Expedition 33 Pro Tips: 15 Tricks That Separated My First and Second Playthrough

My first Expedition 33 playthrough took 28 hours. My second took 14. Same difficulty, same ending path. The difference was 15 things I learned the hard way.

Some of these are combat optimizations. Some are menu tricks the game never tells you. Some are routing decisions that save hours of backtracking. None of them are in the tutorial.

1. You Can Swap Characters Mid-Fight Through the Menu

Not through the normal character swap button — through the actual pause menu. Go to Party, select a different character, and they swap in immediately. The game treats this the same as a normal swap, with the same cooldown. But it works even if your current character is stunned or locked in an animation.

This is the difference between wiping to a bad matchup and recovering mid-fight. Boss about to use an attack your current character can't handle? Pause, swap, resume.

2. The Camp Weapon Upgrade Path Is Better Than It Looks

Camp weapon upgrades seem incremental — small stat bumps, nothing flashy. But every third upgrade tier (levels 3, 6, 9) adds a new property to the weapon. These properties stack. A +9 camp weapon has three bonus properties on top of raw stats, which often puts it ahead of unique weapons from side quests.

The trade-off: camp upgrades use rare materials that are genuinely limited. If you spread upgrades across four characters, nobody's weapon hits tier 3 properties. Pick one or two characters and go deep.

3. Healing Items Restock at Flags, So Use Them

I hoarded healing items on my first playthrough like a dragon sitting on gold. Finished the game with 30+ unused salves. They restock every time you rest at a flag. There is literally no reason to conserve them.

Use healing items mid-fight. Use them between fights. Use them before boss encounters to top off when you're at 80% HP. The game expects you to use them — that's why they restock.

4. Turn Off Motion Blur Immediately

This sounds minor but Expedition 33 has aggressive motion blur that makes reading enemy attack tells harder. The game looks better without it and you'll spot parry windows more consistently.

Settings > Display > Motion Blur: Off. While you're there, set FOV to at least 90. The default FOV is weirdly narrow and you'll miss peripheral enemy attacks.

5. The Tutorial Area Has a Hidden Weapon

After the tutorial, when you're dropped into the first hub, don't leave immediately. Turn around and go back through the tutorial path. There's a chest near the practice dummies that wasn't there during the tutorial. Inside is a weapon with slightly better stats than your starter gear.

It's not a huge upgrade, but in the early game every stat point matters. And it's free.

6. Free-Aim Headshots Cancel Enemy Actions

I said this in the hidden mechanics guide but it bears repeating: headshots stagger. Leg shots slow. Arm shots reduce damage. This applies to most enemies including some bosses.

The AP cost is the same regardless of what you target. If you're just shooting center-mass, you're paying the same AP for worse results.

7. Don't Sell Anything. Ever.

There's a merchant who buys items. There's no reason to sell anything. Crafting materials are needed for upgrades. Old Pictos can be leveled for their Luminas even if you never plan to use them. Consumables are always useful.

The gold you get from selling is negligible and there's nothing worth buying that you can't afford from monster drops alone. Just hoard everything.

8. The Best Farming Spot Is Chapter Five

If you need Pictos XP or specific enemy drops, the best farming spot is in chapter five, in the zone right before the boss arena. The enemies there give the best XP-to-time ratio, and the flag checkpoint is close enough that you can clear, rest, repeat in about three minutes per cycle.

Don't bother farming before chapter five. Enemy XP scaling makes earlier zones inefficient, and you'll naturally level enough through story progression.

9. Read Every Loading Screen Tooltip

Expedition 33 hides mechanical information in loading screen tooltips — the kind that flash by in two seconds if you're on a fast SSD. On PS5 or a good PC, you might never see them.

If you see a tooltip you haven't read before, screenshot it or write it down. Several hidden mechanics (counter-attacks cleanse debuffs, Omen Card type bonuses, body part targeting effects) are only explained in loading screen tooltips.

10. The Paintress Backstory Is in Optional Dialogue, Not Cutscenes

The main story cutscenes give you the broad strokes of the Paintress lore — cursed numbers, monolith, extinction cycle. But the details of why the Paintress exists and what the previous 32 expeditions discovered are in optional NPC dialogue and camp companion scenes.

If you're interested in the lore, talk to every NPC in every hub, and rest at camp after every major story beat to trigger companion conversations. The narrative depth is there, but the game doesn't force-feed it to you.

11. Expert Difficulty Changes Boss Patterns, Not Just Numbers

Most games' hard modes just inflate HP and damage. Expedition 33's Expert difficulty actually changes some boss movesets. Bosses gain additional attacks, existing attacks have shorter telegraphs, and some phase transitions trigger earlier.

I didn't realize this until my Expert playthrough when the chapter two boss did an attack I'd never seen before. If you're struggling on Expert, it's not just a numbers problem — you're facing different fights.

12. The Option to Skip Cutscenes Is Per-Scene, Not All-or-Nothing

If you're replaying for trophies or NG+, you can skip individual cutscenes without skipping all of them. The skip button prompt appears after the first few seconds of each scene. This matters because some cutscenes contain decision points. Skipping the whole scene skips the decision. Skipping per-scene lets you fast-forward through the parts you've seen while still making choices.

13. Achievement/Trophy Cleanup Is Best Done Post-Game

Expedition 33 doesn't have true missable achievements — or at least, anything missable is tied to content you can access via chapter select after completing the game. Don't stress about trophies on your first playthrough.

The full platinum/completionist run takes 30-40+ hours according to trophy tracking sites. Most of that is cleanup after the credits roll.

14. The Best Sound Design Cue Nobody Talks About

Every enemy type has a unique audio cue just before their unblockable attack. It's not the red flash — it's a specific sound effect. Once you learn each enemy's audio cue, you can dodge unblockables before the red flash even appears.

This is especially useful against bosses with fast red-flash attacks where the visual tell alone isn't enough time to react. The audio comes slightly before the visual.

15. Your Second Playthrough Will Be Half as Long

This isn't a tip so much as encouragement. If you're debating whether to replay on Expert or go for the other ending path: do it. The game is dramatically faster when you know the routing, skip cutscenes you've seen, and understand the combat systems.

My second playthrough, going for the alternate ending on Expert difficulty with full knowledge of builds and routing, took 14 hours. That's with all side content and the optional superboss. The game respects your time on replays in a way most RPGs don't.

A bonus thing: there's apparently a third ending that requires specific conditions across multiple playthroughs. The community is still figuring out the exact requirements. I haven't seen it myself. If you find it, maybe let the rest of us know.