Patient Gamers

My one and only problem is the parry/block timing mechanic in a turn-based game. It's not good. If you can't successfully time it, you are screwed. There's no other way to mitagate damage. So this game becomes a twitch-based button mashing experience and it hurts my hands. I couldn't do it.

Good thing everyone is entitled to their own opinion ;) Personally, it is one of the best RPG experiences I've had in a long time and I felt all the awards were well-deserved.

For me it hit the number one game I’ve played of all time. I went into the game cold not really knowing anything about it beforehand. The beginning hooked me right away. The battle system I loved (I was a big fan of super Mario rpg and its remaster). The characters I connected with quickly and the scenery I thought was beautiful and quite artistic and varied. Music was also fantastic. I also appreciate the company having the full 8 hour soundtrack on YouTube without ads and that they added so much new and fun post game stuff for absolutely no cost whatsoever. I thought the story drip was fantastic, and had me trying to figure things out like a murder mystery and being confused when my conclusions still didn’t fully add up. The platforming mini games I enjoyed and thought were a nice silly break from the regular loop. I ended up 100% it because I enjoyed it so much. I even bought some merch which is a rare thing for me.

I had some friends that agree with me 100%. I had some friends that thought it was good but not great. I finally had some friends that also thought it was alright but not for them. Everyone has different tastes :).

It broke inertia in a genre that had been struggling for a long time. A lot of folks have mentioned games like Super Mario RPG which was (one of) the last SNES Squaresoft game(s).

With the Square-Enix merger the franchises of the companies kinda merged together alongside adopting the innovations of MMORPGs.

And so the turn based RPG fell along the wayside, much like the RTS, until E33 renewed interest. So I think E33 is important for what it represents: the viability of a once popular genre ignored by major studios. There'd been smaller time pixel art games, but that was the sort od timecapsule realm it was stuck in.

I hear the story is pretty good, but sadly for me the gameplay was a real bummer. Just incredibly boring to play after a while

It was definitely worth of goty for me, but I still think bg3 is my favorite game personally, I’m a huge sucker for crpgs, because I play a lot of tabletop. I do agree with the art style gripe. I feel like there are prettier games out there, E33 felt idk how to describe its look, jank? I still think something like Witcher 3 next gen or cyberpunk 2077 or Alan wake 2 look way better.

I think the game deserves good reviews, but I’m not quite sure how it won so many GOTY awards. Perhaps it just wasn’t the game for me.

So, I haven't played the game, and haven't read most of your post because of spoilers. The reason I opened the post (and why I am replying to this specific part) is that most of my friends who have played the game consider this one of the best game in a very long time, if not ever. One of the very few 10/10 game for them. They loved the gameplay, the music, and the story (and probably more, but I didn't delved deep into it cause didn't want any spoilers). Oh, and they did find the platforming unnecessary too. I don't think I heard anyone counting that as positive, it just the game was great despite that.

This is just to say that it wasn't just the awards, lots of other people loved it too and consider all the awards well deserved. It is possible the game just isn't for you. I have had similar issues with some very highly rated games (case in point, Red Dead Redemption 2 which I am playing right now). Different people have different tastes. No matter how universal acclaim a game is, there will be people who can't get into it.

I expressed almost the exact same thoughts around the game's release after playing it (before it won the awards). The main thing that kept me going was the music and the story; and the story kinda fell flat for me once you discover the truth of the world. Certainly a 7/10 game, but not a 10/10 like the media around it suggests.

KC:D 2 was my GOTY of that year. E33 took away its spotlight, which I found pitiful. In my circles almost everyone knows E33 and follows the bandwagon of praise and most of them never heard of KC:D 2. Shameful, really.

I still have to try E33 though. I'm still curious what all the fuss is about.

I quite like the combat but the game got boring REALLY quickly. I just sort of stopped playing once I'd unlocked the fourth party member.

Perhaps this is an unpopular opinion but I found the game aesthetically quite ugly. Many landscapes had a feeling of copy pasted Unreal assets that looked so same-y at points they became confusing to navigate (especially given the lack of a mini-map). The characters had these blank, uncanny stares half the time and the designs for some of them (Esquie in particular) just didn't look good to me.

I get shit every time I bring this up, but you are not alone! This game is undeserving of the "best art direction" accolades it recieved and they cheapen the other awards it got.

I bought it without knowing the hype, only seeing a score and wanted to play a JRPG.

It's one of the best games i've ever played. The emotional delivery of the story is on point. The gameplay is solid. The build variety is quite fun.

It's difficult but not too difficult. The art is absolutely on point for me (art is always subjective.)

I would love to see a followup, and given the story there could be one given the openings left in the story to expand upon.

It was quite refreshing seeing the endings too. They are an awesome talking point and the fact that it's not just a boring "good ending", "bad ending", "golden path" like most games fall into is great.

Easy 10/10 for the story, and total package.

Agreed with the sentiment, it's a good game, and a great work of art, but I thought it was sitting in a weird state halfway between a jprg and a souls like, without leaning fully into either, and thus not being that good at neither. I still appreciate their attemot at genre mixing and it felt fresh and release at the right time for succes.

I haven’t played it but I can tell it’s not for me. I’ve seen many games in the last decade come out that seem to be a part of what I call a “fantasy island”.

It’s hard for me to describe, but I know it when I see it. In general, most of these story-heavy massive award-winning RPGs are relying on the player already liking the aesthetic and gameplay style. And if you’re not already a big fan of this style of game, they will do little to try and set it apart from the others.

None of the trailers or gameplay I’ve seen is there to convince someone to play it. They just expect that you’re already into this genre and you know if you’ll like it. It isn’t just E33, it’s all the games that fit on my fantasy island metaphor.

And it’s not just JRPGs and not just fantasy specifically, but just this category of games that “all the gamers” are playing that are “the best game ever” based on awards assume you already have the rest of the genre to compare to.

On its own as a standalone game without knowing about JRPGs, it does nothing to bring in other types of players. And thus, I have yet to try a single game from fantasy island.

I agree. This is a fantastic video essay that goes through everything in more detail than I could here, and I recommend it thoroughly. It's a good game, that manages to enthrall most players into thinking it's a great game through a combination of a phenomenal soundtrack and some standout moments that sort of jolt their critical thinking faculties out of order. I was victim of this too - I liked the game way more as I was first playing through it, but the more I went back through it and the more I actually thought about it the less I liked it.

I still appreciate E33 for what it is (overrated does not mean bad), but for me Blue Prince was the GOTY 2025.

Yet another GOTY I have no interest in because it doesn't overlap with my favorite games in any way.

Bashed my head for a long while with parrying until a friend made me notice: every enemy makes a sound cue for every attack

Yeah, it didn't sit well with me either and the only reason that i tried it was because everyone was singing it's praises like it was the most amazing game in history.

Only one YT channel didn't go with the flow Worth a Buy, Mack didn't say it was bad but that everyone was making it more incredible than it really is.

I got it and played till you get the little redhead in a museum i think and then i was kinda bored and couldn't be bothered to keep going and the whole way to that point i just didn't resonate with it.

I liked cause it was refreshing being a French inspired rpg. Don't get me wrong, I like jrpgs too but CO:E33 was a really refreshing breath of fresh air.

I played it a few months ago. I enjoyed it. As a Sekiro player I liked, but didnt love, the parry system. Thought the game was gorgeous, loved the story, music, environments.

Was kinda meh re: most of the gameplay. It was disappointing how many areas just didn't tell any story, i enter it, and theres this dramatic explosive environment, I ooh and ah, and its just a cul du sac with an item. Dozens of.locations like this, and most of the other ones weren't much more interesting.

The jumping puzzles were not very good. The beach puzzles just weren't fun. I especially hated the one where the guy launches explosives at your platform, and you have to use the world attack button which has a ridiculous cool down.

Power scaling was completely broken. The endgame enemies have a trillion HP, and you do 10 billion damage per attack, and the strat is to create a build so broken that you can do a trillion and one damage on the first hit, because you only have a million hit points and if you don't kill them first hit, the enemy attacks 20 times in a row and does 3 million per hit. Like at first the combat was too easy, then it was too hard, then it was easy again, and then it was impossible unless you equipped 300 luminas. Just like zero consideration for game balance.

Coming from Sekiro, the parry timing was pretty wonky. I think there was influence from Sekiro, but also from stuff people already mentioned like Super Mario RPG (a game I absolutely loved as a kid.) Don't really know how to describe it, but Sekiro was literally the last game I played before Exp 33, and I played it 7 times through, beat it charmless on ng6, platinumed and completed everything but the immortal journey. Before that i played Nightreign, like 300 hours only Executor. My shit was tight, Exp 33 was not.

It really just came off like an advertisement for Unreal engine, which is I assume why it won such accolades. It was a good game, I was in the mood for a jrpg, which I hadn't played one I really liked in a very long time. Was expecting multiple playthroughs, but it was a one and done for me. Good, but not goty imo

I watched some gameplay videos and the start of a Let's Play, couldn't get into it either. The beginning is somewhat intriguing, but once you're out of the prologue it just looks boring and weird in a bad way, like there's something about the visual style that I just don't gel with. I didn't see enough to say much about the story, though.

Maybe the issue with the awards is that the competition wasn't that strong? Most AAA games don't put much effort into telling an interesting story, if nothing else Expedition 33 at least tried.