The final moments ofClair Obscur: Expedition 33are driven by complex, conflicting emotions from the game’s unforgettable cast. All of the secrets, betrayals, and head-turning narrative twists culminate in the kind of final battle you’d expect from this kind of epic RPG, followed by one final, emotional duel for the fate of the Canvas. It’s unexpected and heart-wrenching, but it also gets so lost in its big ideas that it forgets the point of the journey that led to this climax.
This article contains major ending spoilers for Clair Obscur.
The Big Question
After the climactic battle with Renoir, the members of Expedition 33 convince the Dessendre patriarch to leave the Canvas and let Maelle repaint the world. However, Verso betrays the group, exploiting the tear in reality that Renoir left to reach the core of the world, which he hopes to destroy, finally ending his immortal existence.
Malle tries to stop him, and you’re forced to choose; does Maelle save the Canvas, or does Verso destroy it and make his sister confront her grief in the real world? The game seems to frame it as a question of whether it’s right to let Maelle live and die in a fantasy world or allow Verso to die with the Canvas and let Alicia (Maelle’s Parisian alter-ego) start an actual healing process.
From the moment Verso enters the rift, the game forgets thatthe people of the Canvas are sentient, living beings who have spent the last 67 years just trying to survive. Expedition 33 and all the previous journeys to the Continent were never about resolving the Dessendre family drama; they were about stopping the Gommage and creating a future for the hopeless people of Lumiere.
Even during the battle with Renoir, the conversation is about whether it’s best for Alicia to remain in the Canvas as Maelle; Lune and Sciel, who will die if the Canvas is destroyed, appeal to his compassion as Alicia’s father, rather than advocating for their right to exist.
Looking at the big picture, the final choice should be an easy one; Verso doesn’t get to kill an entire world’s worth of people just to facilitate his own death, even if he’s dressing it up as the right thing to do for Alicia. However, the stark contrast between the two endings makes it very clear that Maelle’s is the bad ending, and Verso’s is the good, melancholy as it is.
If you choose Maelle, she immediately becomes a power-mad god, repainting Verso to replace her older brother and play piano for her and all her friends at the Opera House. Everyone in Lumiere comes back to life in a quiet, sanitized version of the Canvas suited to Maelle’s liking. The world she fought to save becomes her personal dollhouse until her physical body succumbs to the effects of the Canvas.
Verso’s ending, on the other hand, kills everyone in the Canvas and lets the Dessendres start the healing process. Aline and Alicia live, and they have the memories of Esquie, Gustave, and all the rest to help them through the hard times - though it’s a small comfort to the thousands who died to give one rich family some peace.
What Was It All For?
Clair Obscur is the story of Expedition 33. It’s right there in the title, in big gold letters. Ever since the game was announced, we’ve been waiting to take the journey with Lumiere’s survivors and find out the truth behind the Paintress and her Monolith, and when one falls, we continue. I never expected the Paintress to be the true antagonist - who would, having played pretty much any RPG in the last 25 years or so? - so the sudden tonal shift at the very end of the game is jarring, to put it mildly.
Verso charismatically hijacks the Expedition and the game’s narrative… steering the Lumierans and the player toward the ending of a story that isn’t theirs.
When the true threat of Renoir is revealed, Expedition 33’s purpose remains the same: to stop the Gommage and save the world or die in the attempt. That’s the purpose that the player has been tasked with since before they watched Sophie crumble to dust in the Prologue. It’s why you kept going after Gustave’s heartbreaking death in Act 1. The Monolith is always there, looming over you no matter where you are in the game’s world. Until Maelle and Verso’s climactic duel, the message is clear; this is a story of putting individual needs aside, “for those who come after,” but at the very end Clair Obscur asks the player to become complicit in betraying that idea for a single character’s selfishness; Maelle’s need for control or Verso’s nihilistic world-weariness.
It would have been better if there were no choice at the end of the game, and Verso’s betrayal was simply the final, long-telegraphed twist of the knife. If you choose to save the world - the singular thing that you’ve been working to do for the game’s entire forty-plus-hour playtime - the tone of the ending makes it clear that you chose poorly. Even if you made your decision based purely on the well-being of Lumiere, the Gestrals, and all the rest, they pay a steep price because Maelle can’t be trusted with the power of a Paintress. Nobody can.
That’s a fair point to make, but it’s far from a central theme of the game.
It feels like the developers’ intent was to depict Verso’s ending as the choice that players are ultimately meant to make. As painful as it is, it provides better closure. The trouble, though, is that, choice or no choice, Clair Obscur tries to cram a bunch of big questions and thematic ideas into its final scene - the nature of grief, the right to die, and the danger of escapism, all of which are worthy of a game with Clair Obscur’s scale and scope - but they suddenly appear at the expense of the narrative goal that’s been driving us forward the whole time.
Verso Really Is The Worst
The thing that bothers me the most about Verso’s ending, though, is how most of the team seems okay with the fact that Verso condemns them all to die, as if they haven’t just journeyed across the entire world and back, twice, for a chance to live. Monoco, Esquie, and Sciel all say their fond farewells before fading away into oblivion forever; Lune, though, isn’t having it, nor should she.
In perhaps the game’s starkest moment of raw, penetrating pathos, Lune simply gives Verso a wordless death-glare, collapsing to the ground in defeat before she disappears. She forgave him too many times, let others vouch for him, and trusted him when she knew she shouldn’t, and now everything she’s ever known is being erased forever.
Verso charismatically hijacks the Expedition and the game’s narrative after Gustave’s death - which he reveals to Maelle that he engineered - steering the Lumierans and the player toward the ending of a story that isn’t theirs. He’s a selfish manipulator from the very beginning, and the game seems so desperate to absolve him of killing the denizens of the Canvas that if I didn’t know better, I’d think the final choice was his own idea, aMonika-esquegaslighting of the player into believing that his way is the only right way.
No matter the outcome of the final duel, the ending of Clair Obscur is a tragic one. There’s no problem with that - tragedy is important, since it reminds us why loss and failure are so painful, and why we need to feel them in spite of that. Simply letting Expedition 33 fail would have been fine; making the game about the Dessendre family drama at the last minute, at the expense of every other character’s very lives, leaves of the game’s central themes of survival and determination in the service of future generations by the wayside, all for the sake of a cool twist.
