God, I hate teenagers. I hated teenagers when I was a teenager, which admittedly made socializing tricky. And weird as it sounds, I don't think that's unrelated to my struggle to get along with JRPGs. Despite having tried to complete dozens of them across my life from various acclaimed series (Persona, Final Fantasy, Tales, etc), I could probably count the number of genre classics I've willingly completed on one hand.
But after being pressured from all sides to try it and currently 20 hours in, it turns out I like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 quite a bit, certainly more than I was expecting to. It's stylish and atmospheric and melodramatic in a way that many JRPGs often are, but now it's different. Now it lands in a way that they so rarely do for me, even though at a glance it doesn't seem meaningfully different to the heritage that clearly influenced it. I think it comes down to my aforementioned distaste for that greasy phase of post-adolescence – and how Clair Obscur carefully sidesteps it.
