The world is beautiful — simply moving around the continent is a pleasurable experience and more than once I caught myself stopping to just look at the scenery — fights are challenging and satisfying; and with the characters’ unique playstyles, the Picto/Lumina system, and the various weapons available, I’m having a blast seeing what combinations I can put together to maximize my team’s strength.

I also found myself really caring about The Expedition itself — figuring out what happened 67 years ago; the backstories (and fates) of Lune, Gustave, Maelle and the rest of the team; and why The Paintress is painting death.

Story Introduction

I honestly often find the story as an afterthought when playing video games. Given the amount of time it takes to get through a game, and the varying games I play, it can be hard to keep track. Expedition 33, though, captivated me. And in order to preserve that for you, I’m going to make sure not to give away any major spoilers.

If you’re completely unaware of the story, though: in this world there’s a giant woman, known as The Paintress, who sits (seemingly weeping) at the base of a sheer face mountain known appropriately as The Monolith.

Annually The Paintress wakes up and writes the next number in a countdown from 100, and on that day everyone that age gets Thanos-snapped (though it appears to be more permanent), in an event they call The Gommage.

And, after The Gommage each year, a group of “Expeditioners” go on a, well, expedition to try to stop The Paintress. It’s been 67 years at this point, people are used to the loss, and have largely given up hope on the idea of any Expeditioners actually succeeding. You play as the 33rd, though, and believe you’re the one’s who will finally get it done.

Combat

Expedition 33 is an expansive RPG with turn-based combat. But you have to still pay attention when it’s not your turn, though — parrying and dodging play a very important role here. Nevrons (which are the primary enemy you encounter; though there’s a couple others) can hit pretty hard. But every attack can be avoided and/or blocked, if you time pressing the button just right.

If you parry all of the enemies strikes in an attack, you’ll do a pretty powerful counter (which can also be leveraged into various benefits, given the Pictos). And if you manage to not get hit in battle at all, you’ll get a 20% XP bonus.

Each enemy also has a Break bar, which when filled will cause a “Break” attack to stun the enemy. I didn’t do much optimizing around breaking, but there’s definitely weapons and Pictos that allow you to do so. It can be a great way to slow down some of the faster enemies and take down the stronger ones, though.

If the enemy does get the best of an Expeditioner, there are remedies. Some characters can heal themselves and/or other members of the party, and some attacks will heal as well. There are also potions that can be used to heal up if someone has taken too much damage, and even ones to revive fallen teammates. Using a potion does count as your turn, though, so use them wisely.

Attacking

Alright, enough about defense. There are 4 different types of attacks: Basic Attacks, Skills, Free Aim Shots, and Gradient Attacks. You’ll primarily be using your Skills in battles, and they do more than just damage your enemies. They can add buffs to your team, or status effects and debuffs to the enemies.

Each skill takes ‘AP’ to use — differing amounts depending on the skill — and free aim shots take 1 AP each time you want to take a shot. In order to replenish your AP, initially you’ll use basic attacks, but as you play though the game, you’ll unlock Pictos and other Skills that can increase the amount each character has each turn.

Gradient attacks unlock around mid-game, have their own separate bar that fills up as you play, and can be powerful ways to turn the battle’s tides back in your favor. On top of that, Gradient attacks don’t count for your turn, so you’re able to attack again after using them. Endgame, there are some awesome Gradient attacks, but I won’t spoil those here.

Skills

Each Expeditioner employs a unique skillset, with varying ways to improve your attacks as you play. Lune (pronounced Lu-Nay), as a mage for example, will create elemental “stains” when she attacks, which then get consumed by other attacks to increase their strength — with stronger attacks becoming available when all and/or all types of stains are available.

Maelle on the other hand, with moves seemingly based in fencing, has different stances she can take. Each stance has different passive effects (like increasing the amount of damage given or decreasing the amount of damage taken) along with more active effects given the skill/attack used (like increasing the amount of burn applied to an enemy if she’s in offensive stance).

Each character has their own skill trees, gaining skill points each time they level up; with the most powerful skills costing up to 10 skill points, and not being available until previous skills are unlocked. The characters’ skills build on each other, too, so you’ve got to pay attention to ensure your skills mesh together well if you want to be able to do the strongest attacks.

Like, it’s wise to use a couple skills in conjunction in order to get Maelle into her Virtuose Stance. That 200% damage increase is no joke. There are several characters you’ll meet along your journey, and each one has a new mechanic to explore, and I’ve been having a ton of fun doing so.

Weapons

On top of their individual moves and skills, there are a bunch of weapons that can be found for each Expiditioner that really enhances their abilities. Keeping with the examples above, Lune uses a floating weapon with 4 spots for her stains. Each weapon is named, but I don’t see anywhere that says what the weapon itself is called (if you know, let me know over on Threads!)

You may find one that will generate a random stain at the beginning of her turn, allowing her to enhance her attacks that much sooner. Or one that will decrease the amount of AP needed for certain skills, allowing her to cast them more frequently. Weapons level up as well, and each one has 3 benefits which unlock at levels 4, 10, and 20.

Along with Skills, The weapons themselves are also elemental, and the enemies have various reactions to different elements. There are certainly weaknesses — like a fire enemy taking extra damage from an ice attack — but that’s not all.

There’s also resistance, where the enemy takes less damage from the attack; nullified, where the enemy takes no damage from the attack; and absorb, where the enemy actually gains health from the attack. It’s definitely something you should pay attention to, it can be frustrating loading up one of your strongest attacks only for the enemy to gain health back when you execute it.

Pictos & Luminas

I’ve mentioned them a couple of times now, but haven’t really delved into them. Pictos are essentially items that grant passive effects to whichever expeditioner has them equipped — each one can only be equipped to one character at a time.

They may grant you more AP at the beginning of your turn, apply burn on free aim shots, make you resistant to certain debuffs, heal you when attacking, and lots lots more. There are tons of them to find, and each time I think I’ve found the highest level/most beneficial Picto, I end up finding another, better one. 60+ hours in and I’m still finding new exciting Pictos.

Luminas give the effects of the Pictos, but without having to be equipped. Luminas can be freely enabled on all characters with no regard as to whether or not another character has it. In order to get the effects of a Picto as a Lumina, you simply have to win 4 battles with the Picto equipped. The only caveat here is that they have to have enough Lumina Points.

Each character will naturally gain Lumina Points as you progress through the game; and you’ll also find “Colour of Lumina” out in the world, which you can use to manually increase a characters Lumina Points. Personally, I chose to evenly distribute my Lumnia Points across all Expeditioners, but I definitely can see a scenario where you put all of them into one character and make them, just, bananas strong. Maybe I’ll give that a shot in NG+.

No Armory Here, Unfortunately

A pretty gaping oversight with all of this is the fact that they don’t have a way to save builds or loadouts. It can be pretty disappointing to have a great setup, but want to try something else, and having no way to quickly change back. Or, given the elemental aspects, you may want to save a specific “fire” or “ice” build in order to target particular weaknesses. But alas, you’re not able to do that here. Hopefully, they fix that with an update.

Attributes

In addition to earning Skill Points when you level up, you also earn Attribute points. These are used to increase your base stats, of which there’s 5:

• Health – How large your health bar is
• Attack Power – How hard your attacks hit
• Speed – Chance to attack more often
• Defense – The game says this is a resistance to attacks, but I’m not 100% sure how it actually comes into play or how it differs from Health
• Luck – Crit chance

You’re able to apply your attribute points to these relatively freely, except they don’t always increase the the stat they’re coordinated with. Sometimes increasing Luck will increase your Speed instead of Crit chance, or increasing Defense will increase Attack Power.

You kind of get used to the pattern, but it was somewhat frustrating when I was specifically trying not to increase one characters speed and it would increase anyway.

All in all, though, between the Skills, Weapons, and Pictos/Luminas, I’ve been having a blast mix-and-matching different combinations; and trying to figure out how to make each Expeditioners’ skills work in tandem with one another in order to make the strongest team possible.

The Continent

This next part you don’t encounter until several hours into the game, and I was quite surprised when I found out. I wouldn’t call it a major spoiler, but it did give me a “holy shit” moment where I realized the game is a lot different than my original impression.

The world of Expedition 33 is beautiful, though I wish I could get 60fps in “Graphics” mode. The atmosphere is a lot more flat in “Performance” mode, but the frames are necessary for those smooth dodges and parries.

I went in with zero expectation, and as I played through it seemed like it would be a rather straight-forward, linear game; with some side areas to explore. But I was way off. After a while, though, you’ll leave the first area and you’ll find yourself on “The Continent”.

Here, the view is much more zoomed out (think Diablo), and you’re kind of moving across the world — between areas — rather than within it. There’s definitely still secrets to find “on” The Continent. And, while they don’t pursue you, there’s enemies here as well (in fact, some of the strongest ones).

But when you get to a new area you want to explore, you “enter” it, the perspective zooms back in, enemies pursue you, and you’re now “in” the area. It’s kind of hard to explain textually, check this out:

Side Areas

I played through the entire storyline, and realized I experienced only about half of the game. I did a decent amount of exploring, but kept coming across areas that were way too strong — I figured either I’d have a reason to revisit those areas later, or they were designed to be explored in New Game+.

Before I committed to NG+, though, I did some digging. It turns out that the enemies scale as well, so they likely are meant to be explored within a single playthrough. And a way to reveal hidden items and areas doesn’t carry over; which, again, gave me pause in restarting.

Going back and exploring the areas has been a blast, though. I’m loving the Gestral beaches, struggling to beat the minigames and complete the platforming sections. It’s been unreal unearthing unique universes (like the underwater world that’s not exactly under water). And finding hidden enemies has been great. I can almost predict where I’m going to see a mime now.

Powerful Enemies dot the continent

And a lot, as a level 60+ and having beat the story, I’m still struggling with. My initial plan was to do the story restart with all of my upgrades. But slowly it’s become to explore the world on this playthrough, get as strong as I can, and see if I can finally take down, hell, Sprong for starters.

The scale of the enemies can be incredible, too. With some of them being mountain-sized monsters towering over you. When the battle starts, though, the tend to shrink some to a more “manageable” size. It’s still pretty amazing sometimes feeling bug-sized when fighting these beasts.

While life on The Continent is bleak, not everything is out to kill you

There are several Gestrals around the world, largely acting as merchants, that you can interact with and buy powerful items from. They also love a good fight, so defeat them in a battle and you can unlock the ability to buy something even better.

They also offer welcome reprieves from nigh endless battles, with the aforementioned Gestral Beaches. Instead of a fight, these areas have challenges; like a parrying challenge to test your timing and reflexes, or even an obstacle course. One may even tag along.

That said…

Given the size of the world, and the various side areas, there’s very little in the way of a map. You really have to rely on your memory trying to explore an entire area. There’s not even a checklist to show whether or not you’ve completed/found everything in an area. It’s quite frustrating.

I spent a ton of time running around the [frozen area], backtracking a couple of times ensuring I found everything. One of the friendly Grandis in Monoco Station needed a [frozen flame?] to “increase my defense”, and I wanted that done. I couldn’t find anything new, so I figured I found the item; I just needed to go and talk to the big guy.

When I did, though, I hadn’t found the item yet. I looked it up an discovered an area I could access by taking the handholds in a different direction that what was obvious. Which is fine, but it might literally be the only place in the game where the handholds fork, so it’s not like it’s something I was looking out for. And without a checklist or anything, it felt like a waste of time having to go back and forth to figure it out.

Tomorrow Comes

Like I mentioned at the beginning of this, I’ve really been enjoying getting to know these characters and figure out just what exactly is going on in the world. Even sitting around the campsite, chatting with the characters, and the stories and secrets that are revealed within, has been a pleasurable experience. Don’t sleep on it, you never know what you might be missing out on.

Overall, though, I can see why this won so many game of the year awards. I’m approaching my 70th hour, and have no plans of stopping soon. The Dark Matter grind can wait.

Thanks for reading! If there’s enough interest, maybe I’ll stream some NG+ gameplay or something in the future. Let me know over on Threads or on YouTube if that’s something you might be interested in. And don’t forget to check back often for more awesome gaming content!

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