During this year’s CEDEC in Japan, AUTOMATON had the opportunity to chat with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 creative director Guillaume Broche and lead programmer Tom Guillermin. Apart from discussing their future plans for the studio and views on other AA-developers, we asked the two developers how they felt about creating a turn-based RPG in a market dominated by action games. While many titles in the genre have performed well commercially, Broche feels that there is still prejudice revolving turn-based JRPGs.
“I could talk about the prejudice forever (laughs). Personally speaking, I think Japanese turn-based RPGs were super popular up until the Xbox 360 era. But around the time open-world games started getting more popular through gaming media, [JRPGs] started being considered “uncool” (laughs).” Broche goes on to mention the Persona series as one of the more successful examples of the genre, but suggests that JRPGs still have a long way to go in order to return to their original popularity. “While they do still sell a large number of copies, with the Persona series as a prime example, I feel like the prejudice against turn-based RPGs isn’t completely gone.”
Despite his concerns, Broche emphasizes that the deviations from the genre’s mechanics (like real-time dodging and parrying) in Clair Obscur weren’t attempts at presenting the game as “the cool” turn-based RPG. “It’s not like we added the parry system and built such a narrative experience because we wanted to avoid our game facing prejudice. We just did it because we wanted to do it.” Broche had the parry system in mind ever since the beginning of Expedition 33’s development. However, initial attempts to implement it didn’t go as planned. In the midst of this slump, Broche turned to Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, which he was playing at the time, for inspiration. “That is how the parry system you know now came to be,” he explains.
Of course, the inspirations for Clair Obscur were various JRPGs Broche has played throughout his childhood. In a past interview, he cited Final Fantasy VI through X, Shadow Hearts, Suikoden, the Atelier series and Lost Odyssey as just a few examples of these – but he singled out Persona 5 as the one title that heavily influenced the UI and camera work of his game. Rather than just imitating these influences on a surface level, he aimed to build upon them and create something new, which could be one of the reasons why Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 ended up being so successful while still embracing everything turn-based JRPGS stand for.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is available for PC (Steam), PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
Turn based was never the issue… Bad games and bad design led to decline, turn based was merely the scapegoat unfortunately