Following Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s overwhelming victory at The Game Awards 2025, game director Guillaume Broche talked about the title’s development in a three-way discussion with Denfaminicogamer and Hiroyuki Kobayashi, founder of Ender series developer Binary Haze Interactive.
During the interview, Broche touched upon Sandall Interactive’s philosophy when designing Expedition 33’s combat and balancing difficulty. Kobayashi commends the game for not hesitating to throw challenging enemies at players even early on in progression, comparing the approach to that of FromSoftware’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Interestingly, Broche himself considers this “a very Japanese” design choice.
“In Western games, you don’t often see an obviously overpowered boss placed early on. One of the reasons I love JRPGs is precisely this experience of challenging something and eventually overcoming it. Even if I’m told it’s impossible, I want to keep trying, even if it takes me three days. And when I finally win, I become overwhelmingly stronger. That feeling is irresistible.”
In this sense, the high-difficulty and optional bosses in Expedition 33 were deliberately designed under the assumption that the player will die at least once, learn, and then retry. The key to making this work, however, is for deaths to not feel frustrating for the player, Broche notes.
“The reason why dying feels frustrating in typical turn-based RPGs is because luck is often involved. For example, the boss might just attack the wrong character and there’s nothing the player can do, or the boss has a random behavior pattern that’s impossible to counter. Deaths like these lead to dissatisfaction among players.”
As such, Sandfall Interactive made a point of designing Expedition 33 so that players only died as a result of not taking advantage of patterns correctly, which is something they can learn and overcome, thus making the whole thing feel rewarding. Inversely, this also means Clair Obscur is technically “a game in which you can beat the final boss at Level 1,” as Kobayashi points out.
Broche confirms that it was indeed his team’s intention from day one to build the battle system around the vision of “a game that can be cleared without taking a single hit.” This approach also happened to act as an important “constraint” during development, helping the developers trim down any unnecessary mechanics.
“Traditional turn-based RPGs feature a plethora of mechanics, such as status effects, buffs, and debuffs. During the design phase, we first considered, ‘Can a boss using this mechanic be defeated without taking any damage?’ If the answer was no, we didn’t use that mechanic in the first place.”
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is available for PC (Steam), PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. A free “Thank You Update” with new quests, locations and, ironically, new bosses that are giving players a really hard time.
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