Clair Obscur wears its influences on its beautifully-rendered sleeve, and honestly? Good. Great. Please do.

We are some many millions into this and you are asking them not to take a little from here or use a little from that? At this point, the building blocks look a lot like the other building blocks beneath them, and those before them resemble some others until forever. Every new thing is a memory in cosplay. Every battle system a child of some earlier one, layered like sediment. I’m glad we’re still making this stuff. The Square Enix RPG is alive in the imaginations of many, But Clair Obscur feels... hollow. Pretty, but hollow. Dramatic in that high-gloss, low-impact way. It hits the notes, but doesn’t make music. Melodramatic in a kind of Joss Whedon for poets way like someone’s trying to write a tragic opera on the back of a Funko Pop.

The combat system revolves around this block mechanic that basically turns stat progression into a polite suggestion. All those tiny +0.2% upgrades to poison damage feel like filler. Tired-computer thoughts. I didn’t come here to do Excel sheets in a corset. But if you time a block right? You can survive anything. And that’s cool, I guess. It gives the player real agency but sometimes it also feels like the game doesn’t actually want you to block, just to try to block. To hope. Or maybe I’m just bad. That’s possible too.

It’s a nice game. I don’t mean that in the familial “nice” way, like when your mum says your writing is “interesting.” I mean it’s genuinely quite good at what it does. The voice acting? Some of the best I’ve heard. Story beats? Evolve in some pleasing ways. Everything here is competent but without reverence. There's a lot of love for a lot of art here and sadly I think I knew them all.

And then there’s the reception. The hype. This weird undercurrent that feels like the old anti-Japanese sentiment of the 2000s sneaking in through the back door. Back then it was “Japan’s just weird now,” like weirdness was suddenly out of fashion. Now the narrative seems to be, “Japan’s too old to do what it used to. The torch has passed. The French get it now.” But Clair Obscur isn’t doing anything Square hasn’t done in the last five years it just isn’t called Final Fantasy XVII. The discourse feels like we’re giving bonus points because it’s French, like that somehow makes the melodrama deeper. It doesn’t.

I don’t know. Maybe it caught you at the right time. Maybe you were looking for something, anything, that still looked like this. But all I could feel while playing was the weight of everyone else's excitement pressing down on me. Waiting for the mind-blow. That moment. The snap. The twist. The revelation. But it never came.

Just a lot of good intentions.

And some lovely clouds.