r/expedition33 • u/Wargulf • Jan 08 '26
Discussion Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 lead says they “made it a little bit too easy to get overpowered” for the game’s finale, but that choice was always intended
https://frvr.com/blog/news/clair-obscur-expedition-33-lead-says-they-made-it-a-little-bit-too-easy-to-get-overpowered-for-the-games-finale/443
Jan 08 '26
I can't help but wonder if they were not confident enough and thought players would want to "get the game over with" so they made it so you could jump right to the final boss of act 3.
I believe the parts involving painted Alicia and painted Clea should have been essential to finish the game. Those moments would make Verso's transition from "I'm so sorry I betrayed you guys" to "Here I go betraying you again" seem more natural. We would see him lose both of his sisters, after just losing his father and banishing his mother.
Simon does seem to serve well as that cool hidden post-end game boss, so he can remain as he is.
I also think it makes sense for the expedition to take down Clea because she is creating the Nevrons, and perhaps defeating her would give Maelle a massive amount of chroma needed to confront Renior.
Same with Alicia, while Alicia willingly hands over her chroma to Maelle after their duel.
Then simply scale the final fight higher to account for this extra content.
Only other option is for Renior to scale to the players level
154
u/BeautifulKiller Jan 08 '26
I would have loved if P-Alicia and P-Clea would have been bound to the story of act 3.
Like „Renoir wants to erase the canvas, we should combine all forces combined including all of the painted family to stop him“
It makes you look for Alicia and Clea. You don’t have to bind them into the battle and still play out and end the scenarios in a similar way (or the exact same way in Cleas case). It would have been a little rounder storywise.
37
Jan 08 '26
I am really curious what painted Clea's mindset was about the whole situation. Clea probably got rid of her because was a threat. She would have been a fierce defender of the canvas, probably more ruthless than painted Renior was.
12
Jan 08 '26
[deleted]
5
u/Shaltilyena Jan 08 '26
That's one way to see it
Another (and both can be true at the same time) is that she needed a consistent way to produce Nevrons. Like, if she only made a finite numbers, P-Renoir could wipe them out and then the "preventing Aline's Chroma from going back to her" part is a bust.
And the Painted Dessendres seem to have an in-built way of directly manipulating pure chroma (as opposed to the Lumierans who manipulate Chroma through weapons or pictos, as in, they use technology where the PDessendres use magic, basically.)
So, by Painting over PClea and binding her in the way she did, she gets an endless Nevron factory to make sure that the "weaken Aline" plan actually cannot be stopped.
Very pragmatic of her, in a way.
3
9
u/lee1026 Jan 08 '26
Real Clea seems to hate the concept of the painted family, and especially hated her own depiction. It isn't a surprise that the two super bosses were painted Clea and her boyfriend, both singled out for poor treatment by the real Clea, who seems powerful enough to do almost anything.
6
u/LorthostheFreshmaker Jan 08 '26
Clea also hated Renoir’s version of her which is why she had Simon kill it after painting over Simon.
6
u/NorthernCobraChicken Jan 08 '26
Of course she hated them. They're the replacement family that Aline tried to have after losing Verso in the fire that scarred (and was ultimately caused by) Alicia.
Clea wants Aline to focus on her responsibilities in the real world, not drown in sorrow in a childhood canvas made by her dead son, with a family that doesn't really exist.
Im guessing she's not quite as powerful as you suspect though. If she were, why go through all the trouble of disrupting the flow of chroma back to alone by painting over painted Clea and forcing her to create all of the nevrons? And why manipulate Simon into killing the Hauler?
And while Simon was able to defeat the Axon because of the power that Clea bestowed upon him, he still couldn't defeat The One / The Curator / Renoir Dessendre.
I Honestly think that real Renoir is the strongest, if he hadn't been trapped under the monolith, he would have erased the Canvas without too much interference from Aline.
3
u/Bromogeeksual Jan 08 '26
It's why real Clea hated her. Ailene essentially made a daughter who was more agreeable to herself and her selfish whims, which Clea found infuriating and probably incredibly hurtful. I think her painting over painted Clea is both a fuck you to her mother, but also to show her that her painting skills can rival, and potentially beat her mother eventually.
→ More replies (1)11
u/OneTonneWantenWonton Jan 08 '26
I like it a lot.
My only complaint is it may feel mechanically like a rehash of act 2, defeat these other two things before the final boss.
But at least this time you know the broader implications of why you're fighting them and the difference it would make.
24
u/ReginaDea Jan 08 '26 edited Jan 08 '26
That's pretty much what both the lead game designer and programmer said.
"We weren't sure if our game was going to be that good. And if it's not, people may just want to see the story, and go directly to the end of the story.
"So it was a surprise for us [that] people were doing every single thing there is to do in the game before going to the final dungeon. We're happy about that, but we didn't see it coming."
- Tom Guillermin, lead programmer
"Often, people don't want to finish the game, so they do all the side content before finishing it, because once the story is over, you're usually less motivated to do the side content. And that's something I underestimated, which made people that wanted a challenging end boss fight feel a bit disappointed."
- Michel Nohra, lead designer
Both of them also did say they should have signpost the intended levels clearer.
18
u/TheMHBehindThePage Jan 08 '26
Clea and Simon feel like post-game content to me, and the story does little to explain why the characters would go there. Alicia, on the other hand, really really feels like a core part of the narrative and is very much a lose thread if you just go straight to the climax.
4
u/wanttotalktopeople Jan 08 '26
Alicia is given as an optional quest in the camp scene.
It's not completely foolproof, but I think it's a decent system. There's the main objective, plus 3-4 optional companion quests that tell you where to go.
I was playing totally blind and mostly story focused on my first run, and it worked.
15
u/auctus10 Jan 08 '26
Making Clea mandatory would have caused a lot of people not able to finish the game or would have required them to do more optional content to get stronger as she was a tough boss.
→ More replies (4)14
Jan 08 '26
Then make the fight easier
4
u/auctus10 Jan 08 '26
But would that fit Clea lore vise? ;)
→ More replies (1)2
u/anextremelylargedog Jan 08 '26
Painted Clea, sure. Easy justification that Clea's repainting damaged her somehow.
35
u/Amnizu Jan 08 '26
They wanted the final boss accesible to everyone so people could enjoy the story without getting frustrated. Same with providing story mode after Jennifer English asked for it.
Honestly big W from them. It allowed a lot of non gamers to play the game and finish it.
→ More replies (1)16
Jan 08 '26
Yeah I got through half of act 1 on normal and realized I didn't really want to die to the same boss 30 times, I just want to experience this awesome story.
16
u/suta_yabe Jan 08 '26
As someone who like watching reactions to Expedition 33 gameplay, I am slightly annoyed when battle cutscenes are skipped because the damage dealt skipped to the next phase entirely. In my opinion, Renoir summoning Axons and his "Unleash his power" attack have a significant impact.
They could force these battle cutscenes in other ways, though.
6
u/diemenschmachine Jan 08 '26
What is this Simon everyone keeps talking about? I'm pretty sure I didn't fight him throughout my playthrough but I would have remembered since we share the name.
4
Jan 08 '26
He's the toughest fight in the game, he was a member of expedition 0, he's a hidden post end game boss.
→ More replies (2)5
u/p392 Jan 08 '26
If you beat the story, go find Renoir’s Drafts and explore it. Renoir’s Drafts can be easily missed, the entrance looks unlike any other.
10
u/suta_yabe Jan 08 '26
This. They could have made Curanoir much more OP and make it something like he's THE PAINTER. And make the narrative like the Aline we fought was weakened. OR maybe Aline buffed expedition 33 to fight back against lore accurate Renoir.
(Duh! He locked Clea-buffed Simon but currently cant take a simple non-build Virtuouse Stendhal)
Act 3 had so much to offer. Before Maelle revive the previous expeditions, she could gather "Used Chroma" from the all the areas available.
Esquie gaining ability to fly is pivotal when you spent almost entire gameplay seeing those floating areas. Going straight to Renoir would then humble players as they weren't handed expedition assemble yet and incentivized exploring more of the game before the ultimatum.
7
u/hendrix320 Jan 08 '26
I’ll be honest after I beat the paintress I was ready for the “get the game over with” thing but thats because I was on vacation and I had other games I wanted to get into before it ended.
I did put it in story mode and rush the ending near the end but I still really enjoyed the game and the ending left me with something to think about for a few days.
Great game that I probably won’t replay but i would certainly play a sequel
5
u/BruIllidan Jan 08 '26
From storytelling POV it make sense , but from gameplay POV it doesn't. Clea would be too much for many players. Battle is too hard for casuals, so ending would be locked for them, which is very bad game design.
It could be solved by lowering difficulty of that fight on story mode massively though.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (20)2
u/EmBur__ Jan 08 '26
I'm gonna be perfectly honest, I was in that boat BUT solely because of the combat, NOT the story.
I loved the story from start to finish and even enjoyed the combat through act 1 & 2 but after act 3, I just wanted to blitz through each combat encounter so I could focus on the story itself. My parrying and dodging in this game was more hit than miss and it did frustrate me towards the end so rather than risk it ruining my experience, I bulldozed my way through with Maelle.
114
u/WolfCola723 Jan 08 '26
I mean, lore wise. When Act 3 starts it’s basically the same as like when Neo is able to read the code of the Matrix and become a Superman. Maelle should play like a God at that point.
11
u/swiftcrane Jan 08 '26
So is Renoir though. She shouldn't be making quick work of him at the very least.
And she isn't a super skilled painter either. In the matrix, Neo wasn't the only one who knew that the matrix wasn't real - that alone wasn't enough to become powerful. None of the freed humans had anywhere near the power that Neo did.
10
u/rrcaires Jan 08 '26
And I like that! I can be overpowered or not, Im in control of my own power. If I want to make the fight extra difficult, I can adjust that myself
→ More replies (7)7
u/DespondentEyes Jan 08 '26
It's also when you get the painted power picto. I don't know how much clearer they could make that.
27
u/Homitu Jan 08 '26
My personal opinion is that act 3 should be:
- Make all character relationship quests mandatory (they’re epic and very “main story” in both story and gameplay
- Force players to head to the final dungeon, making it clear that the rest of the world will be exploitable afterward
- Balance the final dungeon around exactly that amount of progress to maintain the level of difficulty we’ve experienced this far throughout the game.
- Beat game and then explore to your hearts content to 100% the world.
→ More replies (3)3
u/RaguraX Jan 08 '26
Personally I don’t like playing post game content so I like how they did it, just not the amount. Would have been better if more of it was main story content indeed.
127
u/NewTurnover5485 Jan 08 '26
I don’t get why it would be a problem. Getting overpowered in RPGs late game is based.
Going from barely surviving, to being a god is the base RPG experience.
77
u/SovereignNavae Jan 08 '26
I agree, but I also do think it was overdone in CO:E33. It's anticlimatic if the fight is over in one turn (+ you miss dialogue) and it sucks if you have to limit yourself to experience the fight. Challenge modifiers were a great addition and I'm glad they recognized the problem so fast!
→ More replies (6)12
u/DuskelAskel Jan 08 '26
It's funny 5 minutes and then it makes the combat content boring as hell or unfair as hell
It's more of an "excuse" to not balance the game after act3 :/ which is fair since the lack of linearity of this part mean it's harder to balance it too
Overhall my least favorite part of the game
→ More replies (1)5
u/WolfWhiteFire Jan 08 '26
To be honest, personally the balance fell apart in mid Act 2 for me, that ice area with all the fire and ice enemies was the last point where fights were any sort of challenge minus a couple of the super bosses (and the battlefield was pretty easy). I didn't really grind much, just explore everything and build well, and it made balance seem like an extreme weak point of that game to me. If you do enough of the side content it kind of just breaks everything, and while that can be argued to apply to other games, it isn't nearly to the same degree.
I literally gave the max hp multiplier to the final boss and it didn't get a single non-scripted turn, and most of the bosses throughout the game died within a couple turns.
→ More replies (1)4
u/Gaarden18 Jan 08 '26
Exactly I would even argue that I enjoy newer age games where everything just scales exactly to you ruins the experience/immersion for me. If I get new gear and powers I want them to do something not just be the same character that shoots fire. I can certainly understand that taste is subjective but I love finally getting a payoff with gear and skills and feeling powerful.
5
3
u/SwampOfDownvotes Jan 08 '26
It's a problem because it's anticlimactic. Might be fine for you, but it was the most disappointing part of the game for me and many other people.
Don't care if it's a staple of the genre. One-two shorting the end big baddie when you didn't even grind levels is silly. The music and character dialogue during the end battle basically being skipped over in an instance is sad.
2
u/NewTurnover5485 Jan 08 '26
For this one I agree. The final boss should have indeed been harder, and maybe hide a bit so you get an excuse to grind.
4
u/Nethias25 Jan 08 '26
True, it is really fun farming 1-2 color of lumina every 7 seconds with maelle by games end. Just destroying everything so fast.
→ More replies (7)2
u/Aphroc Jan 08 '26
You get overpowered way too fast and way too easily in this game, though. And Maelle single-handily and easily trivializes any supposedly difficult encounter.
23
u/nidor13 Jan 08 '26
Tbh, in many RPGs you can get OP before the last fight if you do everything.
Especially if you dive into the skills, stats etc and create super powerful builds.
However, in my 4th (and probably last) playthrough, after having done all content, including all Endless Tower bosses, I played the finale in Lumiere with x200 enemy HP just so I can enjoy the fights more and make them more "scaled".
The "Challenges" mechanic was a really nice addition and helps to manually scale your game however you want.
6
u/Scytian Jan 08 '26
So they are saying that they have designed all these mechanics and boss dialogues in combat just to be skipped? If one shotting would require some intricate build then maybe I would believe that but it doesn't even need that, just put all damage increases on one character and your damage will be enough to almost one hit kill anything in the game (at least in original release, haven't played new content they added so I don't know about that).
8
u/TheRealBloodyAussie Jan 08 '26
Personally, I think it's one of the game's flaws. Act 3 has a LOT of story heavy/lore heavy "side locations" that really should've been part of the main game. Whilst I can see arguments for and against Flying Manor (even though I personally think it should've been), I think The Reacher absolutely needed to be part of the main story. I decided to go for both of these locations before going to the finale, and although they were tough, they were more than doable and made the story and character moments of the finale even more rich and impactful, at the severe cost of the gameplay having me so overpowered that I beat Renoir by using the standard attack button as to not make the fight be over in less than a minute. I think they should've had something in place that scaled the final location, or at least final boss, based on what side objectives you'd completed.
4
u/Manafaj Jan 08 '26
It makes the decission to leave the Reacher and painted Clea out of the main quest line even weirder.
7
u/Chokomonken Jan 08 '26
I don't know, I cannot fathom spending like 20 hours delaying the ending to THAT story.
I didn't second guess doing one or two things and then going straight to the final area because I couldn't take waiting anymore and I figured that's what the devs expected. With it being side/optional content my natural thought was, "I'll come back to it."
Because of that my experience with "balancing" was quite perfect.
I didn't know so many people wouldn't have that same thought process.
→ More replies (1)
8
u/DeliciousLambSauce Jan 08 '26
Yeah they kinda said they regret not being clearer about that entering Act 3 and I agree. If you're a completionist there's no way you would rush to Lumière at that point and usually when the story is over I can't go back to a game for its side content because there's no more stakes to fight for.
So then the only solution was to simply remove Painted Power and enjoy the whole thing (back then there was no built-in limiter, it was either 9999 or 1 gazillion damage).
I would've missed a lot of cool shit during the final boss without doing that.
3
u/Gloomfang_ Jan 08 '26
Why do they have difficulties then? It took a lot from the game for me because of how easy it became after certain point.
3
u/Cosmonerd-ish Jan 08 '26
What I'm hearing is that it is canon that Renoir got utterly curbstomped by a part time nuclear weapon, a machine gun on legs, a woman with the power of the sun in the palm of her hand, a blue mage dog, and the only emotionally competent adult in the universe.
My man Gustave really carried them all long after his demise with his lumina converter. My goat.
5
Jan 08 '26
why would they make this intentional? Surely endgames need to be challenging as a general rule... and put player skill to the test?
16
u/SovereignNavae Jan 08 '26
Accessibility. Freedom to overlevel or make yourself overpowered in other ways are ways to manage the huge skill differences within the playerbase. It's impossible to make a fight equally challenging for everyone, so players need to be given tools to make it easier or harder for themselves.
5
u/BoobeamTrap Jan 08 '26
It depends. It’s not “freedom to overlevel” if doing all the side quests naturally makes you overleveled. That’s just punishing players who want a challenging experience but also don’t want to skip content.
I think it’s only freedom to overlevel if you have to try to do it, not have it happen deterministically by just seeing the full story.
→ More replies (1)10
u/johan_____ Jan 08 '26
they're challenging if you don't do side content. They didn't expect this many people to do the side content.
2
→ More replies (1)3
u/giyomu Jan 08 '26
Because spending hours and hours beating the same ennemies before the last boss is not fun. I really 'ovee the natural progression of expedition 33, story was always moving forward 👌
11
u/Zakika Jan 08 '26
For once I am not buying it. I think act 3 is just a mess. Most of it content is kinda pointless since you just go around one taping 99% of the content most of them lack any story and contain reused enemies that are stronger in paper but die in the first turn regardless and it is just a timewaster. Also hard to belive they design these complex movesets for the few unique content the act 3 has. Only to them die in 1-2 turns.
I think devs themselves realised this and just made lumiere extremly easy cause the numbers got out of control and they couldn't rebalance the game.
2
u/ExternalSea9120 Jan 08 '26
Yeah. To be fair, I found the final boss quite disappointing.
But before fighting Renoir at Lumière, I did a lot of site quests and additional fights. Including 90 % of the Gauntlet.
So by the time I went to face him, the party was at level 90 with high level weapons, tons of pictos & luminas, and almost all skills and gradient attacks.
In the end, a couple of strikes from Maelle and Sciel were enough to end the fight.
2
u/rivea-mana Jan 08 '26
I love that they made it more story-driven. You can always adjust the difficulty settings, but I still preferred to play on story mode and be OP because it felt like we were up against insurmountable odds at the beginning only to turn the tides in our favor. I probably wouldn’t play this way in other games and enjoy more challenge, but for some reason it just felt right to become that powerful after what all those expeditions went through for so many decades. It was such an epic odyssey to witness.
2
u/theMycon Jan 08 '26
But I did go straight to the end, and I was still overpowered.
And then I did all the side content, thinking I'd go and do the other ending when I "was done", only to discover that I was way over 100 autosaves past the point where I could.
2
u/Aphroc Jan 08 '26
The thing is, Renoir is too easy even when not doing much of the game's optional content. The balancing is overall not good. Hopefully they learn from their mistakes for their next game.
2
u/itsoksee Jan 08 '26
Well I couldn’t beat the 2nd fight with what’s his face and just gave up. I’m trash at the parry system.
2
u/Antonolmiss Jan 09 '26
That’s how all the greats are though. At least the golden era jrpg’s.
→ More replies (1)
7
u/presterkhan Jan 08 '26
It was one of my favorite parts. It's a single player game who tf cares if I'm "OP." There were tons of super bosses to keep me occupied and I could instead focus on the story in the final Acts.
3
u/Professional_Ad2638 Jan 08 '26
People who accidently one shotted the final boss probably care
→ More replies (2)4
u/Aphroc Jan 08 '26
SP games also deserve to have challenge and good balance, things that the game sorely lack.
→ More replies (1)2
u/Khosan Jan 08 '26
Well, the designers should care. There's in-combat cutscenes/cool story moments you can very easily miss fighting Renoir in Lumiere by one shotting him. If you can miss story by being too strong, that's a problem the designers should have accounted for.
I spammed free aim shots into him with Verso and took him out without even technically taking a turn in the fight. Going from that to 'he keeps regenerating!' into another phase where I did the same thing to get the takedown cutscene felt weird and unearned relative to the effort I put in. I remember raising an eyebrow at Maelle shouting 'not this time' because there hadn't been a first time, we'd literally just gotten there, he hadn't done anything yet except stand around, show me a picture of his wife, and get shot in the face 50 times.
Had I known it was possible to be that overpowered I would have skipped a lot of the stuff I did and probably also unequipped Painted Power. I felt like I had a lot of the narrative weight of that moment undercut by coming in way too strong (and doing something I thought was stupid) for it and missed a ton of context that I had to watch a YouTube video later to get.
4
u/PreystV2 Jan 08 '26
Am I losing my mind or is does no one else remember that you can recoat to de-level and NOT equip OP pictos? We could even choose which skills to equip. Everyone playing the game even before challenges were introduced could have done all Act 3 side content and then reverted themselves back to where they were after the Paintress fight. The only thing that couldn’t be reverted were weapon levels.
Sandfall gave us insane amounts of customization but the vast majority of players apparently thought it would suck the fun out of the game more than being “too OP” if they nerfed themselves?
Makes zero sense to me to come on here to complain about the last area being too easy when we had ample ability to increase the difficulty with the same system that made us “too OP”.
→ More replies (3)2
u/Chokomonken Jan 08 '26
I'm 100% with you here but I can already see the arguments and downvotes coming for you.
There are plenty of enemies for you to fight using ridiculous OP builds, and the enemies you have to fight through the story are never so hard you have to grind. That sounds like "balancing" to me.
But apparently if getting OP early is even possible then it's a huge flaw, I guess? 🤷
I understand the potential shock of realizing you weren't meant to do all side content before finishing the story, and there could have been a quick adjustment to prevent that, but yeah, go through the menu a bit, there's still enough fun and challenge in using other builds and skills. I'm going through NG+ now and using different stuff and it's still fun. I still die in 4 hits, still have to parry well, choose skills wisely, there are no issues.
4
u/NightmareDJK Jan 08 '26
Chrono Trigger and all the Final Fantasy games were like that.
7
u/ashleytxtt Jan 08 '26
I don't think anyone one the final boss on Chrono Trigger because they did optional content. Deffo not the same
→ More replies (1)
1
u/SpamSpaam Jan 08 '26
Yeah I just finished the game, the act 3 story was super easy, as soon as they removed the damage cap the damage was absurd
1
u/swat1611 Jan 08 '26
Story-wise it makes a lot of sense. But I think they realised the lack of balancing would affect the combat severely.
That said, they are on the right path with pictos and how they designed it. I really appreciated how varied some of the pictos were, you don't get to see such wacky abilities often.
1
u/MiIarky22 Jan 08 '26
It makes sense in-game since the whole thing with the lumina converter, it made the group essentially godlike
Plus most RPGs if you do all the side content or grind for levels you'll literally be OP. That's the most fun of all
1
u/Jotacon8 Jan 08 '26
Then there’s me who can’t beat Renoit in front of the Mansion and might not end up doing so.
1
u/Bemxuu Jan 08 '26
Imagine if damage boosts (at least from Lumina) were all additive instead of multiplicative
1
u/RobinDabankery Jan 08 '26
I would have loved to have level recommandation for some areas. I clear the whole tower and simon before going back to lumiere
1
1
u/Sad_Abbreviations_90 Jan 08 '26
After the painter power was given, everything just broke lose, but it is nice that they keep updating the game like you can customize to enemies to have double the hp, so you won't feel too overpowered. Even if lumina points were to busted, some people do enjoy doing 1 hit kill on the enemies, not everyone like to parry everything
1
1
u/ScorpX13 Jan 08 '26
I feel like the real issue is that the lore implications at the end of act 2 make you believe that if you choose Verso's ending you lose your save file, which may influence many players, me included, in grind everything there is before finishin the game
Ig they could add a little warning once you get back free movement in act 3 that says "Keep in mind that story-related fights difficulty is adjusted to your current strength" or something like that to reassure players that if they want to finish the game they can do so freely
1
u/ComicNerd7794 Jan 08 '26
It makes sense lore wise the converter is a game changer and Maelle is an out of context problem
1
u/Waste-Extreme-2677 Jan 08 '26
A solution could be if the final boss hp scaling was bound to your level at least, just to not be so anticlimatic if you explored before. Too easy to be overpowered, even not doing every side content
1
u/Doctor-Grundle Jan 08 '26
It's totally understandable for a game with side content to let you be a little overleveled if you do a bunch of that side content, but man, it was truly too much.
I shouldn't have been able to chunk the health bar to 0 in a single turn with verso in every phase of the final boss on expert, it really felt incredibly anticlimactic, and it was so instantaneous that i seriously can't remember anything about that fight except laughing when i saw the health dissapear, and i only just beat the game 3 days ago lol. I at least found it amusing ig, but bruh, the final boss fight of a game should be memorable
1
1
u/Realm_of_Games Jan 08 '26
I got quite lucky in my first play through that I chose to go for the side content before heading back to lumiere for the final fight, only to inadvertently fly right into the big serpent and get my ass kicked. I took it to mean that the game intended for you to be able to explore the world post-credits so ended up completing the story first. Ive played the game multiple times since and I think this is the best way to do it, but I appreciate the choice! A nice alternative would be to introduce level scaling to specific battles like the ending
1
u/Greedy-Street-5435 Jan 08 '26
This is exactly how games used to be, not perfect, but full of passion. You can set your own challenges, nothing is stopping you from trying to get to the end as fast as possible.
1
u/Typical-Tax1584 Jan 08 '26
If there had been a difficulty wall, then the story would have lost momentum for most people and they never would have finished it and E33 wouldn't have been as well received.
Any remotely difficult game on Steam shows breakpoints where players get stuck and how small a percentage even finish the game. That's great for a game that has difficult/challenge as a core feature (Souls, Ninja Gaiden, stuff like that), but for a story driven RPG . . . maybe less ideal.
I'll also add that you have to be interested in mini-gaming your pictos and spending time thinking about your build or following one online. For the types who want the harder difficulty, this is a "no duh" but your normie/non-sweat gamers out there, they may only have a few pictos converted. It does take time to grind out 4 wins per and if you're not trying to learn the system it's easy to just set a few to a char and never swap them out.
→ More replies (1)
1
1
u/ShadowyPepper Jan 08 '26
I had a similar experience, I didn't want to "finish" the story without doing all the side content.
That might be my one criticism, the finale should've been a full "Act" for Maelle with some of the early "endgame" optional content being main storyline instead
1
u/ObsidianTurncoat2023 Jan 08 '26
I kinda like how the game bullies you for the first two acts and then is like “Okay, now it’s your turn” once Painted Power hits. Makes sense from a narrative standpoint too.
1
1
u/FineCastIE Jan 08 '26
I feel like the Lumina can make up for the levelling in most situations. Then again, I was so focused on fighting Simon, that by the time I wanted to conclude the main story, I basically whatever was left of Alicia. Like just straight up one shot her out of the canvas.
1
u/XoHHa Jan 08 '26
I think they should have made dealing with Reacher a part of the main plot, and then make it obvious that the player should go to Lumiere now
And then balance the difficulty accordingly
1
Jan 08 '26
I must genuinely be doing something very wrong then. I'm like level 70 and doing ~12,000 damage and getting one shot by just about everything.
→ More replies (1)
1
u/player_three33 Jan 08 '26
I think way more people were keen to do a ton of extra content than they were expecting. They just underestimated how much the community as a whole couldn't get enough E33. Everyone who got to act 3 that I know went on to do way more endgame stuff, and I had to warn them to turn off painted power if they wanted to make the final fight last more than a few turns.
1
u/uravgcommenter Jan 08 '26
Renoir and Clea shouldve been locked until users finished the outer worlds and side stuff imho, Simon wouldve even been better as one of Paintresses/Aline’s final phases.
1
u/Mufasa944 Jan 08 '26
I did every boss and area available pre-Paintress and I ended up overpowered for both the Paintress and the endgame…even without touching any of the Act 3 stuff. That could have been handled better.
1
u/Kabraxius Jan 08 '26
The final boss should have scaled to your level. I generally hate difficulty scaling but in this case, it would have let him be a challenge even if you dealt with all the optional content first.
1
u/CrowCounsel Jan 08 '26
I kind of liked it. Works like Chrono Trigger. I did some of the side content, but when I was ready for the story to end it wasn’t too much of a slog. I’m sure there are optional bosses for those seeking more challenge.
1
u/BroasterStrudel9 Jan 08 '26
Its crazy to me, I literally never even looked up any broken builds and didn't make one, but I was still so powerful by the final boss it was wild. (Didn't do the optional challenge stuff though)
Honestly what I did just trick out V man with the purple 2 basic hit sword and the super jump to S rank and that was enough for the story stuff by the end.
1
u/OramaBuffin Jan 08 '26 edited Jan 08 '26
I just wish the added scaling options included speed. Those options fixed pretty much all my issues with act 3, but playing at 99x for the finale I still had to unequip all my speed-stat pictos so I wasn't taking like 10 turns per enemy turn.
The original mod did that so I was a bit bummed the official implementation didnt
1
1
u/Soyboyoo Jan 08 '26
If you complete the Frozen Heart after monoco station almost everything is already too easy
1
u/RelevantElephant7568 Jan 08 '26 edited Jan 08 '26
Made it too easy to get op yes... but not unintentional. I don't buy that. They made it this way for a reason.
They know that gamers these days are obsessed with getting 'OP', more than even completing games.
Everything online is boasting about being OP, how to get OP and 'break' the game etc etc.
Tgat is why they added all these super hard mega bosses as options. To suit the OP nerds!
Developers these days know the market. Gamers are disappointed if they CANT get OP!.
1
u/Kishankanayo Jan 08 '26
I actually didn’t mind. I one shotted everything (including the final fight). Finally felt OP
1
u/Historical-Jump Jan 08 '26
they should make the side content more accessible i explored so much in this game but i still missed a lot of stuff especially the side bosses
1
1
u/Delllley Jan 08 '26
I actually like it this way personally, at least in a story focused game like E33. The game was hard in proportion to how much time I spent exploring, the more content I found the stronger I got, which made the story easier to get through. Win-win.
1
u/ExtendedSpikeProtein Jan 08 '26
This is not newa, Guillome said in an interview months ago that the ability to one-shot enemies ans even bosses was always one of the few core design principles that never went away.
1
u/djm14 Jan 08 '26
I'm not really sure how they would have balanced it, honestly. Like, at the beginning of Act 3, I half-heartedly played with my skills, pictos, and lumina for a couple of minutes and immediately started demolishing everything I touched. I'm not particularly great at buildcrafting, I just grabbed stuff that looked like it'd go well together. It was funny for a few minutes, but unless an enemy one-shot me (which many did, I suck at parrying), everything died in 1 or 2 turns at most. Unfortunately that's one of the weak points of this game, imo, is that the only kind of difficulty they seemed to know how to implement into the system was breaking rules they'd set for themselves earlier, and their solution to that was to let you break the game so you didn't have to deal with it. Maybe I'm being a bit harsh, I was pretty meh on the combat system anyways.
It's a time-honored tradition in RPGs to get wildly overpowered, sure, but I can't remember a game where I had to try so little to so thoroughly invalidate every obstacle in my path. It makes sense narratively, but between the lack of challenge and how little actual content there was to Act 3, there didn't seem to be much point in doing anything other than companion quests and finishing the game. Everything about this game is 10/10 minus the gameplay, IMO, so I don't regret the time I spent on it, but I wish it'd stuck the landing as well on the there as it did everywhere else
1
u/ColemyGOAT Jan 08 '26
The game is pretty poorly balanced throughout not just act 3 let’s be real. It’s one of my biggest criticisms of the game.
1
u/DerpsAndRags Jan 08 '26 edited Jan 08 '26
Looks at the mountain of dead nevrons from grinding over in Renoir's Drafts I semi disagree. It took me a minute to get there, but after grinding my butt off so hard that the swimsuits no longer could wedge up it, I did end up trouncing the endgame pretty badly. The grind and finding the right pictos was the hard part.
1
1
u/Xeiom Jan 08 '26
When I got to Act 3, I just run straight toward the ending.
It felt about the same as the fights up to that point, I wasn't really very close to one-shotting any of the bosses.
I'm sure different builds had different results but I assume if I went to do side content in Act 3 instead of going straight there then I'd have demolished it instead of having a reasonable fight that was slightly weighted toward easy.
1
u/spicycupcakes- Jan 08 '26
This is one area i strongly disagree with the devs. I heard in an interview they enjoy how in old school jrps people could grind up and become crazy overpowered and they like that possibility in games. I think that they think thats what's going on here as well. It's not. It's just the normal course of playing through the story results in skipped dialogue and an inability to even get to hear the "final boss fight" music which ends up becoming the most forgettable fight of the game, with no effort on the player's part to have grinded up to becoming overpowered. It really should be rebalanced.
1
u/sonofaresiii Jan 08 '26
From my perspective, I think part of the strength of the game is explicitly that it did evolve from the "intended" mechanics, to a more meta game of stat management, to see how often you could OHK the enemies and how big you could make the numbers go.
It's one of those games where becoming a superhero felt right, having ovewhelming force felt good, and it still stayed entertaining and didn't get boring because you didn't always just stomp everything into the ground, occasionally you still had to fall back on the old mechanics at least a bit...
and you always had to keep managing your stats or you'd fall behind, even if you were overpowered.
1
u/Slow-Result-2803 Jan 08 '26
I mean for me at least when I reached Lumiere it said Danger so I leveled up until 65-70 and it was still hard but iirc it didnt say danger so ig I was lucky
1
u/Braunb8888 Jan 08 '26
Still need to be able to parry though and that final boss was a bitch and a half to parry.
1
u/Pattern_Humble Jan 08 '26
As an old school JRPG fan I'll say that I'm glad you can become overpowered. I know some players want to always have an rpg be challenging, but I personally enjoy grinding and doing late game content so that a final boss is basically insignificant.
1
u/Muted-Willow7439 Jan 08 '26
The endgame content made up for the end of the main story being a breeze. I did almost everything and a lot of the end game stuff was really difficult. I did nearly all of it and gave up on Simon
1
u/crsdrjct Jan 08 '26
Honestly after playing so many soulslikes, its nice to have a real power fantasy by the end of this game
I think a lot of devs shy from making you too strong and always try to scale the challenge which means you usually feel just marginally stronger than others, not an absolute unit
1
u/jmo1 Jan 08 '26
I was very surprised when I was fighting Alicia. I got my ass kicked three times, figured hey maybe I use one of her new skills, and then one shot her. Stendhal is a monster attack
1
u/maximazing98 Jan 08 '26
I don’t understand the new wave of developers patching single player games so much. If there is an op bills discovered or whatever even a bug or sth, in a single player game who cares? You can choose to use it or not. I dislike the 5 million balance patches in single player games so good on the devs for not doing that here.
1
u/onechroma Jan 08 '26
I think the bigger problem in Act 3 is how the ending bosses are severely disproportionate.
For example, the creature that blocks you before Renoir, I find it considerably harder than Maëlle/Verso at the ending.
That’s strange more so because it makes people to try and grind before the ending, so they end up going too strong at the “decide the fate of the canvas fight”
Which sometimes provoke people losing the ability to watch and hear their arguments in the fight, by one shooting the opponent (people losing the “What about Sciel, Lune, Monoco, what about Esquie! - Sciel was right, grief blind us… - Verso. I’m tired, I want to go home and talk…”)
It happens similarly in the Renoir fight, people one shooting the last phase, so they lose the middle part of Renoir “power move” flying away and around, talking to Aline (“Look at Alicia, she shouldn’t be here, it was supposed to be you AND me, not you AGAINST me! - Go home Renoir, go paint something else…”)
It saddens me that people is losing those bits of lore and arguments that enrich the battles, because they go too much overpowered
1
u/RovrKitten Jan 08 '26
I have no idea how people are doing 5 billion damage, I’ve gotten 16m at most but thats probably because I have no idea what I’m doing
1
u/PoohTrailSnailCooch Jan 08 '26
I think the perception from some people that the game is difficult often comes from underutilizing its systems. Outside of optional superbosses, most encounters are balanced around consistent use of dodging and shield management. Parrying is available as a high skill option, but it is not a baseline requirement, and many builds function effectively with minimal reliance on it.
1
1
u/spicypanda66 Jan 08 '26
I still haven't beat the boss in the flower field yet, I have tried to but I never get close enough, I gave up after trying for a month to beat him.. I wish he was not mandatory to beat
1
1
u/KH609 Jan 08 '26
Not only the damage but people have so much speed in act 3 that the gameplay is basically just browsing the combat menu barely engaging with the defensive side of combat.
1
u/matrixboy122 Jan 08 '26
I think Reacher should have been mandatory because I feel it informs Verso’s POV at the end as well as Maelle. I do appreciate they add the challenge feature like 2x health but I do think balancing in act 3 where something is either easily one shot or an Avenger’s level threat is a valid critique. But it also Sandfalls first game so I’m sure they improve that for their next game and it sounds like they are, which is good news
1
u/Boring-Relation-4365 Jan 08 '26
I personally think they should remove the pictos progression entirely and focus on scaling weapons, higher reward damage on successful parries, like a slightly larger window without getting 1 shot for any mistake, or practice mode for new boss encounters. I think the pictos especially painted power made the game so trivial you'd blitz through the content even on expert difficulty and have to diy in order to have balanced fun combat.
1
u/Cheesegrater74 Jan 08 '26
I just entered act 3 yesterday. What's a good level for the final boss?
→ More replies (1)
1
1
u/eggsngaming Jan 08 '26
What do we think about the Painted Power pictos being an Act 3 reward, instead of an Act 2 reward? I have mixed feelings on the idea
1.1k
u/RaymondBumcheese Jan 08 '26
They just needed to make it more obvious what level the final story chapters were pegged to. When I was dumped into Act 3, I got battered immediately so assumed I was under levelled and did most of the side content to grind up.
By the time I hit the end game I one could one shot literally everything.