Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is designed for players to dodge or parry enemy attacks at the right moment. Not every player is skilled enough to hit this timing right away. One fan has therefore looked for a way that untrained players can also enjoy the role-playing game.
Why is dodging and parrying so important? Although the battles in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 take place in rounds, players must remain active during the enemy phase. They can:
- dodge with a slightly larger time window or
- parry with a small time window and thus deal damage to the enemy
If a character suffers damage from an enemy, it often leads to a one-hit in higher difficulty levels. Even at the easiest difficulty level, it can happen against tough foes that one meets their end if they take every hit in a barrage of attacks.
A player wanted to test whether it’s possible to complete Clair Obscur without dodging and parrying. He thought of his wife and child, both of whom do not have “gamer reflexes”. And indeed, he manages to master the game this way. He reveals how he did it on Reddit.
Clair Obscur without parrying and dodging: Here’s how
How did he accomplish this? To make it as easy as possible, the player selected the lowest difficulty level “Story” and enabled the settings that make the quick-time events occur automatically during the characters’ attacks. He never dodged the enemies.
The characters he used were Lune, Sciel, and Maelle. He maxed out the speed attribute for all characters and ignored how to best distribute points in normal circumstances. Vitality, luck, and defense were also slightly increased. The most useful Pictos were:
- Revitalizing Pain (+1 AP when hit)
- Healing Fire (Restores 25% health when attacking burning targets)
- Effective Healing (Doubles any healing received)
He thus completely relied on compensating for the damage taken with healing. As an attack strategy, he used Maelle with Rain of Fire to spread the Burning status, Lune’s Elemental Trick to maintain her 4 charges, and subsequently with her Elemental Genesis.
For tougher fights, he used Lune’s healer build and also deployed Sciel as a healer. Maelle used a combination of Egide and Guard Up to take as little damage as possible, which then transitions to Maelle. He also used the Melarum weapon, which grants the Armored status to all characters with over 80% health at level 10. Thus, he focuses on ultimate defense.
Is there a downside? This tactic takes a lot of time, as the characters are busy with defense and healing and therefore deal very little damage. It takes longer to reach the grand finale of Clair Obscur. Especially Maelle can deal immense damage with the right build.
Moreover, the trick only works on the easiest difficulty level. At the other two levels, the enemies deal too much damage, so the trick does not work there. But it is nice to see that Clair Obscur can indeed be completed by players without significant gaming reflexes.
If you’re not afraid to use external tools, there’s another option – at least on PC. Here, a tool can completely take over dodging and parrying for you: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Cheat Engine – This is how every parry and jump is executed
