Playtime: 123h.
I enjoyed this game, I really did. Could it have been a DLC for the first game? Maybe. There was enough story content in it to warrant a new installment, but all the game mechanics (combat included) felt very same-y to me.
The game looked and ran just as the 2018 piece. Which is to say that it is a stunner, for a PS4 game, so it runs as smooth as silk on any modern hardware. Including PC, which is to say that the game is well optimized.
I thoroughly the time spent with Boy Atreus, Freya, Mimir, Brok and Sindri. Their characters were well written, nuanced and complex enough to make them believable. Except for most, if not all. of the main plot bits.
And there’s the sore patch for me. The main plot. I was recently watching this great video on the making of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and this bit from the lead writer, Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, sums it up nicely:
We are very interested in who people are and why they’re doing what they’re doing. That’s what I always go back to: “why are they doing this? Does it make sense for this character?”.
There were times when … we wanted this kind of plot point, we wanted them to do this, and the characters just didn’t wanna go there. So those were times when it was very difficult to write.
I’ll now spoil some of my next review by saying that this kind of challenge was addressed perfectly for Clair Obscure, where I didn’t have problems accepting any of the twists and explanations; and very poorly for Ragnarök, where most things that the game wants to make a huge deal about feel very shallow and actually easy to address.
“But you said you loved the characters”, you might ask yourself. Yes, I did. And that’s much more from the not-so-random conversation and development that happen outside the bit beat moments of the game, than when they go very soap opera levels of shoehorned drama.
“But you played more than 100h of it!”, you might rage at me. And I played so much because the combat mechanics were tight, and I could do lots of side content that were satisfyingly challenging. The kind of stuff I love.
And if you like the combat mechanics of the recent 2 franchise games, then you’ll love Valhalla, Ragnarök’s DLC. It takes the polished combat mechanics and meshes them into a Roguelite. I played the crap out of it. Oh man, it kept giving the the dopamine hits after well balanced amounts of challenge. Time. After. Time.
Until it didn’t, because I had levelled up all the important stuff and the runs turned from challenging to grinding. But then at least I had the collectathon aspects of it to wrap it all up.
