Expedition 33 presents a post-apocalyptic world where a monster known as the Paintress has painted a number on a huge monolith; every year the number goes down by 1, and everyone older that number dies instantly. Every year people send out expeditions to find and kill the Paintress, but none have succeeded or even come back. I was intrigued by this premise for its similarity to Final Fantasy X, the best Final Fantasy, as well as the promise of an older cast, as this sort of setup is usually an excuse to create a cast of sexy 20-year-olds (or teenagers).

It was a profound disappointment. I’m used to being disappointed these days, but this still impressed me with just how bad it was.

Let’s talk about gameplay first. The battle UI takes clear inspiration from Persona 5: battle commands are mapped to face buttons, plus an option to use guns. However, they go a step further and also map skills to face buttons, which I like significantly less. Since you can freely re-order your skills the buttons don’t have strict functions like they do for the main menu, so you can’t build up muscle memory; furthermore, you can equip up to two sets of skills that you have to switch between with another button, which just adds needless friction and tedium to a basic action. Selecting a skill in this game takes so much more mental energy than just selecting it from a menu would be. I don’t know why they did it this way.

Battles place a big emphasis on action commands, but they implement them in a way that I hate: You press the button in time with these awkward UI popups that have nothing to do with the animation of the skill. Not only does this remove all challenge because these QTEs all have the exact same timing and tell you exactly when to react, it means I can’t even appreciate the pretty skill animations because all my attention is focused on these popups. Just to give you an idea of how jarring this is, the protagonist’s basic attack skill is a three-hit combo with two QTEs, neither of which line up with any one of the hits of his combo. I can’t comprehend why on Earth they did it this way. The thing I loved about action commands in the Mario RPGs was in how they forced you to pay attention to the attack itself and react in time with the characters’ movements; that both makes you appreciate the animations more and sends you into a nice flow state as you feel in tune with the characters. (Even Final Fantasy X at least separated the QTEs and the animations so you could focus on each individually.) I feel like if a game from 2003 did something better than you, you need to rethink some things. What’s even weirder is that defensive action commands do work based on the actual animations like in the Mario RPGs, which, I mean, I’m not complaining, but it is weird that the game uses two different systems like that.

(It doesn’t help that the game stutters badly for me even on the lowest graphics settings because the designers thought it necessary to model every single strand of hair, which is obviously hell on timing-based gameplay. We don’t need to see every strand of hair, it doesn’t even look good, please have mercy on our hardware.)

Furthermore, battles have the typical RPG problem of feeling very samey. I would rather have had half the battles with twice the complexity. As it is, there were way too many brainless battles I beat exactly the same way. This is exacerbated by the game’s cinematic presentation, which drags everything out with long, fancy animations.

The game also uses a point-build system for every character, which… why. I know a lot of people complain about jRPGs giving you no control over your characters’ development, but I actually like it because it gives them a distinct identity. Let us customize the main character, sure, but I don’t feel the need to min-max everyone. In this case I just made everyone the same anyway; since it’s possible (and in fact fairly easy) to completely negate damage, I saw no point in upgrading defensive stats and just pumped everyone’s attack instead.

As for the the plot… well.

We open with a fridging: The main character’s girlfriend is 34, so she dies when the number ticks down to 33. In the process we learn that people die by dissolving into flower petals, which, sure. The next day we prepare for the expedition, which involves an incredibly tortured attempt at immersive exposition where we’re given a quiz about what to these characters is basic historical knowledge, complete with the main character saying after every question “Why are you asking me this, we learned this when we were babies.” From this, we learn that only the first expedition had any survivors, yet everyone is still certain that every expedition is making progress and this totally isn’t a hopeless suicide mission.

Then the moment the expedition starts, they encounter an old guy with godlike powers who slaughters everyone (including the few black guys, who the previous scene makes you think will be important characters).

You would think, at this point, the obvious course of action would be to go back to the village and tell people, hey, the expeditions have not in fact been making any progress because there’s an old guy who kills everyone the moment they touch down and we need to rethink our strategy. This obvious thought for some reason never occurs to any of the characters. There is one scene where the protagonist says they should give up, but he’s only called a coward instead of anyone recognizing that falling back to regroup is in fact the most logical choice in this scenario. Everyone acts as if their only option is to keep moving forward into the unknown despite having lost almost all their manpower and knowing this place is far more deadly than they expected, and I don’t know why. This despite everyone repeatedly stating that they don’t expect to survive and are trying to leave information for those who come after, just not in any useful way apparently! (You do find journals from previous expeditions scattered around, but they’re almost entirely useless and mostly consist of attempts to turn their horrible deaths into jokes because what is tone.)

They could have gone some way towards fixing this if it took most of the year just to get to the mainland so there really is no going back for them… but even then, one of the other survivors turns out to be the protagonist’s daughter “sister” (so we didn’t completely escape having teenagers in our cast), so she could absolutely survive a return trip. Gustave repeatedly tells her to run if anything gets dangerous because he wants her to survive at all costs, but he never seems to think ahead to the next step of what she’s supposed to do once she’s alone in this deadly environment.

Moreover, we immediately run into severe ludonarrative dissonance, because once we’re able to fight the monsters outside of a cutscene I defeat them effortlessly because they’re tutorial enemies. This makes it really hard to gauge how dangerous this place is actually supposed to be, because we whiplash between steamrolling enemies in gameplay and everyone insisting the monsters are unstoppable in cutscenes.

Anyway, we quickly discover the environment is a bizarre dreamlike world where gravity appears to be optional and the landscape is littered with weird statues. No one comments on this, ever. I kept hoping for flavor text if I interacted with stuff, but nope, the characters find none of this worth comment — this despite having established both that this place is extremely deadly and that they have no idea how anything works. The enemies you fight even look like several of the weird statues, but no one ever think that maybe we should smash the seemingly inert ones just in case. In cutscenes the characters repeatedly insist they’re trying to clear the path for the expeditions who come after them, but they never actually do so! (It’s also literally impossible to do so, because the game uses a Dark Souls-esque system where enemies respawn every time you rest.)

The dissonance between the environment and the writing is just so surreal. You can have a dreamlike environment where nothing makes sense or you can have incurious protagonists who refuse to comment on anything, but you cannot have both. It might have been possible to thread the needle if the other expeditions did send information back so the characters have at least some idea of what is and isn’t normal, but we’re explicitly told the exact opposite. It’s especially frustrating because this is such a bizarre fantasy setting that the player has no idea what’s supposed to be abnormal either. This could be explained as “The Paintress just makes weird stuff that doesn’t make sense, don’t think about it too hard,” but we don’t even get that! We get no lore, no flavor text, no information whatsoever.

To give you an idea of just how trippy this is, the first area we explore after the starting zone is an area that’s seemingly underwater but fully breathable and filled with child-like monsters holding sea mines like balloons. Immediately upon entering, we’re told this is the landing site of an earlier expedition whose boat was wrecked by a storm, and we confirm this by finding their actual boat, which is shattered and floating in the air like a sinking ship. Along the way, we find buildings and even specific newspapers from their hometown. Is this, perhaps, showing that this world is a symbolic representation of their death? Is this place in fact the afterlife and we’re all just ghosts? Nah, it doesn’t mean anything. The characters themselves refuse to even consider this is weird; their only reaction is, “Clearly, they got here fine!”

Then the moment the plot moves an inch, we’re suddenly sidetracked by a wacky sidequest village full of immortal childlike fairies because what is tonal consistency. You might think the fact they’re immortal would be relevant to this story about death and mortality, or at least brook comment from the characters? Nope! In fact there are several points where they wonder how the fairies have survived so long when they’re so stupid, even after talking to the NPCs that explain their immortality. After that we’re directed to yet another wacky childlike fairy who sends us on a stupid fetch quest, and the protagonists are inexplicably fine with this because it’s not like they’re on a time limit or anything! This quest also involves the protagonists goofing off and getting in on the wackiness, because it’s not like they just watched all their friends die or anything. What is tonal consistency!!!

And just to add to the whiplash, there are also random mimes scattered around (I presume because the devs want to remind you they’re French) who are inexplicably the hardest enemies in the game yet look nothing like the other monsters. Why are they here? Why does no one comment on them? This is presented as a serious story where we’re supposed to be wondering what’s going on, but it’s also filled with random noise with no significance to anything.

After that I quit, because it was clear this was not going to get any better. It feels like the developers just grabbed random tropes from Final Fantasy, such as the village of quirky mascots, without any consideration for whether they fit with their incredibly dark story.

Honestly, the gameplay doesn’t make any sense with the story either: Unlike Final Fantasy X, it uses a typical RPG game world with an overworld you can freely explore in any direction to find random sidequests, which makes absolutely no sense for these characters to do. They are the sole survivors of an expedition to stop a monster that is killing tons of people and they have less than a year to live, they should not be wasting time on fetch quests or risking their lives fighting optional superbosses! It’s also really jarring how toothless the gameplay is compared to the serious grimdark story; as per usual, characters who hit 0 HP are just safely knocked out. The characters keep reiterating “When one falls, we continue,” except no, when one falls you just pop a smelling salt and they’re fine. Not even game overs carry any threat, because you’re allowed to retry battles as much as you like with no penalty. A roguelike format like Darkest Dungeon would have fit much better with the tone than a jRPG.

So I read a plot summary to see where it was going with all this, and the big reveal is it was all a dream, followed by “Should you commit genocide to help a single family? It’s such a hard choice.” Yes, really. Millions of dollars of budget and dozens of hours of gameplay just for that. I guess that’s why no one is allowed to investigate or comment on any of the weird stuff, the writers knew it didn’t actually matter. What absolute creatively bankrupt hacks.