Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s punishing dodge and parry windows are one of the RPG’s defining characteristics. Enemies basically do a little dance before they bring their weapon down on your party, and you’re expected to memorize and dodge every pattern lest you end up dead before your Gommage. Naturally, fans took this as a challenge, and one person has finally beaten Sandfall Interactive’s GOTY sweeper without taking any damage.
YouTuber Hayete Bahadori has uploaded a four-hour Clair Obscur walkthrough showcasing a damageless run using only one party member in every fight the game allows. Three encounters require you to have a party of three, which doesn’t count against the rules Bahadori set because they’re hardcoded into the game. Pulling off a run like this requires intimate knowledge of just about every required enemy encounter in the game, and Bahadori’s commentary running through each fight sheds plenty of light on patterns that players typically only pick up after repeat plays. If you want to watch the full thing, you can do so below, but it also has time stamps for the big boss fights if you want to jump to a specific encounter.
Bahadori says in a Reddit AMA that the hardest fight to pull off was actually the final battle against Renoir, which has some of the trickiest attack patterns. Despite the video evidence, some Clair Obscur fans were skeptical that the game could be beaten without taking any damage, as the emotional damage of its tragic story is not so easily parried. To which Bahadori responded, “you caught me.”
Perhaps the inevitable Clair Obscur sequel will give speedrunners a chance to dodge and parry their way through some crazy attack patterns once again. Or hey, maybe whatever Sandfall Interactive cooks up next will be something completely different. It sounds like the studio is trying not to feel beholden to any specific expectations, so who knows?