If you’ve read many of my recent gaming reviews, you’ll notice that there’s often one reference that’s peppered throughout them. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. In fact, if you’ve ever had the misfortune of getting caught in a conversation with me, you’ll find I reference it approximately every 6.5 seconds. It was my frontrunner for Game of the Year 2025 by a clear furlong.
And yet despite my enduring love for it, a recent acquisition has totally changed the way I play the game. When toying around with the Asus ROG Raikiri II Xbox controller for review, I found it totally changed the way I play the game and, honestly, helped me enjoy it a whole lot more. I’d been missing something since the very beginning of the game, and the high-end, premium controller helped me realise why.
Despair Obscur
It’s not hard to explain why I’ve enjoyed Expedition 33 so much. The heyday of turn-based role-playing games (RPGs) came during my youth, when my brain was at its squishiest and most impressionable. I know we’re only supposed to care about action RPGs and Soulslikes these days, but Expedition 33 is a love letter to many of the games that sparked my adoration of RPGs, while having enough modern innovations to feel truly forward-looking.
Yet I have a confession to make. Despite how much I love the game, I’ve been harboring a dark, shameful secret that cuts to the core of my identity. While I never wanted to admit this publicly, I feel like I can no longer hide it… I kinda suck at it.
Don’t get me wrong. I hold my own in battles. My builds are relatively effective, I have a good lot of synergies worked out with my skills, and I can usually ace most of the quicktime events (QTEs). The vast majority of opponents fall at my feet, and I can master a lot of the bosses after a few humiliating deaths. So what’s the issue?
In a word: parrying. Ever since I started playing, I’d always felt something was slightly off with the parrying and counter mechanics – I could pull them off regularly enough to be satisfying and to bring many enemies to their knees. However, I often felt like I was missing something.
The window felt unforgiving at the best of times, and every time I came across new enemies, I’d spend most of the encounters with them learning their timings before they largely disappeared from play. I wanted to excel, but often found I got by on a painful process of repeating counters until I had the rhythm down. Later in the game, this sensation was only compounded – certain bosses required almost flawless countering, and the introduction of Verso’s Perfection ranks meant coasting was no longer an option.
I know, I know… get gud, right? But despite all the practice I got, I never quite built up the fluency I needed. And advice online didn’t seem to work for me: listening out for aural cues or the way the screen zooms in just before an attack didn’t help me hit the window with enough regularity. My younger co-workers didn’t seem to have any issues with it, convincing me my issue was more likely with my middle-aged brain. The old girl just ain’t as fast as she used to be.
But, as it turned out, the issue wasn’t with my wetware. It was with my hardware.
He’s got control again
Ridiculous as it is, I don’t actually spend a lot of money on gaming accessories. Despite owning a mid-weight gaming PC, an Xbox Series X, and a Steam Deck, when it comes to choosing between games and accessories, I’ll choose games every time. As a result, I’ve got a Steam library full of uncompleted games, and yet I’ve always used my PC with the cheapest controller I could get my hands on. Yes, I know: I can literally hear your eyes rolling from here.
Fortunately, TechRadar Gaming’s managing editor has been dragging me kicking and screaming into the 2020s one accessory review at a time. And it was as a part of this gradual reeducation process that I recently tested out a new pro controller for Xbox and PC: the Asus ROG Raikiri II Xbox Controller.
When I test any gaming accessory, I’ll always try it out with as wide a range of genres as possible. So, naturally, one of the first titles I fired up was Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
Suddenly, something was different. Instead of getting slashed to ribbons by the Obscurs I was facing, I started deflecting their blows like a spider at the peak of his Olympic fencing career. The crack-thin parry window suddenly felt like an enormous floor-to-ceiling window, and hitting it became a far-less stressful experience. Verso finally went from an, at best, straight-C student to regularly unleashing his most powerful attacks.
I’d never previously considered that a more pro-level pad could make this much of a difference. But take a quick glance at the Raikiri II’s design and feature-set, and it’s easy to see why it’s been so transformative for my gameplay.
The most obvious is its triggers. Not only is the Raikiri II one of the few console controllers so far to have introduced Tunnel Magnetoresistance (TMR) sensors to its triggers – promising even more sensitivity and longevity than Hall effect sensors – but using Asus’s Gear Link software, you can set the sensitivity window for each trigger independently. By far the biggest game changer as far as Expedition 33 is concerned, though, is their micro-switch setting, a digital setting with minimal travel that makes it easier to hammer that parry trigger much faster.
But that’s not the only trick the Raikiri II has up its sleeve here. It’s also a blindingly fast controller, full stop. Thanks to its 1000Hz polling rate, it will pick up any trigger pull or button click within 1ms. On top of this, it has a seriously low input lag of just 2.32ms when hooked up in wired mode or 3.53ms when connected via its 2.4GHz wireless mode – meaning that the gains you’re getting out of faster triggers aren’t swallowed up by lag on the digital side.
And it’s not only been transformative for playing Expedition 33. Tweaking its left thumbstick curves on the Gear Link software made keeping up with the frenetic pace of Doom easier, while lengthening the sensitivity window for the accelerator on Forza Horizon 5 gave me slightly more granular control of my speed as I hurtled around the streets of Guanajuato. As important as speed, that increased level of sensitivity can be transformative for certain titles.
So while I’m not suggesting that all your woes in gaming can be solved with a magic bullet, I’ve definitely noticed how a more pro-level pad has given me more of an edge in certain titles. I may not be able to guarantee that’s why you’re finding the timing tricky in games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, but it’s definitely worth considering if you’ve followed all other advice to no avail. Because sometimes that extra edge and precision can make all the difference.
The best Xbox controllers
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josh.russell@futurenet.com (Josh Russell)
