Expedition 33 Doesn't have a Good Ending. It Does have a Correct Ending.

Major Spoilers for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Ahead

You have a choice before you. Do you accept that grief and loss are parts of life, and choose to move on in the world, knowing that sometimes what is lost is going to be lost forever, no matter how hard you try? Or do you reject the endless march of mortality and grief, and instead choose to live in a world in stasis, holding on to the remnants of what is left, even if it will hurt you?

Do you choose Verso? Or do you choose Maelle? 

If you read last week's article, then you already know my choice. When I finished Expedition 33, I chose to play as Verso and to destroy the canvas, forcing Alicia/Maelle out in the world once more. I don’t know that this ending is what we would traditionally call a video game “good ending” where everything ends up happy and well for everyone. Quite frankly, I don’t know that Expedition 33 has a “good ending” at all. But I do feel, quite strongly, that it is the correct ending.

Now, what do I mean by the correct ending? I mean that the ending coheres with the themes and storylines presented in the game as a whole, serving as a satisfactory emotional conclusion to the journey we have been on. It embraces the world that the game has built and allows the player to feel like they have completed their journey properly, fulfilling themselves emotionally at the end of the game. For example, sparing Lord Shimura at the end of Ghost of Tsushima is one I would consider to be the correct ending (even if I didn’t pick it at the time, white armor ftw). While I think this case is less clear, and an argument could be made for either, I believe sparing Lord Shimura fits more as the end to Jin Sakai’s journey of evolving past the Samurai’s strict code of honor. It fits with the general themes of questioning tradition, familial love, and choosing what is best for those you love as opposed to sticking to a code of honor beyond all reason.

So now we ask, why is Verso’s ending the correct ending to Expedition 33? Both Maelle and Verso’s ending resolve the plot of Expedition 33 effectively, and neither one will leave a player wanting more from a story perspective. Instead, we have to look at how it coheres thematically with the game, specifically within Act 3. 

Act 3 of Expedition 33 deals heavily with the idea of grief, loss, and moving on from grief as opposed to letting it consume you. We can see bits of this in the various characters' story quests, such as Lune finally getting closure about the deaths of her parents and her relationship with them, or in Monoco fighting to resurrect Noco, knowing even as he does so that Noco will never be the same. Where it stands out the most though is in the three main optional boss fights in Act 3, namely Painted Alicia, Painted Clea, and Simon.

While Act 3 only has one required boss fight, that being Renoir, it contains several optional boss fights that add a great deal of texture and story content to the game that can be easily missed otherwise. Two of them are fights against Aline’s (The Paintress) painted recreations of the Dessendre family: a one on one duel between Maelle (Real Alicia) and Painted Alicia, and then a full fight against Clea. In both cases, the painted Dessendre wants to die. They have been cursed with immortality by Aline, and in Clea’s case she has been double cursed and painted over by the real Clea to make endless Nevrons. Alicia requests that Maelle gommage her out of existence upon her defeat, much to the pain of painted Verso. Clea commits a sort of suicide by Nevron upon her defeat, seeking a release from the pain she has been trapped in. They are both creations of Aline’s grief who, by the end of the game, desire nothing more than to finally move on and no longer be trapped in stasis.

The other boss fight is against Simon, one of the painted citizens of the canvas who was at one point romantically involved with the painted Clea. At the point we meet him, Simon has been corrupted, painted over by real Clea, given powers by Aline, and then stuck under the influence of Renoir. It is a full confluence of Dessendre meddling resulting in one very powerful but very miserable individual. This is not a heroic fight against a dastardly foe that must be put down for the good of all. This is, as described by Verso, a fight to lay Simon to rest. Even in his death, Simon does not rail against the heroes, but gives Verso his sword as he fades from existence, finally able to move on.

None of these fights are about preserving the world through the boss’s defeat, or saving people from a terrible villain. They revolve around killing things that have lived for far too long, allowing them to finally die and pass on, even when doing so is painful. We can’t go our entire lives trying to preserve every single thing as it was, and if we try to we will often ruin things we love. 

Following this thought, we can then see how these fights connect with the idea of Verso’s ending much more than they do with Maelle’s. Maelle’s ending is entirely based on the preservation of something that is already gone. Even as she fights Verso at the end, she does not argue that the canvas has to stay because of the lives of people like Lune and Sciel. She just wants to live the life with Verso that she never could after his death. She refuses to accept the loss of her brother and instead forces this painted recreation to live even after he begs for release. Her ending is a rejection of everything we see in Act 3, clinging to that which was as opposed to allowing things to pass as they should and moving forward with her life (Something she clearly understands as a concept given that she gommage’s Painted Alicia despite Verso’s pleas). 

Meanwhile, Verso’s ending is all about acceptance and moving on. He does not argue that the canvas should die because it is fake or because he is suicidal. He recognizes that the only way that Alicia and Aline will ever be able to actually accept Verso’s death and move on with their lives is if he takes the canvas away from them. So long as this fantasy where Verso is alive is available to them, they will always take it. It becomes almost analogous to a drug addiction, with Renoir even describing their home as full of “walking corpses.” It’s a term that, at least to me, evokes images of dopesick people, lost in a drug induced haze meant to take them away from a cruel reality. Just as Verso has to learn to let painted Alicia go, and must free Painted Clea and Simon from their burdens, he realizes that he must also free real Alicia and Aline from theirs. There is no other option left if he wants his family to survive.

There is a version of this game in which the story revolves more around the argument of whether or not the canvas world is real and deserves to stay intact on its own merits as opposed to its status as the last fragment of Verso. In that theoretical game, there is a much stronger argument to be made that Maelle’s ending would resonate more with those themes. It just isn’t the game that we are playing. 

Of course, you might ask, why make it so emotionally fraught then if one ending is, according to me, so clearly correct? The answer is simple: Expedition 33 is a tragedy and for it to be a tragedy, there can be no clear cut good ending. We have to feel emotionally connected to the world of the canvas and Lumiere for our decision to destroy it to mean anything. If it felt clearly fake, or was so obviously a terrible place to be, there would be no emotional weight to the decision at the end. I wouldn’t have to write this article at all, because no one would question which ending was clearly better. Simply put, kicking a heroin addiction might be a bit more of a moral conundrum for people if heroin had a pretty face, a winning personality, and a detailed inner life. 

There is also the argument about all of the people that die in Verso’s ending given that it effectively kills everyone in the canvas. Don’t we have to choose Maelle’s ending so as to save all of these people? To that my only counterpoint is: it’s a story. None of those people are real. Sometimes, for a story to be effective, people have to die. Sure No Country for Old Men would be happier if Llewyn and Carla Jean could live happily ever after, but it also wouldn’t be nearly as memorable a story. Is Cormac McCarthy a villain for killing these characters in the novel? Is Anais Mitchell evil for still not allowing Orpheus to free Eurydice? Is Ryan Coogler a monster for only allowing Sammy to survive the night in Sinners? Obviously no, and none of these stories would even be remotely the same if they had spared their characters from their fates. While the feelings we have for these characters and their impact on us is real, they are at the end of the day fiction. If we really wanted the best moral ending, we’d have one where the canvas is allowed to stay and Aline and Alicia attend grief counseling to properly process the death of Verso, but that would frankly be incredibly underwhelming as an ending to such an emotionally intense journey. Sometimes, for the story to be told properly, fictional people need to die.

There’s other arguments to be made here, such as the fact that the developers clearly seem to portray Verso’s ending much more positively (You look at Maelle’s ending and tell me you don’t feel creeped out by that ending still) but honestly I care a little less about that. Ultimately, Expedition 33 is, to me, a story about working through grief and moving on to live your life outside of the shadow of pain and memory. It’s about allowing yourself to live and not just clinging endlessly to that which could have been. Maelle’s ending rejects these themes in favor of stasis and false life, while Verso’s ending embraces them, focusing not on what used to be but instead on those who come after.