Expedition 33

Image Credit: Sandfall Interactive

So I recently played Expedition 33 for the first time. This was a game that just passed me by last year when it came out, and I didn’t have a good chance to play it until now. Upon seeing its initial, near-universal praise upon release, I was surprised. Then after watching it basically sweep the 2025 Game Awards, I was starting to get skeptical. “Surely,” I said to myself. “Surely there’s no way that this game is as good as everyone says it is.”

Having finally played it, this is my conclusion: Expedition 33 is a fantastic game if you don’t play a lot of RPGs.

Throughout my playthrough of Expedition 33, I was trying to drown out the noise of this game. I was trying to ignore all of the praise, the awards and accolades. But that whole time, I just couldn’t shut that voice up in the back of my head saying “This is what swept the Game Awards? This is what people were losing their minds over? This is the ‘savior’ of RPGs?” I felt like Peter Griffin in that scene from Family Guy where he tells his family that he didn’t like The Godfather.

Today I want to just explain myself. I want to talk about what did and didn’t work for me. And I also want to recommend other RPGs for you to try if you liked Expedition 33. Because as you’ll learn from reading this, there are actually a lot of other RPGs that are similar to Expedition 33, and I think that they do it a lot better.

And as always, these opinions are my own. What I’m going to say in this article is not a reflection of HGO as a whole. In fact, my co-hosts (Hunter and Ethan) both really love this game. On their year end lists, Hunter ranked it #2, while Ethan had it at #1. So clearly I’m the weird one of the trio here.

Also, I want to make it clear that this isn’t a rant, or a hitpiece about this game. I’m not here to tell you that the thing you like is actually bad. I think that this is a well made game. I just want to share my thoughts and opinions about my experience with this game. Maybe you’ll agree. Maybe you won’t. I simply want to expand your mind and show you that there are other games that did what E33 did, but better in some regards.

The Combat

Image Credit: Sandfall Interactive

I’m just gonna be up front with all of you. I didn’t enjoy Expedition 33’s combat. It isn’t as strategic or thoughtful as I like my RPGs to be. First of all, your team composition really doesn’t matter. You can only field three of your five party members at once, and for the most part, it all feels like they’re playing their own game.

Each party member has different mechanics attached to them to try and make them feel unique. Maelle has these three stances that she can switch to by using different skills. Verso has a Devil May Cry style meter that gives him additional bonuses on his Skills. And while that sounds cool, it largely doesn’t matter, or really make that much of an impact on a battle.

It also doesn’t matter which three characters you bring into a battle with you. Because your party members all have their own gimmicks attached to them, there’s no synergy between them. What do I mean by synergy? In a game like Persona 5, you build your team around what weaknesses your enemies have so that you can knock them down and build Baton Pass chains to get increased damage. Or in Chrono Trigger how you’d build your team around what Dual and Triple Techs your party members have with each other.

Meanwhile, what synergy is there in E33? Gustave has a move that Marks the opponent and Maelle has a move that does increased damage to Marked enemies. It’s pretty limp as far as synergy goes. Not to mention that the Mark goes away when an enemy is attacked (including from parries), so Maelle may not even get the chance to take advantage of it.

Boss fight design is also really lame. RPG bosses are meant to flex the chops of the fight designers, and can be some of the most memorable parts of the game. Every fight boils down to “hit it really hard”. You don’t need to care about your team comp. Just out DPS the boss. Going back to Chrono Trigger, one of the most memorable fights in that game was the fight with Magus. Not only was it built up throughout the game, but the fight requires a lot of planning from the player. 

Magus’s gimmick is that his weakness constantly shifts between the game’s four elements: Fire, Water, Lightning, and Dark. In Chrono Trigger you can only bring 3 party members at a time, so you’re always going to be missing one of his weaknesses. It all boils down to what you as a player think would be helpful. Chrono is locked into your party, so it’s up to you to decide what else you want. You may want to bring Frog because thematically this is his fight, and he covers Water. Robo has access to Dark, and he has a good party-wide heal Dual Tech with Chrono. Lucca has the highest Magic stat of all your characters, so she’s a compelling DPS option. And Marle is your Red Mage with access to Water and Healing magic, but you may not want her if you’re already bringing Frog with you.

Another example is Shadow Kanji in Persona 4. In that fight you have the main target (Shadow Kanji) and his two add-ons (Nice Guy and Tough Guy). Nice Guy acts as support, providing healing and buffs to the other two targets. Meanwhile Tough Guy is another source of damage in the fight. So the question then becomes which add-on do you take out first? Well that comes down to what you think is more pressing. Nice Guy doesn’t do damage, but his buffs will make the other two do more damage, or make your team do less damage with his Defense buffs.

Expedition 33 doesn’t make the player ask these questions. The game never makes you stop and examine a situation. When a boss brings in an add-on, it’s usually just another enemy from the area you’ve already been beating. It doesn’t ask you to decide which target is more important. It’s just giving you another thing to parry because the parry sound activates your brain’s dopamine receptors! And as far as boss design goes, it’s just longer attack strings from the bosses with increasingly bullshit delays and fake outs. But the general strategy from the player doesn’t change.

Going back to the individual characters, it really doesn’t matter what each characters’ gimmick is. It doesn’t matter what benefits Maelle’s stances give her, or what Sciel’s tarot cards do to enemies. I never even bothered to use Monoco because I didn’t want to learn another gimmick. None of this matters because every character has an option available to them that just breaks the game in half. Parries.

The parry system breaks this game in half. This is a one-size-fits-all, it goes in the square hole option that just completely destroys the balance of combat and heavily skews it in your favor. So when it’s the enemy’s turn and they attack you, you’re presented with the option to either dodge the attack, dealing no damage. Or you can parry it and deal a massive retaliation attack.

Parries do literally everything in this game. They negate all damage to your characters. They deal huge damage back to the enemy. They restore your character’s AP, letting them spam more of their powerful skills. And they really aren’t that hard to do after seeing them a couple of times. You’ll get tripped up once, then never again. Plus, there’s no penalty for dying in a fight beyond going back to the start of the fight. It’s more of an inconvenience than a penalty. So you have an infinite amount of attempts to learn the bosses patterns to about 90% mastery. Which the game incentivizes because you get bonus EXP if you win a fight without taking damage.

When you level up, you’re also given bonus points that you can allocate into stats, but there’s no reason to increase your defensive stats (HP and Defense) because parrying nulls damage anyways! You’re better off just pumping each character’s Attack and Agility stats because more damage and more turns are good.

“Oh, well if the parry is so OP, just don’t use it.” First of all, that’s not an argument. It’s not the player’s job to balance the game for the designers. Second, this is the core mechanic that the game is designed around. Yeah you can dodge the attack, but besides the larger window for success, there’s really no benefit. Yes you’re still taking no damage, but you don’t get any AP back, and you’re not dealing damage back to the boss. The risk/reward is so far skewed in favor of parries. And once you get used to the weird, unnatural delays that bosses will throw onto their attacks, they aren’t difficult.

I also would’ve liked to see your regular attacks be useful in any way at all. In a game that’s trying to do Paper Mario style action commands on character skills, it's a little disappointing that there’s just nothing on your basic attacks. It makes the regular attack just feel like filler in the rare case that you don’t have AP for a skill.

Lifting something like the Addition system from Legend of Dragoon would’ve been really cool. If you aren’t familiar, Legend of Dragoon has a combo system called Additions where you have to time X button presses to keep the combo going, but if you mistime the press, your turn just ends. Certain enemies can also interrupt your Additions, so you need to press Circle to counter them. It’s a cool back and forth, and keeps the player engaged in fights. And having something like that in E33 would’ve been a cool way to balance parries, since now both parties would have access to the mechanic.

So yeah. On the whole, I didn’t really care for the combat. And by the end of Act 1, you’ve seen everything that the game has on offer. Unless you really care about bosses getting longer and longer attack patterns for you to memorize because that’s what difficulty is! Though I did have a good laugh in Act 2 when the game added Gradient Parries to your repertoire. These are functionally the same as regular parries, but the screen turns grayscale and the enemy slows down, further screwing up your internal clock on when you’re meant to press the button.

The Story

Image Credit: Sandfall Interactive

Now onto the story. This is where things may start to get dicey for some people. The story is good, but it’s not for me. I’m really just not a fan of these overtly depressing stories where all of your characters are doomed by the narrative. It’s really just not what I’m ever in the mood for. The game’s prologue does a very good job of setting the tone and selling the stakes. But also watching a bunch of people that I don’t know dying doesn’t do anything for me. Especially when I’ve been playing the game for half an hour.

Every cutscene in this game just feels like it drags on and on about how sad everyone is. Then you have the obnoxious sad music with the sad chanting blarbing in your ears that’s about as subtle as a wet fart in church. Like someone’s just constantly bashing you over the head with a metal chair going “ARE YOU SAD YET? LISTEN TO THE SAD MUSIC!!! BE SAD, IDIOT!!!!” It all got to the point where I just got tired of the game’s writing as a whole.

And continuing to be up front with you all, I didn’t do any side stuff in this game. I followed the main path from start to finish. So when I say this next sentence, know that I’m basing my statement off of that. Alright, now that we’re all on the same page. The characters in your party are boring as hell!

I liked the dynamic that Gustave and Maelle had. It was a fun father/daughter, brother/sister hybrid dynamic. Even though they aren’t biologically related, they still see each other as family. And then Gustave dies and the only good dynamic is broken up. They try to replicate that with Maelle and Verso, but I just didn’t buy into it like I did with Gustave.

And then you have your other three party members, and they’re barely worth talking about. Lune, Sciel, and Monoco could easily have been replaced with any other background character, and very little would change. Lune and Sciel exist to comfort Maelle when she gets sad. And Monoco is here because… Because! I really don’t know. He’s one of Verso’s friends and he just tags along for fun.

No, what I really want to talk about is the two endings, and how they fumbled the ball at the 1-Yard line. I don’t know why this game even had multiple endings, but I think that they’re both bad for different reasons, and really left a sour taste in my mouth. Obviously, spoilers ahead.

So, ending one. Verso’s ending. In this ending we learn that this whole world was just a creation of Verso’s family; the Dessendres. This just feels like such a slap in the face and just retroactively made the whole adventure feel like a waste of time. I get that thematically this is meant to act as a coping mechanism for his mother (The Paintress) to get over the loss of her family. But it just felt bad to watch. And not in an “I feel bad for the characters” way. More in an “I feel like an idiot for even trying to be invested” kind of way.

But then there’s Maelle’s ending. I genuinely think that Maelle’s ending is just bad. Maybe I’m not smart enough to see the genius behind it, but it really feels like it goes against the whole message of the game.

Maelle’s ending has her essentially becoming the new Paintress. She takes Verso’s magic canvas and repaints the world of Lumière. With it, she brings back everyone that died and gets to continue living in her fantasy land where nothing bad will happen anymore. Gustave and his wife are brought back. Verso gets to keep on living. And Maelle basically becomes the God of Lumière. I personally just feel like this spits in the face of the game’s “For those who come after us” message that it had been hammering us with the whole game, since in this world there’s no repercussions now that Maelle can just bring back anyone she wants.

And then to make things worse is that you have the game’s developers coming forward and saying “Oh, there’s no canon ending. Whatever you picked was the ending to the story.” And I’m fine with the idea of there not being a “good” ending. But when your options for endings are “Genocide the Painted World” or “Let Maelle play God as her coping mechanism for being sad”, you might want to think about which ending is the real one. Again, it shouldn’t be the player’s job to fix the game for the developers. This is your story that you wanted to tell. At least have the courtesy to give the players a definitive ending for sitting through your depressing story!

Closing

And that’s my honest thoughts on Expedition 33. And honestly, while I’ve been negative through this whole article, I don’t even think that E33 is a bad game. I’ve just played so many RPGs that did what they tried to do better. I just needed to write my thoughts to try and wash this bad taste out of my mouth.

As for recommendations for other RPGs for you to play if you liked Expedition 33, here’s a few just off the top of my head. First off is Chrono Trigger. It’s a masterpiece, and everyone should play it. It’s on Steam. You don’t have an excuse. Next is Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario: TTYD. Both of those games recently got remade on Switch. Add Legend of Dragoon to the list as well since it’s a turn-based game that’s more action focused, and it’s on PS5. And of course, classic Final Fantasy games. 4-10 are all good candidates for starting points in the series. And if you want another sad game, Mother 3 is a great play. The fan translation is still up and it’s still the only way for us in the Western world to play it, but it’s a very well made translation.

As someone who genuinely loves the RPG genre, it’s sad to me that E33 really only got attention because it “made turn-based combat interesting”. Turn-based combat was already interesting, and you don’t need jingling keys, flashy animations, and cinematic camera spins to find it. For me, the fun of turn-based combat is preparation and on the fly thinking. Expedition 33 trades that for stat pumping and execution checks. Like if Elden Ring was a turn-based game.

I can’t wait for Final Fantasy 17 in 2030 to see how many ideas it poorly implements from this game.