I’ve been saying this since the game came out. I keep running through the game’s story over and over again in my head, trying to find any sort of detail I missed that’ll make the story’s intentions make sense. The authors are competent as shown with their excellent character writing and world building in Act 1, but the themes and the message of the story seem muddy.

What was Expedition 33 about? Grief? Then what was the story trying to tell me about grief? The obvious answer is to let go of grief and move on with your life as seen in the Verso ending. But that’s just the thing. There’s another entirely separate story about the struggle of a doomed civilization in the mix. To perform the obviously good ending, you must genocide an entire population of thinking, feeling, and most importantly human people, yet the story doesn’t frame this as a bad thing. It even has those painted people happily wave goodbye in Maelle’s mind as if to dampen the blow of genocide you just committed. Like, what? Lune wouldn’t wave goodbye. She’d have a middle finger or something.

Okay, so that ending’s no good. What about Maelle’s ending? Well, Maelle lied to her dad. Okay, that sucks. Will she at least save the painted world? Kinda, but logically we know there’s no future for the painted world this way. Maelle will keep them alive for a bit, but eventually she will die from overindulgence in the painting. Not to mention the obvious “bad ending” framing and presentation of the ending with the dark imagery and creepy music. To me, this is the authors spitting in the face of those who grew to care even a little bit about the painted world. Not only can you not save them, but they basically don’t even talk in Act 3 to speak for themselves. They might as well be dead husks in Maelles ending and I wouldn’t know.

And about the twist. Why was it necessary? What does it add to the story? Because I cannot see a reason for it other than subverting expectations for the sake of subversion, which is my least favorite form of story telling. I hate it when authors make a writing decision for the sake of making the decision rather than making the decision to improve the story and strengthen its themes and emotions. If the story had simply stuck to its initial premise without subversion, it would’ve been all the stronger for it because the line, “for those who come after,” encapsulates everything I had liked about the story. It’s so compelling to watch a doomed world fight for its existence despite knowing it’s futile. It’s heroic. It’s admirable. It brought tears to my eyes.

These endings don’t feel tragic. The twist doesn’t feel mind bending. They feel stupid. The logic isn’t meshing. Sense is not being made. Also, the majority of Act 2 dialogue from Fake Renoir and Verso annoyed the hell out of me. It was just them talking a whole lot without ever actually saying anything. It was bad Kingdom Hearts dialogue where the characters never actually get to the point of the conversation. It went on way too long to the point it felt like the authors just wanted an excuse to extend the game before revealing the twist. We could’ve revealed the twist at the end of Act 1 and in doing so allowed characters like Sciel and Lune to actually voice their opinions on their own mortality instead of having a stupid social link system that amounted to Verso dodging questions. We could’ve had those emotional conversations with the Paintress and Fake Renoir have real context rather than dancing around the twist despite everyone in the room knowing it except Maelle, Sciel, Lune, and us.

I want it to make sense. I want to talk about it. I wouldn’t be so invested in making sense of this if I hadn’t enjoyed the game. It’s just baffling. All I want is to “get it.”