The following contains story spoilers for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 boasts one of gaming’s most original stories in recent memory, and the cherry on its luscious cupcake is that it also features rich, thrilling gameplay that continues to evolve with various party compositions, skills, and pictos. Like any turn-based JRPG worth its salt, Sandfall’s JRPG-inspired FRPG has a terrific cast of playable characters to compose parties of three out of, though certain scripted instances select players’ parties for them and sometimes restrict them to one or two characters.
Not counting Esquie as he appears in players’ party screens but not turn-based combat, Clair Obscur: Expedition’s full playable party includes Gustave/Verso (the former is playable in the prologue and Act 1 before he’s abruptly replaced by the latter for Act 2 and Act 3), Lune, Maelle, Sciel, and Monoco.
It’s not easy to overstate how immensely elaborate each character’s gameplay is in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, as if each is imbued by a completely separate and thorough gameplay system between them. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is proof of how cinematic, engaging, and strategic spell-or magic-based combat can be in a turn-based setting via Lune’s Stains and Sciel’s Foretell, and such mechanics make a strong argument for turn-based gameplay to be considered in a Harry Potter game, let alone what would need to be a particularly unconventional Hogwarts Legacy sequel.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 May Have More in Common with Alan Wake Than It Originally Seems
Clair Obscur: Expedition teases an elaborate world players haven't yet seen, and in that tease lies the possibility for a comparison to Alan Wake.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s Lune is More Than a Mere Mage Archetype
Lune is the first Expedition 33 party member to join Gustave on the mainland and it’d be easy to pigeonhole her as a ubiquitous elemental mage archetype if not for how Sandfall revitalizes that class’ preconceived biases with what the game calls ‘Stains.’ Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s Lune casts fire, ice, earth, and lightning elements, sure. But, with each spell cast, Lune generates up to four Stains—fire, ice, earth, lightning, light, and dark—that she can then imbue subsequent casts with.
Therefore, a meticulous Lune build will accommodate for how much AP she can spend on any given turn, how many Stains she can generate from any given ability, and how many spells she can cast with the optimal amount of damage or enhancements via Stain consumption.
Like all of Expedition 33’s party members, Lune is a fine wine whose abilities and strategies only become clearer and more in-depth as players equip more pictos, lumina, and skills. Harry Potter’s magic hasn’t ever restricted itself to the elements like Lune’s is, but an ability economy akin to her Stains in a Harry Potter or Hogwarts Legacy game could be far more gratifying than cooldowns.
Of course, this would require a wholesale restructuring of Hogwarts Legacy’s open-world action-RPG combat, and in doing so it’d probably have to become turn-based like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. This wouldn’t be all too alarming, though, especially if it also adopted Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s parry and dodge mechanics, which make the game’s combat relentlessly biting and interactive and has earned it its own loose comparisons to challenging Soulslike games.
Hogwarts Legacy has a Protego/Stupefy counter/parry as well as a somersault and an Ancient Magic dodge, meaning it’s already met Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s combat halfway.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s Sciel is a Window into Harry Potter’s Divination
Forgoing tea leaves and teacup omens, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s Sciel relies on Sun and Moon charges in her thrown deck of mystical cards with some spells applying Foretell onto enemies and others consuming that Foretell to enhance the ability. A phase dubbed ‘Twilight’ is automatically activated once players have at least one Sun and Moon charge that lasts for two turns and attributes Sciel’s abilities with the following buffs (amplified further via additional means):
- +50% damage minimum
- x2 Foretell applied
- x2 max Foretell
Sciel is the first new party member whose abilities are largely self-servicing. Furthermore, Sciel has the misfortune of being the first new party member players recruit who must take someone else’s place if she’s to be wielded in combat, meaning players have the difficult decision to make of whether they’ll swap someone out for her.
Still, Sciel is undoubtedly worth a try as her unique playstyle can be highly rewarding, especially if players are willing to indulge in her high-risk, high-reward characteristics with the Roulette picto. It might be a bit too thin of a stretch to imagine despite any amount of hypothesis, but if Avalanche wanted to keep Hogwarts Legacy’s wand-dueling combat intact it could potentially debut something similar to Foretell.
Harry Potter’s magic is fairly leashed in terms of how characters engage in combat, at least in the Scottish Highlands, where magic is cast with wands and spells are quite rigid in what magic is known or practiced. That said, Harry Potter’s Hogwarts does teach a Divination class, dabbling even ephemerally in fortune-telling.
Sciel dabbles heavily in the Dark element, and if Hogwarts Legacy had anything like her Foretell magic it’d be neat to see how it and dark magic could intertwine in gameplay; perhaps players could learn to see fragments of their future at the cost of their sanity, for instance, or maybe Divination could be employed as a way to tap into dark magic.
If Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 found a way to saliently represent such arts in gameplay, it would be phenomenal if Hogwarts Legacy sequel could do the same and weave Divination into combat somehow. Either way, the novel way Clair Obscur approaches magic and fantasy should be lauded and would be a boon in countless other game IPs or genres.
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 92 /100 Critics Rec: 97%
- Released
- April 24, 2025
- ESRB
- Mature 17+ / Blood and Gore, Strong Language, Suggestive Themes, Violence
- Developer(s)
- Sandfall Interactive
- Publisher(s)
- Kepler Interactive
WHERE TO PLAY
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 5
- Number of Players
- Single-player
- Steam Deck Compatibility
- Playable
- PC Release Date
- April 24, 2025
- Xbox Series X|S Release Date
- April 24, 2025
- PS5 Release Date
- April 24, 2025
- Genre(s)
- Turn-Based RPG, JRPG, Fantasy
- Platform(s)
- PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, PC
- OpenCritic Rating
- Mighty
- X|S Optimized
- Yes
- File Size Xbox Series
- 42.33 GB
- Wiki
