The deeply flawed magnificence of Clair Obscur [Part II]
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Okay, this is Part II of my Clair Obscur impressions, and this post will contain major spoilers so if you're here by accident, please go ahead and read Part I, which is spoiler-free.
The story of Clair Obscur has been bugging me for a month now, so I will just get it off my chest and move on.
First of all, for me personally it was false advertising. I wanted to play a mystery in an interesting setting, a story about uprooting the order of the world, breaking the cycle of the Gommage with subsequent restoration of Lumiere and so on and so forth, as advertised. I was imagining all the ways the world is going to change when we defeat the Paintress and break the cycle. Maybe, we'll be able to repaint those who gommaged! After all, we're not sure what the mechanism is, maybe their souls linger somewhere, and we can bring them back!
What about the Continent? I wonder if we can restore Lumiere back to its old glory! Or maybe Lumiere will stay where it is, but we could restore the old city and have two cities! And trade with gestrals! I wonder what kind of societal changes await Lumiere when we sort this mess out, it would be so interesting to see!
I never loved the story of Expedition 33 more than I did in the prologue and Act 1.
Figuring out everything is fake and nothing matters was a terrible experience for me, and I put it off for as long as I possibly could. A totally personal thing, yes. This is the type of story I dislike the most. It falls under the umbrella of 'this is all a dream' stories that destroy all stakes and all my investment into the characters. This is a type of story I'd never choose to play willingly, so I really didn't like the game baiting me into playing the story I love the most and then throwing me into 'everything is painted and nothing matters' narrative that I will still play because one, it's sunk cost fallacy at this point, and two, I always have hopes for the stories to pivot and surprise me. I had hope when Maelle promised Lune to paint Paris for her, a Painting inside a Painting, which led me to believe that we're moving towards the hybrid ending where this Canvas stays intact and Maelle comes to visit. Unfortunately, the game has only one ending, and this is not it.
On the other hand, this switch perfectly explained the lackluster worldbuilding and characters lacking consistency. Remember how in Act 1 Lune was all about following rules and quoting protocols? She loses that part of the character completely in subsequent acts. Sciel is absolutely the writers' least favorite character — she has less dialogue than others and doesn't even have a personal quest of any sort. I love both Lune and Sciel — but really, more for their potential than for the lack of its exploration in-game. Act 1 is loaded with heartfelt dialogue and intimate scenes between characters which lulled me into thinking this is going to stay consistent. Nope.
The fact that everything is painted and there are only two real people in the Canvas now — Alicia and Renoir — in one fell swoop destroyed any investment I had into the painted characters. After thinking about it for a while, I realized that it happened because my investment was based on emotion and imagination, completely unsupported by the game's worldbuilding. Clair Obscur makes a tiny — and honestly quite pathetic — attempt to let you peek into the real world by having Clea mention 'The Writers' that 'the Painters' are at war with, and also Aline being the head of 'the Painters'. It explains nothing and gives no context to anything apart from 'people can create worlds' which we already know. Since the nature of the relationship between the Painters and the people they paint is never explained, I had to assume that the painted characters can never transcend the consciousness of the person who painted them, which honestly makes that cutscene where Sciel and Lune try to teach Renoir about grief and being a good parent hilarious. You might say, 'No, Verso was painted by Aline and he still wants to destroy the painting against her wishes!' — that's because Verso is special, his free will is 'a gift from Maman', as well as his ability to access the underpainting space. To what extent it might apply to all the other painted people we'll never know because the game never explains it.
My second point is that Gustave was killed for shock value, and it inadvertently ruined the entire story. When he died, I was like OH NO, but not only because I really liked Gustave, but because he was the best written character in the game, and he was just thrown off a cliff. For me, the relationship between Maelle and Gustave was so unique and established so efficiently, I was absolutely sure the game would just ride this tide all the way to the end. But no, Gustave is wasted 10 hours later to make everyone cry, in awe of the game that mercilessly kills one of its protagonists at the very start. Shock value. When he died, I was like okay, the game needs to either introduce an equally well-written character or rapidly evolve an existing character, or the narrative will drown completely. And the game introduces Verso, a character long past his most shocking and traumatic realizations and revelations who had already decided his course of action. Verso is a completely immovable character set on his path of being unpainted. He knows what he wants, doesn't need figuring things out, and, consequently, he is super boring to play as, even if only in camp. His moments with Esquie and Monoko do help the situation tremendously but still, in my mind, it would've made much more sense for me to play as Maelle as she is trying to navigate the mission — and her entire life — after losing Gustave and build her own relationships with all the other characters. In the end it doesn't really matter, but as I was playing the game not knowing how it ends, it was constantly baffling for me why I wasn't playing as Maelle who had the most potential for character growth and was clearly the protagonist of the story.
Later on, Verso confesses to Maelle that he could've saved Gustave but didn't in order for his death to become Maelle's motivation to reach the Paintress and destroy her and Renoir. Well, this can't be true because Maelle already had the exact same motivation, considering that she didn't know defeating the Paintress would end the world with Gustave in it. It's Gustave's last year; if they don't succeed, he's dead anyway. Changing her motivation from love to vengeance achieved exactly nothing of value but removed the only character who could contribute to Maelle's character growth.
And this is where we get to my major problem with the story in Clair Obscur — and, contrary to my previous points, I don't consider it my subjective issue — it is the glaring absence of personal growth for both central characters. They end up in the same place they started, and whatever changes occurred to their storylines, occurred due to external circumstances or were forced by other characters.
The main theme of the game is very complicated and delicate: grieving after losing someone you love. Contrary to popular belief, it is a non-linear process, and everyone grieves differently. It also never fully goes away but transforms with time. Unfortunately, I know about it first-hand, maybe that is why the theme of Clair Obscur has struck such a chord with me and left me so confused and honestly terrified.
Aline, one of the two main characters with an internal conflict, is consumed by grief for her late son Verso. She abandons all her duties and relationships with her husband and her remaining children. She says that Renoir can do whatever he wants, she is just going to sit inside the Canvas and play pretend, and she apparently doesn't care at all if her body in Paris just drops dead.
Her story ends in the exact same place. She never finds a healthier, non-destructive way to grieve — on her own or with her family. We kick her out of the Canvas, and then her daughters hide it so that she doesn't re-enter it because she learned nothing.
During the final battle with Renoir, when she re-enters the painting, I was 120% sure I knew what's going on. Aline woke up in Paris in a dire condition from her prolonged presence in the Canvas; she talked to Clea, realized that she almost lost her entire family to her destructive grief; she sees that her youngest daughter, Alicia, is about to do the exact same thing, so she finds the Canvas again — maybe Clea tells her where it is, seeing that Aline has finally come to her senses — and enters it to be a mother and help Alicia out by joining Renoir against us, which is also a big reconciliation between them. There wasn't a doubt in my mind that was what's happening.
The way my jaw dropped when I realized that she came back to assist us against Renoir cannot be described. He calls her selfish for it by the way, because she can die at any moment from exhaustion, but it still never occurs to her to think of her remaining family. After all that happens inside the Canvas, she is in the exact same place. The game's story locks Aline in a room with no doors or windows, and there is no hope for her at all, because Renoir's pleas fall on deaf ears. She never changes and frankly, no one does.
Maelle-Alicia is the exact same. She starts in the place of misery: disfigured by the fire, shunned by Aline, guilt-stricken over Verso's death. Her internal conflict is the inability to find new joy in life, like Renoir wanted her to, and choosing escapism instead. She wishes to stay inside the Canvas and live a happy and healthy life. She is the absolute villain of the final act because her desire to preserve the Canvas has nothing to do with her grief or love for Verso, but with her personal comfort, and she never changes either. She never gains any hope for what her real life could be, she never experiences personal growth to be able to leave the Canvas and let Verso go out of her love for him. There is absolutely no difference between Maelle in Ending A, where she forces alternate Verso onto the stage after he begged her to unpaint him, clearly stating that he doesn't want this life; where she keeps the little Verso as a pet to be the god of the Canvas through him, and Alicia in Ending B where she is forced to leave the Canvas by alternate Verso, and the Canvas is then destroyed. This is the problem of the choice that you make in the underpainting space at the very end: while it leads to seemingly drastically different endings, it doesn't matter at all, because the character — Alicia — is the same. There was no personal growth for her to ever end up in a different place. Throughout the game you don't make any relevant choices for her to find the internal strength to let Verso go and try to find a way to live happily in the real world.
That is why the Verso ending, which is considered to be 'the good ending', gives me about the same creeps as 'the bad ending'. It's not about the Dessendre family finally reuniting and addressing their feelings, but about Alicia and Aline temporarily stopping their destructive behavior because other people — Renoir, Clea, alternate Verso — forced them to, and the Canvas is currently destroyed. They are here, in front of Verso's grave, because they were denied the place they want to be in, not because they suddenly learned to let go. The way I see it, the moment Renoir falls asleep both of them would just paint new Canvas and jump there immediately because for them nothing has changed, and no lessons were learned; no personal growth achieved. Aline still doesn't care about her remaining family because in-game nothing happened to make her care. She is the exact same. Alicia before Verso's grave is the exact same one that would force him into a life he doesn't want to preserve her illusion. The Verso ending is just the Maelle ending but slightly delayed. It is chilling.
You might say, well, who said that Expedition 33 is about happy endings? Maybe it's supposed to be grim and dark and hopeless! Oh, come on now :D While playing the game, I was sure, without a doubt in my mind, that it is trying to convey a hopeful message of finding healthier ways to grieve, of letting go and finding new joy in life that seems ruined. It is mostly done through Renoir and his dialogues, when he tells Alicia that it will get better — because it will. Renoir is honestly the hero of the story, even though all other Dessendres consistently forget that he lost a child too, and he is grieving too. Additionally, this message is also conveyed through songs, like Linen and Cotton:
Every sorrow is born of love
Every love transcends sorrows
Every sorrow is born of love
Time transcends pain
It's as if the game picked a hopeful direction for the story to follow but forgot to check if it actually did. Well, it didn't. Love transcends sorrows. Time transcends pain. But the main conflicts are never resolved in this direction. They are never resolved at all. Both Aline and Alicia claim that their actions are explained by their love for Verso; but I don't believe that at all. It is about their personal comfort, and they both would make others suffer — including the little Verso inside the Canvas, and the alternate Verso — to maintain it, which is a pretty grim takeaway from a game about grief. After watching the credits, I couldn't shake the feeling that the game is trying to tell me that all is lost, and the rest of my life is hopeless if I have lost someone I loved. That there is no escape from the overwhelming grief that consumes you. Other people might force you to stop destroying your life temporarily, but at the end, there is no letting go and no hope to be found anyway.
I am thinking of all the possibilities I imagined when I was playing the game, and it honestly boggles the mind that none of them came true. The expectation problem, you might say, and yeah, I do expect delicate themes to be handled with consideration. I figured out the real story halfway through Act 2, I think many did, and I was constantly weirded out by the fact that the developers killed off Gustave when he was so clearly a profound influence over Maelle, and could have helped her immensely in becoming a more mature person and learning to let go. Well, that didn't happen. Maybe, since Alicia is clearly the protagonist of the story, her personal growth throughout the adventure could have led her to extend some grace to her mother and offer her some comfort; start mending what is broken, and maybe then we could've seen Aline being nudged towards healing.
None of this happens. It feels to me that the game just takes a complicated, emotionally heavy theme, explores a bit of it, and then just drops it — not only without a proper resolution, but on a grim and outright depressing note. I did not like that at all.
I know now (not from the game, that's for sure) that grief is not something you can 'overcome'. It's with you forever because grief is love that has nowhere to go, and as long as this love remains, grief will be there too. But you can learn to live with it, and it takes time. A lot of time, but eventually new joy in life can be found — no doubt about it — because loving and losing is better than not loving at all, even if very often it might seem the opposite.
I hope this is the last post I make on Clair Obscur because I really need to move on to other games :D
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Thank you very much for your time. Take care.
