criticizing expedition 33's fencing postures

17 May, 2025

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a French RPG whose elevator pitch is "what if Persona was a Dark Souls game", except it actually rules. It has the thing you love¹ about Dark Souls combat (precise windows for dodging and parrying attacks), but also it's turn based. It also has some phenomenal storytelling and looks gorgeous, and I'm enjoying it very much, but none of that is important. What's important is, they gave one of the characters a French smallsword, and her fencing posture is bad. Apart from the name of one of the very first party members you recruit, there are no story spoilers in this post; there will be some screenshots that don't really tell you anything (mostly some random cosmetics I found around the time I took these screenshots), and I will be giving the names but not the effects of in-game mechanics.

This image is from the official website's Cosplay Guides, which is a super neat thing they have. Please ignore the bit of arm.

I've been studying classical French foil for the past ten years--or, put another way, in this game set in Belle Époque France, I've been studying the fencing that they were teaching in Belle Époque France. The smallsword is an evolution of the rapier--it's smaller and lighter, with a less developed guard, because its intention is to be a civilian weapon that could be worn daily.² It is a point weapon exclusively, unlike the rapier, which was primarily a point weapon but still occasionally used cuts. It's also to my mind the most distinctively French weapon historically, so it's a pretty good pick for a game from a French studio depicting a fantasy France.

The foil was the training weapon for the French smallsword (other students at the salle study smallsword, also, but I do not, though I do fence them with some regularity); later on, the French school would develop the French dueling sword³, which is the weapon you probably know as the epee. And I must stress that I am far from an expert in any of these weapons; any mistakes in this analysis are, of course, my own.

The image above shows the weapon Maelle starts with. The design is clearly inspired by the French smallsword (especially the figure eight shell and the knuckle bow), so, though some websites have identified her weapon as a rapier, I think this stems more from a lack of familiarity with terms than anything else. It does have some rapier-like embellishments to the design, but that's not uncommon in smallsword hilts.

This is a screenshot from the game.

Maelle has a number of stances she cycles through. This one is what the game calls Stanceless; it seems to me inspired by the position of à plomb, which is a ready position taken before a fencer has assumed their guard, or otherwise when fencing is not occurring. The position is not quite right--in à plomb the feet should be touching, with the front foot facing forward and the rear foot perpendicular to that at a ninety degree angle--but that seems to be the inspiration. The problem, of course, is that this is not a fencing posture; one neither attacks nor defends from à plomb. There are no contexts when Maelle is in this stance where she should not already have formed her guard, and thus be ready to parry or attack.

This is a screenshot from the game; I took it from menus instead of from a combat, because this one appears in menus and it looks cleaner. I'm now sort of regretting not also getting a normal one but it's fine.

This one is called Offensive Stance (it's also the stance she uses on the weapon select screen). Here she is standing with her weapon pulled back, her off hand forward; I suspect the idea is that with the weapon pulled back you have more room to really pivot forward and put all your weight into an attack, but this position is nonsense.

One of the primary advantages of a point weapon versus a slashing weapon is the speed with which you can attack--the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, after all, and an attack with a point weapon is just a straight line, unlike the curves necessary to make a cut land. One of the other advantages is reach; you can safely attack from much further away with a thrust than with a cut. This posture sacrifices both of those advantages.

You're also not actually going to get any mileage out of the "added power" that comes from pivoting forward. The force of your lunge is derived from your structure; proper structure allows you to transfer all of the force of your body being propelled forward in a lunge into the point as it lands. All the things video games always do to make a lunge look more meaty--the jabs and the big windups--break your structure and make that transfer of energy less efficient.

It also sacrifices the ability to defend; parries are ideally taken on the forte of the blade (the section nearest the hilt) because that is where the fencer's leverage is strongest; as you can see here, Maelle's forte is behind her head, and she is presenting her foible to the opponent--the part of her blade where her leverage is weakest, and where an opponent could easily move the blade aside.

Her offhand being extended forward like this, while it looks cool, also makes very little sense without an offhand weapon. While the off hand is used occasionally in smallsword, it was never, to the best of my knowledge, fenced with an accompanying weapon--there is no smallsword and dagger or smallsword and buckler or smallsword and cloak.

(Amusingly, if you just put the sword in her left hand, and kept both her hands where they are, this would be a very normal position: the weapon extended to threaten an attack, the off hand is about where it would be in the traditional French posture.)

This is a screenshot from the game.

This is the Defensive Stance. I want to first make note here of how she has tucked her off hand behind her back; while this is not the traditional position for the off hand in any weapon I am familiar with, it does, at least, make sense.

In classical sabre fencing the off hand is placed on the hip, to keep it out of the way (but still nearby in the event it is needed for an action which uses the off hand); in a few weapons (poignard and rapier come to mind), the off hand is kept slightly forward to facilitate using it to parry or disarm your opponent; in foil, smallsword, and epee, the off hand is raised behind the head, rather like Maelle's main hand in the Offensive Guard. This is done to facilitate faster recovery from lunges; in a lunge, the hand and arm are thrown back, and when recovering the arm is returned to this position. So while I would expect Maelle to be placing her offhand more traditionally, the fact that she is at least doing something with it to keep it out of the way and make it less of a target makes sense.

What doesn't make sense is the position of her sword. This is not a guard position. It is once again behind her, so in order to defend she will need to move it forward to intercept an attack; the point is not threatening a riposte, and without the threat of a riposte you do not have a defense.

This hand position seems to be inspired from one of the positions that occur during the foil's salute (I think the smallsword also, but that uses a different salute and I don't know that one, so despite having seen it countless times I can't tell you for certainty), in which the hand is brought up to approximately the height of the chin, the blade perpendicular to the ground, before continuing with the salute. And notably in the variation of this stance she adopts whilst using the Aim button, she holds the weapon in front of her in a pretty close approximation to that position. But with the Defensive Stance the weapon is at a bit of an angle and her hand is behind her head, not in front of her face, so if that is indeed the inspiration they have clearly made some adaptations.

This is a screenshot from the game.

I'd also like to take a look at her legs, here. (Not in the one I just posted, in the original one. Sorry.) It's possible that it's just ten years of training talking, but I find it profoundly difficult to lunge or do any footwork at all if my front foot is not aimed at my opponent, but here we see her front foot is just kind of off at a forty-five degree angle.

Note also how she is standing upright. In the en garde posture the feet are about shoulder width apart and the knees slightly bent; most of the weight in foil and smallsword is on the back leg, which facilitates the lunge. Here she is standing mostly upright with her feet fairly close together--not an ideal position for doing footwork. It is possible that this particular stance was inspired by the instructor's posture--her feet are still angled wrong for it, but it's a possibility. In the instructor's posture⁴ the body is much more upright and the off hand is placed on the hip. (That said, the instructor's posture, I'm fairly certain, is primarily that way for the comfort of the instructor, not for any advantages it has to offer, but that's speculation on my part; I've never asked.)

This is a screenshot from the game.

This is the stance the game calls Virtuose Stance. This is fairly self-evidently some Weird Fantasy Nonsense--it looks like she's playing a violin or something--so I'm not going to delve into it here, but in case you were wondering: no, this isn't a thing.

This image is from this Reddit post by AmsaiBros, whose whole deal seems to be making these cool miniatures.

So this is actually the image that first made me want to write this. While this image is of a kitbashed Hero Forge figure someone on Reddit made [put a link here], this is the posture Maelle adopts when she transitions into Defensive Stance--she just needs to rotate her arm down and she's there. On its surface it looks somewhat better--her point is still aimed at her opponent, so she is a threat--but this hand position is nonsense.

It's not immediately obvious why--go ahead and adopt that pose without a weapon in your hand, and I think you'll probably feel like this isn't too bad. But look where the sword is extending. How can you attack from this position? You can't just freely rotate your arm, as you could when you simply had an empty fist--the blade could hit you in the face, which is rather suboptimal. Basically any hand position on your outside is very awkward to get to from here; you could probably make an extension into your high inside line without too much awkward rotating, but it still feels pretty bad; and even then, that's awkward rotating that takes time, and control of time is everything in fencing.

I also want to take a look at how she is holding the weapon here, and first I must here apologize: I don't know if this is a faithful reproduction, or if it is either the kitbasher's interpretation or a limitation of the tools they have (I know nothing about this art form, but I must say, this miniature is pretty spot on, this person does some awesome work), but recall what I just said about how time is important in fencing? Part of how you gain more time is by decreasing the size of your actions, and the way you do that is by using your fingers to manipulate the point, rather than your wrist. You can't do that if you're holding the weapon like this.

I must point out that in the screenshots I have of her other postures, she mostly seems to be holding the sword correctly or correctly-adjacent, but it seems that she isn't in the screenshot I grabbed of the Offensive Stance. This makes me suspect that the animators maybe tried, as I did, to accomplish some of these positions while holding the weapon correctly and found it, as I did, to be exceedingly awkward, so the rule of cool won out and they just shifted her to holding it like a baseball bat for those.

This is a screenshot from the game.

I've seen this one a few times but it's an action pose after a lunge of some variety, so getting a screenshot is difficult; sorry about the low quality here. This lunge looks backwards. That is: it looks like she has done a lunge in the other direction, with her left hand leading, and has turned around to stab someone behind her with the sword in her off hand. You can sort of see from this posture how she has to kind of contort herself in order to get the reach that should be effortless from a lunge position.

Her offhand is also wrong here--after a lunge the palm should be facing up, and the arm should be relaxed and fully extended, not tensed and slightly curled as it is here.

I could go on for quite a while about this, but I think I'll leave it there. If it isn't obvious, this is, of course, meant to be light-hearted--it's a fantasy game; she has attacks that set people on fire, and in one of the stances she's holding the weapon like a violin. She is capable of parrying attacks from giant monsters. This game is phenomenal and it's not diminished by the fact that its depiction of smallsword fencing is much more fantastical than it is realistic.

But I love fencing, and I enjoyed having the opportunity to talk about some of these concepts here. Most of this is, of course, pretty basic, but fencing is one of those art forms where you can spend a lifetime refining the fundamentals.

I don't think it's likely I'll find the ability to get high quality footage of any of the animations, but if I somehow get my hands on that, and if there's something interesting to be found in there, I might do a followup to this. But until then, thanks so much for reading. I'll see you next time.

#essay