Do the QTEs work like the Mario RPG games? That sounds great.

I love that the origin of this game is basically the developers going "hey, nobody makes turn based JRPGs with high end graphics any more", and they decided to be the change they wanted to see.

> made by a team of 30

Not true. Roughly 500 people worked on the game.

Doesn’t it work on the steam deck straight?

Not op but having played Rebirth, while overall very good, it suffers from the classic case nowadays of adding repetitive "chores" to do around maps, to artificially increase the length of the game with little purpose.

So far (only 6 hours in, but some friends who went further confirmed), Expedition 33 seems to steer away from that, being a lot more story driven.

It also has, by far, the greatest prologue I've seen in a game.

Worse thing so far, the UI in the menu does take a second to get. Particularly the selected state is way too subtle and a bit confusing at first.

No, but that is because I played Remake and thought it was really bad, genuinely one of the worst games I've ever played. As you might imagine I did not drop my cash on the follow-up to a game I hated that much.

Played Remake and put that down after a few hours. The combat was just not appealing; it was packed with filler for anyone who actually played the original FFVII; the VA was just typical JRPG wooden quality. Would rather not invest another $70 for Rebirth.

FFVII Rebirth is perfection. Best battle system ever, great voice acting, great music.

Sure, user reviews are totally useless across the board, not disagreeing with that. My point is that if a game gets exceptionally good critical reviews then a 0 is almost always a hissy fit, not a serious assessment. And often the only thing that is "polarizing" is the game's financial success. (Edit: see my prediction about the game winning awards and seeing its user score knocked down accordingly.)

When Astro Bot won GotY, a bunch of idiots who thought that Black Myth Wukong should have won started review-bombing BG3; since Astro Bot is a PS5-only game and you can't review games on PSN, they decided to go after BG3 since their CEO was the one who presented the GotY award to Astro Bot.

You don't often see people review-bombing games positively that they've never played, so the skew is going to be towards the negative and not the positive.

> If a game sees a bunch of 10s and 0s it means that something in the game is polarizing. The fact that Clair Obscur has such a high rating means it pleased everyone across the board. Nowadays that is quite a feat.

100% this. Clair Obscur, by every metric I can think of, is going absolutely nuts. I find it hard to imagine many upcoming games which might compete with it for GotY.

> If a game sees a bunch of 10s and 0s it means that something in the game is polarizing. The fact that Clair Obscur has such a high rating means it pleased everyone across the board. Nowadays that is quite a feat.

What I suspect has happened is that it is neither "conspicuously woke" nor "conspicuously anti-woke". Probably because it's French. Therefore it has avoided organized review-bombing campaigns, as well as being an extremely good game in a neglected genre.

(re: review bombing, a funny/stupid example of this was when Genshin Impact gave out anniversary freebies that the fandom deemed inadequate. So they started review-bombing it. Google removed the reviews. So they review-bombed https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... instead)

I don't mind if there's meaningful choice that can affect later gameplay, but clicking through lines of dialogue feels like an unnecessary step. (Again, I'm completely open to the response that this is just how it is in this genre, but from a more general audience perspective it feels strange.)

> or a journal/note/description thing for me to read

It's incredibly hard to please everyone. I don't like reading in games, the UX is awful. If I wanted to read I wouldn't have started a game in the first place, I read books not games.

Again, I didn't say it was average and in fact went out of my way to say that I felt like it wasn't average at all but that it was perhaps less groundbreaking than the excitement for it lets on because it appears to share traits with a particular genre that has been neglected for open world games. I also didn't say "derivative" but I would note that, for every feature you're listing as innovative, you're providing an example of where the mechanic can already be found. And, from my perspective that's *perfectly fine*, but it also contextualizes the game as more of a loving homage than genuinely groundbreaking.