It always amazes me when niche games find huge mainstream success. In movies, the summer blockbusters are all predictably the same: crowd pleasers like Tom Cruise action movies,superhero slop, and anything with a talking CGI animal always dominate the box office. But when it comes to games, a lot of the biggest hits are the most unapproachable ones: punishingSoulslikes, 1000-hourD&D campaigns, and French turn-based RPGs with the most unforgiving parry system this side ofSekiro.
I loveClair Obscur: Expedition 33, and I love that so many other people love it too. But I’ve also seen some disappointment. With all the hype and an easy way to try it out thanks to Game Pass, a lot of folks are jumping into Expedition 33 and realizing pretty quickly they don’t have the skills to contend with its surprisingly fast-paced combat. That’s a shame, both because it’s an exceptional game everyone should experience, and because it probably isn’t even your fault that you suck at it.
A Parry Window Thinner Than A Strand Of Hair
For a turn-based game, Expedition 33 is pretty demanding on your reflexes. Timing is baked into every aspect of combat, but even compared to other active turn-based games, Expedition 33 has a lot going on. Depending on an enemy’s attack, you may need to block, parry, jump, or use a more powerful block called a gradient parry. Tougher bad guys will hit you with long combos with different kinds of attacks that all need to be countered with near-perfect timing. Even if you’re a seasoned parrier, this is not an easy game.
In fact, having a lot of experience with fast-paced combat like this might even make things harder. If you play a lot of Soulslikes or other parry-ful games, you’re probably used to a certain window for executing a block. In most games, you have to hit your block either right as the enemies’ attack makes contact, or alittlebit before. In Expedition 33, you’ll fail every parry if you’re even a fraction of a second too early. You have to press it precisely when the attack would hit you, or even a millisecond or twoafter. It’s an extraordinarily tight window that has a different feel from what we’re used to.
Hitting that window is hard, no doubt about it. But because there’s so little room for error, Expedition 33 can expose some technical issues of your gaming setup that might not have anything to do with your timing at all.
Latency, Image Smoothing, And Audio Sync
Even if your timing is perfect, your TV, speakers, or controller could be sabotaging you. If you’re missing your parries and you don’t understand why, or if it just feels like something about the timing is wrong, it may be worth looking into some of these common issues.
A lot of TVs have picture settings that could throw off your timing. One common feature is Image Smoothing, which is an interpolation process that adds frames until the image matches the TV’s native refresh rate. For obvious reasons, you don’t want your TV adding frames that aren’t really there to Expedition 33, so make sure to turn any kind of frame generation features off. If your TV has a game mode, even better. This will ensure you’re seeing things correctly.
Parrying is all about waiting for the exact moment the enemy strikes, but Expedition 33 uses a lot of audio cues to prompt you, too. Once you’ve learned to recognize these cues you could win fights blindfolded (which I’m looking forward to seeing at the next Games Done Quick). That is, unless your audio is out of sync.
There are a lot of reasons this might be happening, depending on your setup. Bluetooth soundbars are notorious for creating sound sync issues, but even something as simple as a bad HDMI cable can create problems. If you think your problem is audio related, try using TV sound instead of a speaker, or connecting your speaker to your TV with a fiber optic cable instead of Bluetooth.
Many rhythm games have an audio sync adjuster for this very reason. It would be great if Sandfall could add one to Expedition 33, as well.
Your wireless controller could also be causing problems. While OEM PlayStation and Xbox controllers shouldn’t have any bluetooth latency issues, your favorite third-party customizable gamepad could. If it seems like your inputs are registering late, try using a different controller or hardlining your controller to your PC or console.
When all else fails, you may always blame the game. It’s not your fault man, that was just a cheap shot. You’d have to be cracked out of your mind to hit these parries! Don’t worry about it, mate. You’re still good at video games, I promise.
