Clair Obscur Metacritic user score | Hacker News Reader

Clair Obscur Metacritic user score

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62 pointstyleo64 comments

Clair Obscur is really good. The storytelling and writing have been fantastic, the graphics look great (and the art direction is beautiful), the music is good, and even the voice acting is good. It's also fun to play (though some fights are too hard like I mentioned in another comment). Honestly, I hope that it wakes up the devs at Square Enix because this is what Final Fantasy should have been for the last 25 years instead of the hot mess they have made of it.

have you played Final Fantasy VII Rebirth?

Not op but having played Rebirth, while overall very good, it suffers from the classic case nowadays of adding repetitive "chores" to do around maps, to artificially increase the length of the game with little purpose.

So far (only 6 hours in, but some friends who went further confirmed), Expedition 33 seems to steer away from that, being a lot more story driven.

It also has, by far, the greatest prologue I've seen in a game.

Worse thing so far, the UI in the menu does take a second to get. Particularly the selected state is way too subtle and a bit confusing at first.

Agreed, I've only played FF7 Remake (which I'd waited patiently for years while it was being developed), and just did not enjoy playing the game. It felt like it 20 hour game stretched out to 70 hours with repetitive fetch quests. It lacked the charm and fun of the original, and it sounds like this Clair Obscur game has learnt from this experience.

No, but that is because I played Remake and thought it was really bad, genuinely one of the worst games I've ever played. As you might imagine I did not drop my cash on the follow-up to a game I hated that much.

Played Remake and put that down after a few hours. The combat was just not appealing; it was packed with filler for anyone who actually played the original FFVII; the VA was just typical JRPG wooden quality. Would rather not invest another $70 for Rebirth.

FFVII Rebirth is perfection. Best battle system ever, great voice acting, great music.

I think a bunch of people would have been more interested in the ff7 remake had it been able to wrap up the story in a single game that's only 30-60 hours.

Having just started (and slogged through the interminable intro piece that is tonally completely unrelated to the main game), I'm keeping an open mind, but it feels like this is scratching a very particular itch for a very particular group of gamers who have been largely ignored for a decade or more. It's not bad at all and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes, but the turn-based approach feels _very_ old (in both good and bad ways), and the dialogue system..

"We leave tomorrow." click A "Huh" click A "We must drink tonight" click A "You're a bad influence" click A "Huh" click A

Someone will probably tell me this is the convention in the Final Fantasy style and that's FINE, and this would go a long way to explaining the reaction. It feels like a well above average game that is a GREAT game to a subset of gamers because they haven't had a game like this in so long.

There's few things I dislike more in 3d games than selecting dialogue flow. Especially if there are important hint inside. Cinematic scenes should be a quick break from the flow of the game, but those feels more like reviewing forms. Either gives me a proper cinematic, or a journal/note/description thing for me to read.

I don't mind if there's meaningful choice that can affect later gameplay, but clicking through lines of dialogue feels like an unnecessary step. (Again, I'm completely open to the response that this is just how it is in this genre, but from a more general audience perspective it feels strange.)

Likely a business decision to save on VA billable hours via nostalgic RPG trope.

VA = "voice actor"? Because, if so, that's the funniest part: having to click A after someone responds, in spoken words as well as onscreen, "Hmmmm". It's almost charming, but it seemed deeply, deeply unnecessary to me. (Also just a quirk so far.)

You're right, I missed that you were talking about the click-through dialogue specifically for the special event dialogues

> or a journal/note/description thing for me to read

It's incredibly hard to please everyone. I don't like reading in games, the UX is awful. If I wanted to read I wouldn't have started a game in the first place, I read books not games.

Not saying your opinion is not valid, but just voicing that this might be good for other consumers.

For me - journals/notes/description and even video scenes - is something I cannot focus on, so ignore most of the time.

However selecting (even fake) choices keeps me engaged and more "role playing" as if I am saying those lines and live through the dialogue.

The game is actually quite innovative compared to the average game. The combat is turn based but it has a large dodging/parrying element akin to Sekiro. The limited consumables but being refreshed on resting at a flag(bonfire), and flask also seem directly inspired by FROMSoftware games. The ability to use your other party members when other ones die feels fresh and makes it feel like there are no "never used" party members. The aiming option in fights feels like it draws from P5. They turned the limit break mechanic into kind of a party super meter, which I'm sure has been done before but feels fresh.

The dialogue is actually humerous(which is unusual for a game), the story is mysterious and intriguing, the music is great. Interesting take that this is average or derivative and just appealing to a certain type of gamer--can't say I agree.

Again, I didn't say it was average and in fact went out of my way to say that I felt like it wasn't average at all but that it was perhaps less groundbreaking than the excitement for it lets on because it appears to share traits with a particular genre that has been neglected for open world games. I also didn't say "derivative" but I would note that, for every feature you're listing as innovative, you're providing an example of where the mechanic can already be found. And, from my perspective that's *perfectly fine*, but it also contextualizes the game as more of a loving homage than genuinely groundbreaking.

> "We leave tomorrow." click A "Huh" click A "We must drink tonight" click A "You're a bad influence" click A "Huh" click A

Good, makes me want to play the game more. As someone that likes to pay attention to story and dialogue, I like to be able to control the flow of dialogue.

In a lot of cases, games like this give plenty of options for dialog speed and automatic continuation. As long as those things are in place, it seems like it should make everyone happy at relatively little development effort. I'm split on this. If there are voice overs, it's insufferable to make me press a button to continue every single line. If it's text only, it feels more natural.

It’s so refreshing playing a game that isn’t the N+1 installment in some archaic franchise. I hope the studio survives and makes something else novel and interesting.

Of particular note is the care taken in facial animations. There’s still some uncanny valley (UE5 still sucks at human faces) but they’ve done a lot to make the characters emote believably during in-engine cutscenes.

I wish the out-of-engine FMVs weren’t so heavily compressed, but c’est la vie.

My advice: play this in performance mode. Parrying is significantly harder at 30Hz.

I thought I’d post this because there are a lot of gamers here. This game went entirely under my radar but apparently it’s great.

I don’t know what it’s about but I intend to play it and wanted to share with others.

Funny I am playing Persona 5 on my Steam Deck right now and this is exactly the sort of game I like.

It's a jrpg made by a team of 30 that adds timing based quick time events (block, Parry, Empower) to standard jrpg combat with souls like one shot mechanics. It's a new IP based on a world where a entity has taken over and every year a countdown decreased by 1 and anyone over that age disappears. You are on an expedition to solve the mystery and stop it.

Do the QTEs work like the Mario RPG games? That sounds great.

Yep, more or less. The game is like if Super Mario RPG and Persona had a baby in the middle of the Champs-Élysées.

And also, somehow, Fantasian

More or less (disclaimer: I haven't actually played those games so I'm going by reputation). The big difference is that the dodge/parry mechanic in Clair Obscur can be punishing. There have been cases where a boss would one-shot characters if I don't get a dodge off, which is very frustrating - I don't play Souls games for a reason, and I don't want that level of fuck you difficulty. But mostly, it is at the level where you will need to spend more time healing if you take hits, but you can muddle through.

While i agree mostly, i feel like it fits the environment/setting in which this story takes place. It feels like a near hopeless expedition; one of which many believe is a suicide mission.

Sure, but while you want the suggestion it’s hopeless, you don’t want it to actually be so, or it’d be a pretty frustrating game.

I love that the origin of this game is basically the developers going "hey, nobody makes turn based JRPGs with high end graphics any more", and they decided to be the change they wanted to see.

The AA space has been really stepping up to fill the gap when AAA abandoned good single player games for live services, player retention. and recurring revenue.

All while proving you don't need a $150-200 million dollar budget to make a good and successful game.

> made by a team of 30

Not true. Roughly 500 people worked on the game.

You mean 15 000, you forgot the people making the engine.

It's wonderful. went under my radar as well, but i had it through Game Pass. Been playing it on my Steam Deck via GeForce Now. I'm a long time JRPG (turn based) fan and this is, so far, one of the best i've ever played. I'm very happy to be surprised by this one.

Doesn’t it work on the steam deck straight?

It ought to. I'm playing on my Arch desktop with no issues, so I can't imagine a steam deck would have problems.

I've never been a fan of JRPGs, preferring things like BG3, Mass Effect, Dragon Age (not the new one), and Skyrim. But after 800 hours in BG3, I think it's time to try something else and this looks like it might be that.

This is not very meaningful unless you filter the plethora of 0s and 1s out of games that clearly don't deserve then (e.g. Baldur's Gate 3 - I didn't like BG3 very much either, but even for the crankiest gamers it is not honest to give it below 6/10).

There is some interesting sociology about why Clair Obscur hasn't been dogpiled by bad-faith reviews, but I don't think it says much about the quality of the game. In particular I am sure the score will go down once it wins some awards and bored losers get mad about it.

> This is not very meaningful unless you filter the plethora of 0s and 1s out of games that clearly don't deserve then

Only if you filter out the plethora of 10s that games that "clearly don't deserve them" either.

Who is the judge if a game deserves a score when the aggregator purpose is to normalize it anyway?

If a game sees a bunch of 10s and 0s it means that something in the game is polarizing. The fact that Clair Obscur has such a high rating means it pleased everyone across the board. Nowadays that is quite a feat.

Sure, user reviews are totally useless across the board, not disagreeing with that. My point is that if a game gets exceptionally good critical reviews then a 0 is almost always a hissy fit, not a serious assessment. And often the only thing that is "polarizing" is the game's financial success. (Edit: see my prediction about the game winning awards and seeing its user score knocked down accordingly.)

Funny you say that, I think user reviews are the only useful reviews for me to measure if a game is worth playing. I find professional reviews less than useless - those are essentially trash.

Start with a quantitative analysis. A game has a 7. Is it a bunch of scores around 7? A bunch of 10s and some zeroes? Those will inform you some.

Then do some qualitative analysis. See what people are praising or complaining about. Check if the complaints matter to you. If they don't, you should try it.

> My point is that if a game gets exceptionally good critical reviews then a 0 is almost always a hissy fit, not a serious assessment

Hard disagree. Critical reviews are pure marketing. I played games that are aggressively mediocre that were critically praised before.

Speaking of bad faith... really seems like you're shifting the goalposts here. I specifically mentioned Baldur's Gate 3 as a game I didn't care for, I would have given it a 7/10. A 0/10 or 1/10 is preposterous. This is the specific problem I am talking about: absurdly low reviews driven by resentment.

Is there a single game that averaged >80/100 on Metacritic which you would have given a 0?

> I specifically mentioned Baldur's Gate 3 as a game I didn't care for, I would have given it a 7/10. A 0/10 or 1/10 is preposterous.

Preposterous to you. You sound awfully judgemental of other people's opinions. Are your tastes inherently superior?

I didn't play BG3, mostly because I don't like D&D. If I played BG3, I would most likely not like it very much due to my predisposition to dislike it, due to my dislike of D&D. If I gave it a low score, you would dismiss my score as resentment? Sorry, this is bullshit.

This is hypothetical of course, since I didn't play nor rate BG3.

> Is there a single game that averaged >80/100 on Metacritic which you would have given a 0?

Me, personally? No, but that is more related to how I rate games. The games I played that I disliked the most got like a 3 or 4. Zero would be reserved to games that are fundamentally broken.

When Astro Bot won GotY, a bunch of idiots who thought that Black Myth Wukong should have won started review-bombing BG3; since Astro Bot is a PS5-only game and you can't review games on PSN, they decided to go after BG3 since their CEO was the one who presented the GotY award to Astro Bot.

You don't often see people review-bombing games positively that they've never played, so the skew is going to be towards the negative and not the positive.

> If a game sees a bunch of 10s and 0s it means that something in the game is polarizing. The fact that Clair Obscur has such a high rating means it pleased everyone across the board. Nowadays that is quite a feat.

100% this. Clair Obscur, by every metric I can think of, is going absolutely nuts. I find it hard to imagine many upcoming games which might compete with it for GotY.

> When Astro Bot won GotY, a bunch of idiots who thought that Black Myth Wukong should have won started review-bombing BG3; since Astro Bot is a PS5-only game and you can't review games on PSN, they decided to go after BG3 since their CEO was the one who presented the GotY award to Astro Bot.

And that is valid information and context.

If I see a bunch of user reviews that gave a zero but no textual information on that zero (or the textual reviews that gave it a zero contained bullshit), I can ignore those as irrelevant for me and pay attention to the game.

> You don't often see people review-bombing games positively that they've never played, so the skew is going to be towards the negative and not the positive.

That absolutely does happen. Fanboyism is a thing.

How can you be a fanboy of something you haven't played?

You'd think that, but it's a common enough phenomenon that satirical articles joke about it [1].

[1] https://hard-drive.net/hd/video-games/huge-earthbound-fan-ex...

People are told what they should be a fan of and what they should hate by content creators, usually on youtube. Playing the game itself is often a mere distraction from the more important business of internet comment section PvP (ahem)

What I suspect has happened is that it is neither "conspicuously woke" nor "conspicuously anti-woke". Probably because it's French. Therefore it has avoided organized review-bombing campaigns, as well as being an extremely good game in a neglected genre.

(re: review bombing, a funny/stupid example of this was when Genshin Impact gave out anniversary freebies that the fandom deemed inadequate. So they started review-bombing it. Google removed the reviews. So they review-bombed https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... instead)

And review bombing is alright. I have no idea why people get so obsessed over it. Which is why people should actually read the words of user reviews.

Are people that gave it a zero complaining only that the game is woke? If that does not matter to you, you may want to try it.

I enjoyed games that were review bombed before, as the reasons why people were review bombing it didn't matter to me.

I would suggest a causal correlation there. They were able to focus on making the game good, rather than focusing on making the game political, and thus failing to make the game good, as the dozens of recent AAA(A) commercial failures have done.

It sounds like: 1. Some people just dislike the qte combat. 2. Some people reject certain plot points. But we can't talk about it that much because it's a spoiler. I'm annoyed at myself for reading too many comments on it.

What is the argument of letting people vote without verifying if they played the game ? I get it since its the usual approach to movies, but when you are used to reviews through stores like Steam, it sounds a bit off (granted, people can buy a game on steam, leave a review and refund it but that's still less of a problem than letting everyone review). If there is an argument, would that still hold for Steam ? Can anyone review a Steam game even if they didn't play it ? I might have missed a lot so don't be too harsh

I think its about ergonomics of the review system, not that reviews of non-players are positively valued.

Review sites NEED reviews. Even unreliable reviews are better than no reviews. Otherwise you are dead. On top of that keeping users engaged in the review system drives revenue. All of this means adding hurdles like verification (however that might work for metacritic) or (for Steam) turning away reviewers because they played the game off-platform is a net negative for the company.

I’ve been playing it for the past few days and I’ve been really enjoying it.

I normally get bored of JRPGs quickly but the game systems, music, artwork and story have all been stellar.

Just finished FF VII Rebirth, which I'm considering exactly what a FF should be, with the exclusion of the last chapter's narrative that I didn't like. That said, next one is Clair Obscur, very looking forward to play it!

This one’s more of a streamlined experience, with a very nice take on turn based combat - it’s FFX turns with complex mechanics and quicktime parries, basically.

Story and environment rival a FF, with a European touch that’s a nice change. But it’s about 30 hours so not as immersive. Amazing achievement for an unknown team!

Released a week ago? Aren't IMDB ratings high in the first few weeks/months too, because of screenings/film festivals/devout followers etc?

Talk about hyperbole

For an established IP that can happen, yes. Further context about this one is that it's new IP and the first game from a studio that doesn't even have a Wikipedia page yet.

I went for Oblivion Remastered instead, but this was the other contender.

Hopefully they will release DRM free version on GoG as well.

Does anyone else find the vibe to be... off-putting? From the trailers, videos etc, something about this doesn't gel with what I go for, but I can't put my finger on it. Maybe it's an uncanny valley feel between abstract and realistic, or may be it's just different from the games I play, and fiction I'm exposed to.

Edit: After watching more videos, I think it is, indeed, the mix of cartoon/early-video-game-era flashy animations on the screen (Or maybe think Batman comic books?), with a story-driven narrative, and characters that also toe the line between cartoon and realistic style.

One thing is the graphics are a generation behind what you would usually expect from a game of this quality. I’ve been playing it and I can confirm it is wonderful, and the graphics just makes me impressed with the amount of focus the tiny team (33 people, I think?) put into making what matters great (though I’d be excited for a remaster in the future).

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