I am awful when it comes to decision making. I once heard that videogames actually make people more decisive, but that just means I’m either not a real gamer, or I’ve been doing it all wrong. It’s not that I make the wrong decisions, it’s just that I’m plagued by panicked indecision, terrified about the prospect of messing it all up. So you can probably guess the mental anguish that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s ending put me through.
Ending spoilers for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 ahead.
You see, there are two endings for Expedition 33, which can largely be summarised as a Maelle or Verso ending. Notice how I didn’t say good or bad, because both endings have pros and cons.
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If you choose to control Maelle in the last battle against Verso and win, then you keep the group alive, but they’ll forfeit their free will and Maelle ends up in a bit of a rough way as well. But if you pick Verso and win, then you get a more cathartic ending but sadly have to say goodbye to most of the group of characters you’ve come to love. It’s pretty cursed no matter what you do.
The lack of a straightforward good ending made it all the harder for me when it came to picking a side. I can’t even look to Sandfall Interactive for any direction, as writer Jennifer Svedberg-Yen affirms that there’s no right or wrong option (via IGN). Expedition 33 doesn’t have a canon ending: “We are not going to pick one. Never say never, but there is no canon ending there. It is a Schrodinger’s ending.” OK, great, that makes me even less certain in my ultimate choice to side with Verso.
“I think that was almost like an unspoken agreement,” Svedberg-Yen adds. “We never even considered really a true, happy ending. I think there was maybe a happier one possibly. You can see also in the way that the endings are edited, that one has a slightly more uplifting tone and one has a slightly darker tone.
“That was a choice that Guillaume made in terms of just having a little bit of shading there. But from my perspective, narratively, both are equally valid. Both are both good and bad. And it really just depends on whose perspective, whose good or whose happily-ever-after you are prioritising.”
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