Fresh off its Game of the Year win, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has a new, free update that adds additional levels, upgrades, and boss fights to the RPG. If it’s been a while since you checked in with Verso, Maelle, and the rest of the expedition, maybe, I dunno, go practice your parrying before you head into the new content, because even the sickos who were already dodging the game’s most elaborate onslaughts are having trouble with these challenging fights.
The “Thank You Update,” as Sandfall Interactive is calling it, includes an Endless Tower, which features revamped boss battles from the base game for an extra challenge. Clair Obscur’s late-game boss fights and secret battles were already daunting tasks, and now the game has added a plethora of new fights that are exhausting just to watch. Look at how long this combo goes on in the new Duollistes fight:
Some of the update’s challenges come from a seemingly never-ending barrage of attacks, but a lot of its fights are pretty standard Clair Obscur fare in that they trick you with multiple fakeout attacks, baiting you into dodging and parrying before an enemy actually strikes, throwing off your rhythm and leaving you open to attack.
Oh, and one boss will just straight up nuke your team. Good luck parrying that one.
Clair Obscur fans are no strangers to challenging boss fights, but some feel that the Thank You Update’s boss run is too much. This account from Reddit user Maggot_6661 sums it up:
“I love this game, truly,” they wrote. “This update is great, but these bosses are too much. Unless I spend a full 9 to 5 learning the reaction times only a robot can reach, I will never beat them. I already have to spend the day searching for a job and going disappointment after disappointment, I’m not mentally strong enough to suffer through these bosses afterwards, all it’s doing is making me not like the game… which is something I don’t want to happen.”
Sometimes walking away from the biggest challenges a game has to offer is the right call. To this day, I’ve never played through some of the secret bosses in Final Fantasy X, and I have art from that game tattooed on my arm. I think I’d rather just enjoy the game I played than bang my head against a wall on some of its more challenging fights, so I won’t judge anyone who walks away from Clair Obscur’s Endless Tower. To those of you who do beat them, thank you for your service. “For those who come after.”
