age or older is disappeared in the form of petals (kinda like the snap in Marvel). This game shows the number going from 34 to 33, so everyone 33 or more disappears. This begins Expedition 33, technically the 67th Expedition (probably a bit less because of logistics) to go kill the Paintress, who seems to be causing the deaths. They get to the nearest navigable island, finding an old man (which shouldn’t happen) who starts killing people alongside some monsters. You play as a small set of the Expedition people who managed to survive the assault, finding out about the world outside of Lumière and trying to find the way to the Paintress. You find out a lot of crazy shit along the way, namely about how the world works (it’s very unrealistic unlike the mostly-grounded style of Lumière), and there’s actually a few really good plot twists in there. Overall, good story, good characters, everyone gets some badass moments, it’s some good shit.
The gameplay is that of a fairly standard JRPG. You get turns, with a system similar to FF10 where you see the turn order, but also a system similar to Legend of Dragoon where your attacks have QTEs, and a system similar to Super Mario RPG where you can try to actively block enemy attacks.
While the attack QTEs feel completely useless and can even be deactivated (overall I’d say it should not be there), the defense stuff is critical. Namely, there are multiple ways to defend. You can dodge, which has a larger window of effectiveness. A dodge stops all damage if successful, and some stuff can cause bonuses if you perfectly dodge. You can parry, which has a very small window of effectiveness (which happens to be identical to perfect dodging), but it gives AP (which you use for either shooting attacks or skills) and can be improved. Enemy attacks generally have multiple hits, but if you manage to parry all of them, that triggers a counterattack. So skill is actually really important in combat. It’s a really well-designed risk vs reward system, where dodging is easier, but getting good at parrying allows you to deal massive extra damage on enemies. There’s 2 more defense methods, jumping (which has a counter of its own) and gradient counter (which is for attacks that feature a specific animation), but they’re not super nuanced compared to the dodge/parry system. Also they clearly had Souls inspirations for these enemy attacks because holy shit the enemies have funky-ass animations with weird timing, making parrying very difficult, especially the first time you encounter them.
Each character has completely different gameplay which I found pretty interesting. Maelle changes stances based on the skills used which have different effects (defensive, offense at the cost of defense, and literally triple damage) with skills having different effects based on stances. Lune stores elements after every attack, which other attacks might consume to power up. Sciel places status symbols directly on enemies which can be used on later turns to power up attacks… and there’s a few more. It’s all pretty well done, I have basically nothing to complain about. If there’s a character you don’t like (I wasn’t a big fan of Sciel’s gameplay) you’ll probably still have characters you enjoy. I think they’re all viable, though I found Maelle and Verso to be clearly the top characters (and I didn’t even do the shit Maelle has that makes her actually broken that was patched today).
There’s a good amount of content too, with a lot of optional areas/battles for you to 100% later on. Some of the battles are a bit wacky, like one of them is a boss you just have to survive his attack (which takes a while, there’s a lot of hits) then it just dies. You might miss shit on your first go through an area, and there’s a few things you can only do later in the game to find more stuff. There’s just a lot here.
There’s also fun leveling systems. You get skill points every level to learn new attacks from a skill tree for each character. There’s items called “pictos” which both power up stats but also teach passive skills (things like ways to get more AP so you can use more skills, or resistances, or power-ups to parrying and dodging). After having a picto equipped for 4 battles makes you “learn” it, which makes the passive that’s on it learnable by all characters, with a set of points you can earn from finding items around the world. It allows to get pretty strong.
Also the music good as fuck.
The graphics are fucking beautiful.
The game is not very glitchy (I caught a few really small things, like walking on a light bridge that wasn’t there on the overworld (it didn’t let me skip anything because there was an invisible wall)) which was a big, welcome surprise. Teams with thousands of people can’t manage this anymore, but this team did.
The french voice acting is actually good, which was a nice change of pace compared to the subpar english voice acting we tend to get.
Overall, I highly recommend this game. I think it will be remembered as a classic.
Why it feels impossible
This game is not full price (it is 50$). For a massive game like this, that’s very nice.
The game was made by ~30 people.
There was clear passion in making this game, both with the really interesting and very unique story, as well as the character designs, style and just overall tone.
The devs (at least some of them) are ex-Ubisoft… Who knew they had actual talent at that shithole of a company that hasn’t produced anything worth thinking about since 2013? Why has Ubisoft been so bad when they do, in fact, have talented devs working for them? Who else exists at Ubisoft that could leave and make their own game and release another banger?
This game has managed to be all over the place, which I’m just happy about. I wasn’t seeing TOO much hype for it earlier, but just a bit before release it managed to get a massive boost, and now it’s a huge success, far above some big AAA garbage that came out close to it.
Legitimately, seeing those credits and having roles being fulfilled by ONE person instead of 20+ was so refreshing. And sometimes seeing some of the names double-up in different roles because they had to split responsibilities.
Games this good are just very rare in the industry recently, but it being made by a small team and not being overpriced makes it very noteworthy.
What lessons are there to learn?
You don’t need massive teams of 9000+ people to make a game. You’d think stuff like Undertale or Balatro or Binding of Isaac or most games before the year 2000 would teach that same lesson, but apparently not. 30 people is absolutely reasonable for a team, because it allows a more singular vision for the game where all the people on the team know what they’re making (which is legitimately not the case at a lot of big game companies nowadays).
Games now have extremely overblown budgets. In part it’s because they have absolutely massive teams of people making really small parts of the games, then there’s too much outsourcing (which leads to low-quality work), then there’s absolutely insane marketing budgets when that’s absolutely not needed anymore if you have a brain and utilize the internet.
To continue from the previous point, games shouldn’t be 70$. Or 80$. 50$ is the sweet spot. If they are higher priced and have DLC and shit to compensate for the high budget… the problem is the budget, and nothing else. Have a reasonable budget, sell a good game people want for 50$, enough copies will sell for it to land a profit.
Games require passion to be good. Companies have been treating games like “products” rather than, you know, games, for way too long. A lot of games just feel like they come of a conveyor belt and no one really gave a shit on the time, you know?
Game companies seem to just… have talented devs. They just don’t utilize any of them. If ~30 of them can quit Ubisoft and come out with a game this good… What the fuck was Ubisoft doing? Why are game companies not leveraging having more smaller teams making games, rather than massive teams making one piece of garbage that will kill your company if it fails?
I hope Sandfall Interactive keep this shit in mind for their future games. They have the potential to be a major player in gaming, if they don’t forget their first success. I am very much looking forward to their next game.
The JRPG thing
I’m seeing extremely stupid people claiming this is not a JRPG because it’s not japanese. People who say this are either really dumb, or just don’t know how genres work.
Historically, before ~FF7, JRPG was not a genre name at all. We used to called them Console-style RPGs, to differentiate them from Computer RPGs (or PC RPGs) of the time. Console-style RPGs, specifically, descend from the style of Dragon Quest, where they simplified the gameplay style of PC RPGs to be playable more easily with a controller with limited buttons (while PC RPGs were way more complex than Dragon Quest). Game journalists always sucked and, around when FF7 came out, they all decided that they hated japan and decided to apply “japanese” to the genre so they could be derisive about it (you can find a lot of japan hate in old game news shit, like on G4). The term “console-style RPG” still remained a little bit around, like they still had it on gamefaqs until the 2010s, but now they go with “japanese-style” and “western-style”, which still actually makes sense. Japanese-style = Dragon Quest-like, Western-style = Wizardry/Ultima-like. You can still understand the gameplay differences between the 2 genres.
So yes, Expedition 33 is a “JRPG”. It’s a console-style RPG, one that plays more like Dragon Quest than Wizardry, making it “japanese-style” and not “western-style”.
Not sure why this needs to be said, I even saw game devs saying “durrrr it’s not made in japan so it’s not JRPG” when they should obviously know better.
Though I will say “J’RPG” is a funny term and I approve, even if it means nothing.
Anyways
Game good, buy it.
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