Deciding whether to boot up New Game Plus in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 depends entirely on how thoroughly you cleared the final acts of your first playthrough. Sandfall Interactive designed this mode to test optimized builds, but it comes with specific carryover rules that can catch players off guard.
If you finished the main campaign and want to know whether a second run is worth your time, the answer comes down to loot progression, exclusive items like the Baguette weapons, and scaling challenges. This breakdown examines what transfers, what resets, and whether the mode delivers enough fresh value to justify another journey through the Continent.
What Carries Over into Expedition 33 New Game Plus
When you initiate New Game Plus from any expedition flag, the game preserves the vast majority of your hard-earned progression. You won't have to rebuild your core combat loop from scratch.
- Characters and Skills: All unlocked party members, including late-joiners, are available or join you early with their previously acquired skill trees intact.
- Equipment and Gear: Your weapons, Pictos, Luminas, Tints, and outfits remain in your inventory.
- Gradient Skills: Special traversal and combat upgrades you unlocked via relationship milestones stay with you, preventing early-game backtracking walls.
Keeping your gear means you start the opening hours as an absolute powerhouse. Enemies in early zones pose minimal threat until scaling catches up in later acts.
What Resets in New Game Plus
Not everything survives the transition into a second cycle. Certain world states and narrative items reset completely to preserve the structure of the campaign.
- Quest Items and Progression: Main story progression, side quests, and specific quest items are wiped, requiring you to clear regions normally.
- Expedition Journals and Records: Collectibles like music records and written logs reset, meaning completionists must track them again if they aim for a fresh archive.
- Relationship Levels: Character bonds and relationship statuses reset, forcing you to re-engage with dialogue choices if you want to see alternate outcomes or narrative branches.
The True Value Proposition: Exclusive Loot and Challenges
The primary incentive for playing through New Game Plus involves optimization and hidden rewards.
Enemies drop higher-level Pictos and greater quantities of Chroma, allowing you to push your characters past previous damage caps. Furthermore, players who saved festival tokens from the prologue can finally unlock the elusive Baguette weapons by visiting the bakery early in a second run. Because token limits restrict how many you can acquire per playthrough, you'll need multiple cycles to collect them all for every character.
Combat difficulty scales up, though players who completely maxed out their builds in the post-game may still find standard encounters relatively fast to clear.
Common Mistakes to Avoid Before Starting
Jumping into a second run prematurely can lock you out of efficient completion paths.
- Skipping Post-Game Bosses: If you start a new cycle before defeating optional endgame super-bosses, you miss the satisfaction of testing fully upgraded gear against the game's toughest encounters.
- Ignoring Collectibles: Failing to grab trophies, achievements, or easy-to-miss records on your first save means repeating entire chapters just to clean up missed items.
- Forgetting Festival Tokens: Spending prologue tokens on temporary goods instead of hoarding them ruins your chance to acquire the unique endgame weapons tied to the bakery door.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to start New Game Plus to reach maximum level?
No. You can cap your characters and optimize your loadouts during the endgame phase of your initial playthrough without transitioning to a new cycle.
Can I change the difficulty setting after starting?
Yes, you can adjust gameplay parameters and enemy scaling options in the settings menu if the baseline challenge feels too high or too low.
Are there any exclusive narrative scenes in New Game Plus?
The core narrative remains identical, but resetting relationship levels allows you to explore alternative dialogue paths and character interactions you may have missed the first time.
What happens to my original save file?
Initiating the mode rolls your progression data forward into the new cycle, so it's wise to make a manual backup save before committing to the transition.
