How To Defeat Renoir In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Remember when you first got into the Paintress’ domain, and 10 seconds later, this old guy welcomes you by going full Thanos on 90-percent of your compatriots? Welp, here’s your first honest chance to get some goddamn payback. Renoir’s his name, being an absolute shithead is his game, and we’ll show you how to put him down for his dirt nap.

Preparation

Given this asshole was literally the first human being you saw when you got off the boat in Paintress Land, yes, you can assume this will be a rough fight; and what’s worse, this guy doesn’t even have the good taste to have an easily exploitable weakness. So, you’ll just have to make your own, and to that end, applying Burn is once again gonna be your hobby and job this whole fight, and you’re gonna want to build your team specifically around skills that can take full advantage of the status.

Maelle should be your ride-or-die by this point to begin with, and you’re free to use Spark or Rain of Fire to kick things off. You could also potentially shunt that responsibility off to Lune, who can also double as a healer—especially if you managed to earn Revive by now—but given her most powerful offense (Mayhem) requires a lot of build up, and life is real damn fragile in this fight, that could potentially be making things harder for yourself if you’re planning on piling on attacks. Still, if you go that route, Thermal Transfer can at least key off of the Burn status pretty well if you get a chance. Sciel strikes a bit of a better balance there—especially using Dark Harvest to keep the party topped off on health—but, again, that means keeping Maelle on Burn duty more than pure offense. Verso’s a safe bet here, especially since he can apply Mark with a little more force than the others, though if you’ve absorbed enough skills with Monoco, he can do some ridiculous raw damage if Renoir’s set up for it.

Aside from all that, if you have anybody who’s lagging behind on Agility, maybe use a Recoat to fix that, because Renoir getting to attack twice is a bad time for everybody involved.

Best strategies against Renoir

You know that Mike Tyson quote about how everybody’s got a plan till they get punched in the face? Amend that to “Everybody’s got a plan until Renoir makes a character disappear.” Because yeah, that’s a thing he likes to do from time to time, there’s no way to resurrect whoever he disappears, and depending on the character, it can throw your entire shit into upheaval. So yeah, consider that move your primary enemy for this fight. The good news is that it’s a Chromatic Attack, meaning you can punish the hell out of it if you get the timing right, which is parrying right before he lands his jump, then using the audio zooming noise for the Gradient Counter.

Past that, it’s not even so much that Renoir’s attacks are particularly complex, just that all of them hit hard, and the staggered timing on dodging them can be a royal pain. Mostly he likes hitting you with massive, team-wiping waves of Chroma. The basic version is the one he likes to spam more than the rest. Dodge that using the visual cue more than anything, wait till the gathered Chroma is as small as possible before dodging/parrying. The same goes for its larger, more devastating version that floats in the air. For that one, the first two blasts can be dodged the same way, but the second is Chromatic. Don’t make the mistake of letting the initial Chromatic slowdown effect psych you out, wait for the proper third blast.

His melee combo will annoy the piss out of you, just because the timing is so weird; but if you’re keen-eyed, you can see the tiny slowdown before each hit of the combo. Still, that attack’s not worth risking the tiny parry window, dodge through it all.

At about 50-percent health, Renoir will summon two “petals” to his sides. After about two or three turns, they’ll give him a big chunk of health back. If you’re confident in your damage dealing skills—if you have Sciel in your crew, that’ll help—then yes, try to take out both mirrors. If not, settle for destroying one and focus back on Renoir and try to mitigate the HP he’ll get back.

If you’re lucky, you can put an end to Renoir before he gets to this point, but if this fight drags on long enough, he’ll summon three giant masks in the sky which will fire energy beams at your team. The dodge/parry timing isn’t terrible—each mask will tilt twice, then fire—but the full attack is long, with each mask firing twice, then firing altogether as a finisher. But hopefully, you’ve already ended this fight before he gets to that point, especially if you can break him.

You’ll get a bunch of Chroma, a bunch of XP, and the Melarum sword for Maelle for your troubles. Now sit back and relax, Verso’s got some splainin’ to do.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is available now on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Windows PCs.