Eight hours and more than 10,000 parries later, a Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 superfan is being praised for beating one of the game’s toughest bosses in frankly ridiculous conditions.
Underpowered but undeterred, Reddit user Recordbreaks has posted a screenshot showing that they beat the super strong Duollistes boss after managing 10,545 successful parries — which feels like more than I’ve completed in the entire game.
The encounter took eight hours, two minutes and 36 seconds, during which time Recordbreaks says they “took one break maybe for about 5-10 minutes” in order to go get snacks, then “went back to it.”
Added to Clair Obscur last month as part of the game’s highly-anticipated farewell update, Duollistes is housed within the new Endless Tower location. This area hosts a series of bosses that are designed to provide some of the toughest challenges in the hit role-playing game, though they still shouldn’t take the average endgame player anywhere near eight hours.
“Only reason it took me this long is because I haven’t properly built Verso for damage in the millions yet,” Recordbreaks admitted, saying his squad was still around level 80. “He was doing maybe 200,000 damage per hit and that’s if Roulette was working in my favor which it wasn’t most of the time.”
While some fans have said Recordbreaks could simply have quit the battle, sorted their build then restarted, the vast majority of fans are praising the player for putting in an actual work shift’s worth of time to beat the boss anyway.
Most surreal of all, however? Throughout the whole battle, Recordbreaks avoided dodging to the point where not a single successful dodge is recorded, opting instead for the tougher option to parry attacks every time.
“22 parries a minute, pretty much one parry every three seconds,” one fan noted, after doing the math.
“Bro that’s a full-time job spent for that boss and 10k parries damn,” admired xXxZeroTwoxXx. “Congrats bud.”
“Why? Cuz I felt like it,” Recordbreaks replied, when asked the reason for their perseverance. “How? With sheer will and determination. What’s wrong with me? Haven’t gone to a therapist to work that out yet.”
With work on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 now complete, fans are already speculating what might come next, as the game’s developer has teased that Clair Obscur was a “franchise name” and Expedition 33 was just one story within its universe. In the meantime, you can catch up on the full patch notes for Expedition 33’s final update here.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
