I played the PC version over the course of about two weeks starting around December 17, 2025 until January 1, 2026. Article first published on January 2, 2026; addendum added on January 6 2026.
In broad strokes, I think the gameplay had potential but presented with too many glaring flaws that ultimately left a negative impression on me.
I'll start with the out-of-combat gameplay details. Maneuvering in the overworld was fine - the characters controlled well enough for an RPG, the "special movement tech" with things like the grapple points and the light ropes were flashy and cool despite their superfluousness in the gameplay (likely these existed to bridge the gap between what the map artists were doing and what the level designers wanted). There were some issues - the climbing mechanic for example was a bit janky and I occasionally got stuck on a wall for a bit as the input to step off the climbing point wouldn't register. There were also a LOT of invisible walls throughout the world that drove me nuts, as I would frequently see what looked like a path that might have some treasure only to be stopped in my tracks. I also frequently bumped into random objects, rocks, or small protrusions in the ground terrain that would stop my movement for a second until I could navigate around them. These things aren't terribly large issues, in fact I would say that in a JRPG I don't expect perfect overworld/map controls, but they do highlight what I would consider a lack of polish; I'd rather be able to fall off the world or make it part way down an empty path rather than be stopped by an invisible wall.
The Gestral Beaches, however, make me sing a completely different tune about the map controls. Suddenly, the odd movement controls and jank become central to a piece of gameplay. The one based around climbing points with the water balls knocking the player off was probably the most uninteresting of them, but I found both the parkour race and the volleyball minigames to be really fun as they turned two otherwise low-key gameplay mechanics into something totally new. The "getting over it" one was particularly remarkable to me; as I played it, I couldn't help but think of Shadow of the Colossus. In that game, the developers followed a design philosophy called "design by subtraction," in which they stripped away extraneous gameplay mechanics until the game only had what was necessary for the plot and main experience. If that design methodology was applied to Expedition 33, there probably wouldn't even be the ability to jump in the overworld, let alone the ability to complete complex parkour puzzles. In this way, E33 embraces the opposite of design by subtraction: take a mechanic that might otherwise feel superfluous and underdeveloped and work it into the main focus of a challenge. If the controls were more polished, it wouldn't have been nearly as tough as it was, so the fact that the devs made it as challenging as it is shows that they were very aware of how the game felt to control. They chose to embrace it rather than trying to fine-tune an aspect of the game that ultimately wasn't the main focus. I have a lot of respect for this, and that's why the Gestral Beach challenges were some of the highlights of the gameplay experience for me.
Back to gameplay issues, the menuing was also not super well implemented. There were some small details that just felt off the whole time - too many to list, but just for a single example there was an inconsistency in the Pictos equipment menu, how sometimes pressing A on top of a pictos slot would bring you to the left column to select a new Pictos, but then pressing A on the pictos wouldn't swap out the one previously selected and would prompt you to select a new one to replace. I'd frequently run into this while trying to swap out my Pictos and it made what should have been simple swaps just tedious. A similar bug presented itself in the skills equipping menu.
Now to the combat, which I am not a fan of. There were 3 main design flaws I perceived with the combat: one is the poor balance, two is the fundamental simplicity of the dodge/parry mechanic, and three is the way that dodge/parry interacts with the game flow.
First, the balance: The two aspects of this are the damage cap and the dodge/parry mechanic. I think the damage cap could have been interesting if there were more to it than just a hard cap forcing you to balance your play around hitting more times instead of using more powerful individual hits. I don't know if it would have been more interesting or less if it were a per-ability damage cap (i.e. a 3 hit ability has the same 9999 total max damage as a 1 hit ability), but one thing I think that could have really improved this system is if there were a few means of breaking the cap. I found in the mid-game for example that using mark was almost useless because I was hitting damage cap anyway. Similarly, enemy weaknesses and getting crits was often useless for the same reason. If these mechanics had interacted with the damage cap rather than simply butting against it. If a hit with mark could get the 50% buff and do a maximum of 14999 damage, there would still be a reason to interact with the combat system. In practice, it's just put the abilities on your palate that hit X times so the total damage is X times 9999.
Issue two with the balance is how parry warps the rest of the game around it. I figured out pretty early on that dodging is utterly useless as all it does is prevent you from taking damage. Parry prevents the damage, gives you AP, and hits back with massive damage. Parry is supposed to be harder than dodging because the window is smaller, but in practice because of the cooldown and timing of dodge, and the fake-outs that every enemy does, it wasn't actually more reliable to go for dodges. Plus, I found I was late more often than early, and a fundamental flaw of the dodge/parry system is that it's not possible to be late. And even if dodging were more practical, it'd be irrelevant as the opportunity cost in potential AP gain and return damage far outweighs the mere damage avoid that dodging provides. As long as you survive the enemy attack, which wasn't too hard to build around with HP boosting Pictos, they could be healed back up with the basically free healing tints; if they died, you get enough revive tints that that's also not a huge problem.
Plus, because of how strong dodge/parry is, you don't have to think hard about defensive support or healing. This is why mana exists as a mechanic for most games - it puts a cap on how long you can survive, and forces you to balance your build around damage reduction/self healing and the damage you do; you need to win the fight before you run out of mana. I actually tested a strategy out against the Paintress in which I stacked HP and healing/defensive abilities, which let me effectively not engage with the dodge/parry system. I actually thought this was really cool and respected the fact that it was possible. It let me see another angle of the game's design, and was a fun restriction to work around. But after that fight, I went back to parrying everything because it was just stronger and faster.
Issue two is the fundamental shallowness of the parry mechanic. The only parameter that the fight designers can play with is the timing and animations of enemy attacks. The game thus fundamentally becomes a memorization game: either you know the enemy attacks and can nail the timing, or you don't and you get hit. So most boss fights went the same for me: I'd go in blind, get hit a few times and wipe, but I'd learn the parry timing and then get through next try. The bosses with more HP took more tries, because I'd have to learn the later attacks, but fundamentally they all went the same. I've seen a lot of comparisons between this game and soulslike games, but I actually would liken it more to I Wanna Be the Guy - it's just pure memorization. This led to later frustration for me as I never felt like I was actually getting better at E33 in general, rather just at each specific fight. It didn't matter how perfectly I was executing on my successful attempt of the Mask Keeper, none of that was transferrable skill going into Sirine as her timing was completely different.
This is all amplified by how eventually you learn all the mechanics of a boss or overworld enemy, and just have to watch the excessively long wind-up and fake out animation play out until you're finally allowed to press RB and hit the parry. At this point, fighting is only tedious. I can compare it against challenging boss fights in games like Hollow Knight or even WoW raid bosses. In those games, avoiding an attack isn't pure pass/fail; rather there are small micro-optimizations you can make as a player to do things better. In Hollow Knight, for example, I also had to go into fights and get whooped on my first try while I learned all the attack patterns and tells. However even after I got to the point of avoiding all the attacks, I could still further optimize my play to get an extra hit in or find time to heal, I could choose to be more or less aggressive in how I dodge and I could take risks for bigger reward. E33 has none of that - either you parry or you don't.
Lastly, problem 3 is how much the parry mechanic interacts with game flow. As I already mentioned, there's no real reason to dodge when parrying is absurdly more impactful. Parry gives you AP, which lets you do more things on your own turn. There were some fights where, between the amount of AP I got from parrying and the start-of-turn AP gain, I would have 9 AP for every one of my own actions. In principle this is fun as you feel more powerful, but it leads to a few issues: one is, as stated, there's no real reason to go for dodges when parrying gives you this benefit. The other is that so many skills are painfully unbalanced when infinite AP is possible. Fleuret Flurry wasn't balanced around being able to use it every turn, but Maelle only needs to once or twice before her next turn for that to be possible.
To say one nice thing about the combat, I love the "Last Stand of Expedition 33" mechanic. It means that the backline remains useful throughout the game and gives the player more time/opportunity to learn the boss's moveset, partially alleviating the tedium of getting through more difficult bosses. The downside is you have to keep your backline's weapons and Pictos up-to-date, else the "last stand" becomes a waste of time as they won't do enough damage to net you the victory - this just means more time in the menus.
As with the gameplay, the story loves to do fake-outs. Gustave is a main character? A fake out. The paintress is the villain? A fake-out (though for anyone familiar with JRPGs this was obvious). The nature of the gommage? Fake-out. Verso's mysterious identity? Kind of a fake-out. The humans of the world having their own narrative? Believe it or not - fake-out. Some fake-outs and plot twists are expected in this kind of story, however I think that in Expedition 33 they eventually became a detriment to the story.
As with all other aspects of this game, in spite of my issues there were a lot of good moments in the story. Starting with the opening sequence, this was really well done. It nicely set up the relationship between Gustave and Maelle as well as the main conflict between the people of Lumiere and the Paintress. The festival leading up to the gommage and the expedition's departure was a nice nod to Chrono Trigger, inverted in that it's sad and melancholy instead of joyous and exciting. The first major twist was the expedition's landing at the beach and the reveal of the mysterious and powerful Renoir. The typical JRPG outward journey is hopeful and heroic, but here they are instantly met with death and tragedy. It puts some actual stakes on the adventure and is a welcome departure from the blueprint. I also loved the endings, which I'll talk about later.
Unfortuantely, the rest of the story was not as compelling for me. I'd read a lot of comparisons between this and Xenoblade Chronicles 3, which does make sense if you view the Canvas as a take on the "Eternal Now" from that game. But actually, I think a fairer comparison is to Xenoblade Chronicles 1: Maelle is like Shulk in that she's unknowningly an incarnation of a godlike being, loses a loved one (Fiora, Gustave/Sophie) early to a main villain (Egil, Renoir) and goes on a quest for revenge, later it's revealed that that main villain isn't actually the main villain, and then she must defeat the actual main villain who's trying to destroy the world. It's not perfect, but I think if you had to compare the plot of E33 to anything I'd rather XC1 than XC3. In any case, I was really lost by the sudden change in focus away from the people of the world to this clash of what are effectively gods. I think if they had fleshed out the conflict in the real world a little more (between the Painters and Writers) and had managed to weave the humans on the Canvas in with that plotline, I might have been a little more engaged. But as it is, the focus in Act 3 is on the grief of these characters that were completely disjointed from the rest of the story. There wasn't even some dramatic/tragic irony where we, the players, know something that the characters don't, thus making the tragedy of the characters' actions hit harder. The little bit there is connecting Acts 1/2 to the Act 3 story is Maelle's "family is complicated" line, seeing how everyone in real Alicia's family is kind of a horrible person and the only true family she's ever had is Gustave and Sophie.
This is why I liked the endings. I chose Maelle's ending, as ultimately I personally was more attached to the characters of the Canvas and wanted them to live and be happy. That Maelle chose the evil deed of forcing Verso to life, thus mirroring her mother, and ultimately making her lose herself in the canvas just as Aline did, is part of the tragedy. Verso's ending results in the annihilation of everyone inside the canvas and Renoir exerting his will on Alicia and her mother. I think this is just as tragic overall. I like that both endings are unhappy in their own way, it's brave of the writers to let that happen and not give a "true" ending that somehow cleans everything up with a nice bow. It's easy to imagine how that might be possible in an imagined "Renoir" or "Clea" ending (just keep Aline and Alicia away from the Canvas and let everyone there live out their lives in peace), but they didn't do that and I respect it.
One of my particular issues with the post Act 3 plot is that the story became completely decoupled from the gameplay. There was a montage of the party collecting Chroma from dead expeditioners, and I wonder if the developers originally planned on having the player go on this second trip around the world themselves and it didn't make the final cut. Because otherwise, after beating the Paintress the only remaining part of the story that's accompanied by gameplay is fighting through Lumiere and the battle against Renoir. The rest of the "real world" Dessendre's plot is told only through a few cutscenes.
One other point that I don't know where else to put: I think they were trying to trick the player into thinking that humans are reincarnated as nevrons somehow. Between the friendly nevrons that you can do quests for, the Goblu boss in the flower field, and the mystery of what happens to people when they are gommage'd vs dying in an expedition, the writers seemed to be pointing to more there than meets the eye. This was yet another fake-out. I wonder if this was actually an intention that they changed their mind on once they came up with the plot around the Dessendres, but I'm not sure if that can be said one way or another. Ultimately, the problem is that it's a completely inconsequential red herring. It's not something that has the player or the characters guessing one way or the other with a later reveal with a satisfying payoff.
Gustave is of course only present in the party through the end of Act 1, but I think that with this in consideration he was one of the best designed characters. They did a great job of faking the player out about his death, with those locked skills in his skill tree and how he's set up as the leader of the expedition. His story flows very nicely into Act 2 (up until the reveal of the world outside the Canvas and the whiplash in narrative focus that comes with it) - the expedition's "for those who come after" does weave into his character arc quite well, I found the push and pull of his struggle with duty as an expeditioner vs family in his love for Sophie and care for Maelle wonderfully compelling. Earlier, the moment that he nearly shot himself was so raw but believable, and helped me to attach to his character. But also, because of his arc and his actions I felt connected to the rest of the expedition even after his death which set me up to be motivated to continue in Act 2. It's good that he didn't live long enough to become a background character in Maelle's and Verso's story like Lune and Sciel.
Gameplay-wise his "gimmick" was Overcharge, which was simple enough as a tutorial of the game's mechanics. He didn't last long enough for me to have picked up enough Pictos to experiment much with builds, especially as I didn't do much side content. I was excited to see what his unlocks would have been if they weren't just decoys as I think the kit has some potential, I could see a world where the trade-off is between doing more damage against building more charge per AP, which could have been cool against bosses with weak adds or if any had vulnerability phases.
Her gameplay was pretty cool, though I did bench her after getting Sciel and hardly used her after that point. There was one easy gameplay loop I used in the early game that involved just using two abilities that apply 2 stains each, and then finishing off with Mayhem. That left 3 slots open for more supportive abilities or for abilities with more niche purposes, of which she had quite a few of. She had some cool weapons as well, like the ones that reduced elemental ability AP costs (I really liked the lightning one that reduced the basicl lightning spell to 0 AP). That said, I did bench her early on and didn't get to explore too much of her kit.
I liked her character in the first act of the main story, she was a good foil to Gustave and kept the party on track for their mission. In Act 2, the plot shifted in a way that pushed her into the background, though she was still more present than Sciel, being the one to find the journal in Old Lumiere that revealed Verso's relationship to Renoir. I also didn't care much for her personal quest - I probably would have found it relateable 10 years ago, but the specific relationship she has with her parents is a weird thing for a 32 year old to still be hung up on. Lastly, design-wise I thought she was fantastic, probably the best modeled character in the game and her voice actress nailed the performance. I like that she floats to really sell the mage stereotype and her weapons, while simple, are pretty cool designs.
Maelle is a really interesting case as she is in many ways two characters. I have a lot of complaints about post-Act-3 Maelle/Alicia, but I think I really liked her character in the first two acts. There's an aspect of her character in Act 1 that I found really compelling: she had absolutely no idea what she was getting into by joining the expedition, and it being not only not what she expected but also being what took Gustave from her felt like the setup to a character arc that would pay off well later on. It was pretty obvious even midway through Act 1 that she would be either the secret true protagonist or the deuteragonist of the plot, so I was eagerly awaiting to see what would happen. Only to be let down by her personality shift (and the narrative's shift) after regaining her memories as Alicia.
Her gameplay was also majorly flawed in my eyes. Virtuoso stance was simply too powerful. Other than the burn skills on the left side of her tree, I can't imagine a build that isn't centered around using Medallum to start in Virtuoso stance and then only using Fleuret Flurry for damage and Mezzo Forte to stay in virtuoso stance while regaining AP. Throughout Act 2, I never willingly left virtuoso stance, and I only used other skills when required to get back into virtuoso stance (if Maelle was incapacitated and couldn't Fleuret Flurry one turn for whatever reason). In Act 3, I did occasionally use Burning Canvas as burn is quite impactful, and after finishing the game and looking at her one-shot builds centered around Stendahl I can see how those work (though this is still centered around Medallum), but ultimately her kit was just too poorly balanced to feel fun. Unfortunately, I wanted to use her in my party as she was narratively important and her massive damage output was too tempting, but there wasn't really anything fun in her build. This also comes back to how overly centralizing parry is - it was almost a given to always have the AP to use her skills, she just needed to parry once or twice between turns, and because parry prevents all damage taken it wasn't hard to just stick her with the glass cannon Picto/Lumina skill. And with the damage cap, the 3 hits of Fleuret Flurry outscaled her other mid game damage options.
Design-wise I think she was one of the best. Some of her themeing was a bit strange (why Mezzo Forte when she's not themed around music? That feels like a Verso ability), but overall her abilities and animations were flashy and I always think that fencing swords are cool as a main weapon. I liked all her main story costumes, the designers seemed to actually respect the fact that she's a teenage girl (unlike literally any other JRPG design I've ever seen), which I definitely appreciate. Her voice actress also did awesome, I know she also voiced Shadowheart from Baldur's Gate and I think this game proved that she doesn't have the same "can only do one voice" thing that many other VAs have.
I can't speak too much on her gameplay as I benched her after getting Monoco, but up until that point I felt she had the most interesting kit. I was planning on using her as a healer and support as she had some of the most powerful support abilities in the game between the early game access to Rush and later having skills like Intervention. The gimmick of applying and consuming foretell was cool, though the tie-in of sun and moon charges was a little underbaked. There were few situations where you'd ever have moon charges at 0 sun charges since you need to apply foretell before you can consume it, so I think they could have redesigned it (I could see something based on WoW balance druid for example where you shift from sun to moon and abilities gain perks based on which phase you are in, with twilight functioning more like eclipse) - but fundamentally the rest of her kit was interesting enough that the under-bakedness of sun/moon/twilight was no real issue.
Her character was just okay. She didn't have much of a presence in the story even from the beginning, and the few leads they put in the main story that seemed to point at more to her story just had to do with her personal arc instead - here I'm mainly thinking of Esquie mysteriously mentioning her swimming ability after the party recruits him.
There was something uncanny about either her model or her mocap that I found very distracting in cutscenes. I don't know exactly what it is, I think it was just that her facial expressions didn't often match the mood of the scene. I also don't think the casting and voice direction for her was right - the VA had a pleasant voice, but it didn't suit the character model, and she often spoke with these long pauses that are typical of english language dubbing which I hate. Her design is cool overall, I like the scythe weapons especially as well has her theme around cards and fortune telling, thought I don't know how well those fit in with her characterization.
The mysterious stranger that replaces Gustave at the end of Act 1. I was convinced that he was some sort of alternate version of Gustave until partway through Act 2 as the plot twist started to unfold. In a way this is true, and it's probably no coincidence that they look somewhat similar: Gustave is as much Maelle's family as Verso is, so it works out. He was a little too secretive for me throughout the story, and some of the lies he had to tell to keep the twist from revealing were quite ham-fisted by the end. But otherwise, he was pretty cool and worked well enough as a focal character throughout Act 2.
Gameplay wise, I mostly used him with Dualiso going for a free aim/basic attack/support build with huge AP gains through Dualiso and combo attack. It was fun to play as him, as otherwise I'd barely have interacted with free aim. His kit is also the only one that interacts meaningfully with dodge, since for him the lower risk of dodging is sometimes better than going for a parry as he loses perfection on getting hit. His Ascending Assault was cool post Act 3 when the damage cap was no longer an issue as well, so he could do quite respectable damage, though Follow Up was stronger in most one-off situations. He stayed in my party for the whole game from the point that he joined until the ending.
I'm a huge fan of the blue mage archetype, so as soon as I realized what Monoco was about he became my favorite party member. Cooking up with builds for him to have him cycle through the masks and get all the effects I wanted was a lot of fun, though I think he did have AP issues at times. In practice, executing the build wasn't as fun as coming up with it as everything became perfectly cyclical if you wanted the bonus effect from using the correct mask (which you did always want to do as the power differential is enormous). I think he suffered from having only 6 skill slots, thus not being able to have two alternatives for each mask to at least potentially change out of a consistent rotation. One of the other un-fun parts of his gameplay is that he has to be in the party to collect feet - so either you use him right from the get-go, or he becomes unusable because you aren't collecting new abilities for him to use.
His design and characterization was also great, despite being pretty one-note. He's just a crusty old guy who likes fighting, he's been around in the Canvas for a long time, he's got this cyclical father/son relationship with Noco when they each reincarnated which ties into the central theme of Act 3. He's based on Verso's dogq, explaining his loyalty, and he collects feet, i.e. leg bones. So the symbolism is pretty clever.
For the other characters, I didn't care much for anyone outside the main party, Esquie, and Francois. Esquie especially was great, his voice acting was perfect and his design and character were also perfect. I'm not sure what, if anything, that he represents metaphorically, but he was definitely a shining star in the cast for me. I thought him being filled with Verso's wine was kinda silly, and was another ultimately meaningless red herring when he and Verso had the conversation at the start of part 2 implying a major secret, which kind of pissed me off. Outside of these characters, none of the other NPCs really meant much to me. I couldn't sympathize with any of the real or Painted Dessendre's, even real Alicia after Maelle recovered her memories felt like a different character and I no longer was invested in her story. The gestrals were a nice "mascot" type character (obviously meant as this world's take on Moogles or Nopon) and acted as good comic relief, but weren't super memorable to me. The Grandis were also just kind of there for me and didn't do much. I didn't do all the side quests, however, so I can imagine I missed a lot of worldbuilding and characterization.
Last point regarding the characters - there wasn't any combat interaction with the characters' kits, other than potentially burn strats and buffs or effects like mark. I think this might've been a missed opportunity, though it would have made the combat a lot more complicated. The closest we had to this is how one of Verso's weapons gives the damage boost from his Rank to his allies, making him a pure support. Even if it were just something like Chrono Trigger's dual attacks or Xenoblade's chain attacks, but as it is, all of the characters unique mechanics are isolated. I think they had just the perfect amount of interaction with each other in the story. Some games and stories try to balance the screentime all of the inter-party interactions - like modern Fire Emblem games' support conversations - which means A) characters can't develop because it would throw off the characterization in future interactions, and B) that some of the relationships that are inherently shallow result in unserious conversations. I'm glad Expedition 33 didn't do this - there wasn't much for Lune and Monoco to say to each other, for example, so it's actually fine that they didn't have any conversations.
I forgot to include a music section in the first draft. This is probably a metaphor for how uninteresting I found the music to be. Other than the main menu, Paintress fight, and the flying waters combat music, I thought it was all pretty boring and unmemorable. I'm surprised it's as acclaimed as it is.
I want to also point out that I have not read any analyses by other players yet, which I normally do after playing games. I wanted to write this up myself purely based on my own experience with the game. Because of this, I'm sure I have missed a lot of details and some well-portrayed metaphors. For example I'm sure there's some cool analyses on viewing the painted family against the axons as the former were painted by Aline and the latter by Renoir, and thus reflect how they each view their family members. I haven't thought much about this because I wasn't convinced by the overarching plot of the world outside the Canvas.
There were a couple things I didn't think to mention in the first article.
Starting with sound design: I loved the way that this game sounded beyond the music, the actual effect noises were great, combat and weapon sounds were punchy and satisfying, the sounds within menus were great. I did have an issue with two things, both combat related. One is that the audio cues for enemy attacks were woefully inconsistent. There was an aspect of me trying to learn enemy attack patterns where I thought I noticed a pattern to do with the sound effect that plays before an enemy attack lands, and that it might surprisngly be easier to close my eyes on an enemy turn and just try to time my hits with the sound. This worked sometimes, but not always - for most enemies, it was consistent within their kit, but it did not transfer 100% from enemy to enemy. Some enemies had no audio cues, other had audio cues that were a bit ahead of the actual parry timing, some (enemy ranged attacks, mainly) had audio cues that were way ahead of the actual hit timing. I don't think this is necessary a problem but it's just one more layer of thing to learn/memorize and makes the game hard to "sight read" (to lift a term from music).
The second thing I want to mention is a thing of pure praise: the art direction. When Sandfall won art direction, there was some confusion and much derision over the choice: people claimed that the game was just "UE5 slop" and looked like any other AAA gaming title. But I think that's a shallow view of what makes for good art direction. There were specific aesthetic choices made within the game to give it the feel of a hand-painted style, uniting with the narrative to compellingly sell the story to the player. There were also a lot of cool bits with specific scenes, such as how my brother pointed out that the Curator at the campsite, in his little area in the dark with just a single light illuminating him, is just like a clair obscur painting. The nevrons painted by Clea had a different style than the ones painted by Renoir or by Aline (which I only learned from reading other articles and posts about the game, as I didn't do all the side content that revealed the origin of most story nevrons being Clea but others being painted by the parents). I also loved the various attack animations, how for example the effect trails following weapons make the weapon's motion look like a paintbrush, or even the overworld attack used to initiate combat appearing like a messy mix of paint colors being thrown out at the enemy. And lastly, my favorite bit of trivia is just how much the developers used and twisted pre-existing UE5 assets, a very wise decision to better utilize their time in a small-ish team.