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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Is Great, But Its Popularity Raises Big Questions About How We View Japanese RPGs
When I first saw it at the 2024 Xbox Games Showcase, I was surprised to see a game from a French developer with the photorealism of Western RPGs and mechanical stylings of Japanese ones. Its polished, cinematic trailer gave the impression of a AAA game, even though I'd never even heard of Sandfall Interactive at the time.
Clair Obscur moved mountains. Despite its launch on the same weekend as Oblivion Remastered, it sold 500,000 copies within 24 hours and 1 million after three days. It's still maintaining the discourse and curiosity of the games community months later--something that you'd think only a title from a more experienced studio could do. It's all for good reason, of course--it's a great game. We even rated it a 9/10 in our Clair Obscur review.
In many ways, its critical and commercial triumph has been encouraging. We should have a wide range of RPGs made by people from different backgrounds, and we should have more turn-based RPGs. However, Clair Obscur's success also magnified criticisms of Japanese turn-based games, only some of which are deserved. Finally, the haters said, a turn-based RPG that is actually good--as if those don't already exist.Continue Reading at GameSpot
