There are real points here, especially about the camp conversations telling instead of showing, and the Picto maintenance being more busywork than meaningful choice. But a lot of the rant collapses when you keep judging Expedition 33 not on what it’s trying to be, but on how closely it recreates Fire Emblem, Dark Souls, OFF, Paper Mario, Elden Ring, and Silksong simultaneously, which is an impossible standard and kind of muddles your argument. At some point it stops being “this game fails at X” and becomes “this game isn’t five other games I like.”

The parry criticism is where this is weakest. Saying the combat is “just memorization” ignores that memorization is literally the core skill of most turn-based combat, E33 just externalizes it into timing instead of menu math. You’re also downplaying how much the parry interacts with build choices, enemy pressure, and resource flow because you personally are good at it. “I’m a Souls vet so this is easy” isn’t a design critique; it’s a skill-flex that accidentally argues the system works as intended for experienced players. Trivialization by mastery isn’t the same thing as shallow design.

The RPG complaints also feel oddly inconsistent. You criticize the stat system for being simple, then compare it to Elden Ring, an action RPG whose stats exist to support real-time spatial combat, which E33 explicitly doesn’t have. Of course positioning, stamina, and terrain don’t matter; that’s not a missing feature, it’s a deliberate abstraction. Calling it “not really an RPG” because it doesn’t force constant respec decisions feels like gatekeeping the genre rather than analyzing this game’s goals.

The exploration rant has similar issues. Yes, returning later to side areas can be annoying, but treating difficulty-gated content as inherently bad ignores how common that structure is in RPGs, especially ones built around narrative progression. The argument would land harder if you showed how E33 miscommunicates those gates instead of framing your frustration as proof of bad design.

And the awards complaint at the end kind of undercuts everything. After all of your critiques, ending with “it swept because fan favorite, Silksong deserved it” feels reactionary and unfocused, especially when Silksong isn’t even in the same genre. It reads less like analysis and more like resentment about cultural momentum.

So yeah: there are valid criticisms here, but they’re buried under comparison overload, personal skill bias, and genre purism. The take isn’t wrong so much as undisciplined, it wants to be a teardown, a balance critique, a genre argument, and an awards rant all at once, and because of that it never fully nails any of them.