New Game Plus is one of the most anticipated features for players who have completed the main story of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and Sandfall Interactive has implemented a system that rewards repeat playthroughs with meaningful mechanical changes rather than simply letting you stomp through the game with overpowered equipment. The NG+ mode in Expedition 33 is designed for players who want to experience the story again with a deeper understanding of its mechanics, explore content they may have missed on their first run, and tackle significantly more challenging combat encounters. Unlike some RPGs where NG+ is essentially a victory lap, Expedition 33's second playthrough introduces genuine difficulty increases that test your mastery of the hybrid turn-based and real-time combat system. This guide covers everything you need to know before starting your New Game Plus journey, including what carries over from your first playthrough, what gets reset, how enemy scaling works, and practical advice for optimizing your second run.
What Carries Over Into New Game Plus
When you begin a New Game Plus playthrough in Expedition 33, the game preserves several categories of progress that make your second run feel like a continuation of your first rather than a complete restart. Your character levels carry over in full, meaning every party member retains all the stat growth they accumulated during your initial playthrough. This includes Gustave, Maelle, Verso, Lune, and Scally, all of whom will start the game at their end-of-first-run levels. Your skill tree progress also carries over completely, so any abilities you unlocked and any passive bonuses you invested in remain available from the very beginning of the game. Equipment is another major carry-over category: every weapon, piece of armor, accessory, and Tint modification you collected during your first run will be in your inventory when you start NG+. This is particularly valuable because it means you can experiment with different builds right from the opening hours without needing to grind for gear. Collectibles such as Pictos and Luminas carry their completion status forward, so you do not need to hunt down items you already found on your first playthrough. If you missed any collectibles during your initial run, those remain available to discover in NG+, giving completionists a clean path to 100 percent completion across two playthroughs.
What Resets and How Enemy Scaling Works
Despite the generous carry-over system, several elements of Expedition 33 reset completely when you begin New Game Plus. Story progress resets to the very beginning of the game, meaning you will experience the entire narrative from scratch, including all cutscenes, character introductions, and plot developments. Side quest progress also resets, so any optional missions you completed during your first run will need to be undertaken again if you want their rewards and story content. The most significant change in NG+ is the enemy scaling system. All enemies in the game receive substantial stat boosts that increase their health, attack power, defense, and the complexity of their attack patterns. Boss encounters feature new phase transitions, additional attack types, and tighter timing windows for parries and dodges. The scaling is not simply a flat percentage increase applied uniformly to every enemy; instead, the game designers have tuned individual encounters to create new challenge profiles that test specific skills. Some bosses gain additional elemental resistances, others gain faster attack animations that require quicker reflexes, and still others introduce entirely new mechanics that did not appear in the base game version of the fight. This thoughtful approach to difficulty scaling ensures that NG+ feels like a genuinely new experience rather than a stat-inflated version of the same game.
New Dialogue Options and Story Details on Replay
One of the most rewarding aspects of playing Expedition 33 a second time is the opportunity to notice narrative details and access dialogue options that were not available during your first playthrough. The game includes several context-sensitive dialogue branches that only appear when the player has already experienced certain story events, effectively allowing the characters to reference knowledge that only the player and the character should possess at that point in the timeline. These additional dialogue exchanges provide deeper insight into character motivations, foreshadowing that is easy to miss on a first run, and subtle references to the game's dual-ending structure that take on new meaning when you know what is coming. Environmental storytelling elements also benefit from replay, as locations that seemed mysterious or confusing on your first visit make perfect sense once you understand the full scope of the narrative. Players who rush through the game on their first playthrough to reach the ending will find that a second, more deliberate NG+ run reveals layers of depth in the world-building and character writing that simply cannot be appreciated when you are experiencing the story for the first time and reacting to plot twists in real time.
Experiencing the Other Ending
For many players, the primary motivation for starting a New Game Plus run in Expedition 33 is the opportunity to experience the ending they did not choose on their first playthrough. The game's two endings, the Verso ending and the Maelle ending, represent fundamentally different philosophical conclusions to the story, and both are worth experiencing to fully appreciate the narrative's depth. The Verso ending involves the sacrifice of the painted world itself, a devastating but thematically powerful resolution that argues for the primacy of truth and liberation over continued existence. The Maelle ending preserves the painted world at the cost of lingering uncertainty, arguing that existence has intrinsic value regardless of its origin. Both endings are emotionally impactful, and the contrast between them on a second playthrough is striking because you carry the emotional weight of your first ending choice into your second. The game does not penalize you for changing your decision in NG+, and the final choice is presented with the same gravity and ambiguity regardless of what you chose before. For players who felt conflicted about their initial choice, NG+ offers a rare opportunity to see the road not taken and evaluate which conclusion resonates more deeply upon reflection.
Optimizing Builds for NG+ Difficulty
Building an effective party for New Game Plus requires a different approach than building for the base game, because the increased enemy stats and new attack patterns demand more specialized and efficient strategies. During your first playthrough, a reasonably balanced party composition with a mix of damage dealers, support characters, and defensive specialists is sufficient to handle most encounters. In NG+, the margin for error is significantly narrower, and you will benefit from creating more focused builds that maximize specific strengths rather than spreading your resources across multiple roles. Prioritize skill tree investments that improve your Break damage, extend the duration of Break states, and enhance your parry timing window, because these three mechanics are the foundation of efficient combat in the higher-difficulty NG+ encounters. Equipment should be selected with specific enemy types and boss encounters in mind, and the Tint system becomes even more important in NG+ because the percentage-based bonuses it provides scale in value as enemy stats increase. Consider creating multiple loadouts for different situations and swapping between them based on the enemies you expect to face in upcoming areas. Healing and resource management become more critical in NG+ because encounters last longer and enemies deal more damage, so invest in skills and equipment that improve your sustainability across extended fights.
Speedrun Considerations and Completion Time
Players interested in speedrunning Expedition 33 will find that New Game Plus offers a significantly faster path through the game's content because your overleveled characters and endgame equipment allow you to bypass much of the early-game grinding and resource management that slows down a first playthrough. The main story can be completed in NG+ in roughly 15 to 20 hours for players who skip optional content and focus exclusively on critical path objectives, compared to the 30 hours or more that a first playthrough typically requires. This makes NG+ an attractive option for players who want to see the other ending without committing another 30-plus hours to a full replay. The speedrunning community has also embraced NG+ as a separate category with its own leaderboard and route optimizations, exploiting the carried-over equipment and levels to sequence-break certain encounters and bypass sections that are designed to gate first-time players. However, even if you are not interested in competitive speedrunning, the reduced completion time of a NG+ run makes it a more manageable commitment for players with limited time who still want to experience the game's alternative content and higher difficulty.
Is New Game Plus Worth It?
The question of whether New Game Plus is worth playing ultimately depends on what you valued most about your first playthrough of Expedition 33. If you found the combat to be the highlight of the experience and you want to test your skills against tougher, more complex encounters, NG+ is absolutely worth your time. The enemy scaling is substantial enough that even experienced players will find themselves challenged, and the new attack patterns and phase transitions in boss fights provide genuine novelty. If you were primarily drawn to the story and characters, the additional dialogue options and the opportunity to make the other ending choice provide meaningful new content that justifies a second run. The carry-over system ensures that you never feel like you are grinding through content you have already completed, because your accumulated power lets you move through familiar areas more quickly while still engaging with new mechanical challenges. The only players who may find NG+ less compelling are those who felt the base game was too long or too difficult to begin with, as NG+ exacerbates both of those qualities. For the majority of players who loved Expedition 33 enough to see the credits roll, New Game Plus is a well-designed and thoroughly rewarding extension of an already exceptional game.
A second playthrough means another 15 to 20 hours in the chair, so gear up accordingly. The Ghost Of Yotei Kawaii Grey Hoodie in storm grey is soft, breathable, and relaxed enough for marathon sessions. Consider it part of your NG+ loadout — it carries over between playthroughs too.
