Speedrunning Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is still a young discipline, but the community has already made serious progress in finding skips, optimizing routes, and pushing completion times lower than anyone expected. The game's hybrid combat system and semi-linear world design create unique challenges for speedrunners, since you cannot simply run past every enemy and you cannot skip most story beats. What you can do, however, is optimize the heck out of everything in between. Here is what the current speedrun meta looks like and how you can get started.
Any% vs 100%: Choosing Your Category
Any% is the most popular speedrun category for Expedition 33, and it focuses purely on reaching the end credits as fast as possible. This means skipping optional content, avoiding most side encounters, and making beelines between story objectives. Current world record times for Any% hover around four to five hours on Expeditioner difficulty, with NG+ runs dropping that closer to three hours thanks to carried-over skill trees and gear. The 100% category, which requires completing all side content, collecting every Lost Gestrals, Pictos, and Luminas, and clearing the Verso's Drafts dungeon, sits closer to twenty hours for optimized runs.
For new speedrunners, Any% on NG+ is the best starting point. You already know the story, you have the combat tools to handle encounters quickly, and the route is straightforward enough to learn in a few practice runs. Do not attempt a first-playthrough speedrun unless you are comfortable with the combat system and know the general layout of each area. The game's unskippable cutscenes mean you will be watching a lot of story content regardless, so the speed gains come entirely from gameplay optimization.
Combat Optimization and Boss Fights
You cannot skip combat in Expedition 33 the way you can in some RPGs, but you can minimize the time each fight takes. The key is aggressive Break system usage. Instead of slowly whittling down enemy health, focus all your attacks on breaking their defenses as fast as possible. A broken enemy is a stunned enemy, and stunned enemies take double damage for a full turn. On NG+, with maxed skill trees, you can often break a boss in one or two turns and then unload your highest-damage Gradient Attacks during the stun window.
Boss fights are the biggest time sinks in any speedrun, and optimizing them is where the biggest time saves come from. Each boss has a specific pattern that can be exploited. Some bosses have weaknesses that trigger faster Break, some have phases that can be skipped entirely if you deal enough damage during specific windows, and some have attack patterns with long recovery periods where you can safely queue up multiple abilities. Learn these patterns. Practice them until they are muscle memory. A perfect boss fight on NG+ can take under two minutes. A sloppy one can drag on for ten. The difference between a good speedrun and a great one is boss consistency.
Party Composition for Speedrunning
The fastest party composition for speedrunning is Gustave, Verso, and Lune. Gustave provides consistent single-target damage and the best Break output in the game. Verso brings heavy-hitting abilities that shine during stun windows and has utility skills that reduce encounter times. Lune's Fracture-zone-specific abilities are essential for the later portions of the game where those enemies become common. Maelle is a fantastic character for a normal playthrough, but her elemental abilities require more setup time per encounter than the raw damage approach that speedruns demand.
Tint loadouts matter too. For speedrunning, you want Tints that boost raw damage and Break efficiency rather than defensive or utility options. The game does not penalize you for running glass cannon builds if your parry timing is good, and in a speedrun context, killing enemies faster is always better than surviving longer. Equip your party with attack-boosting Tints, focus your skill point investments on damage-dealing nodes, and accept that you will occasionally die to bosses while learning the timing. Death in Expedition 33 respawns you at the last checkpoint without significant loading times, so resets are not punishing.
Route Optimization and Movement
Movement speed in Expedition 33 is consistent across all characters, so the main way to optimize routing is by minimizing backtracking and knowing exactly where each story objective is located. The speedrunning community has mapped out optimal paths for each chapter that avoid unnecessary exploration while hitting every required story trigger. Learning these routes is the first thing any aspiring speedrunner should do. There are a handful of sequence breaks that have been discovered, mostly involving clipping through geometry in specific locations, but Sandfall has patched the most egregious ones and the remaining skips save only seconds rather than minutes.
One often-overlooked speedrun tip is to skip the Verso's Drafts dungeon entirely on Any% runs. The dungeon was added in the free Thank You Update and is not required for story completion. It is a great experience, but it adds significant time to any run. Save it for 100% category runs or casual NG+ playthroughs. The current community leaderboards are hosted on the usual speedrun sites, and watching the top runners is the fastest way to learn the route. Even if you have no intention of competing, watching a skilled speedrunner dismantle the game's hardest bosses in under two minutes is genuinely entertaining.
Speedrunners learn something most players figure out late: comfort is performance. A scratchy hoodie will throw off your parry timing faster than any boss will. The Ghost of Yotei Grey Hoodie from Huzi Style is $44, ships worldwide for a flat $10, and stays comfortable through the hundredth practice run of the same route.
