Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is many things—heartwrenching, impressive, a love-letter to the JRPG genre, and, uh, (checking my notes) kawaii, apparently. In case you aren't uncomfortably familiar with anime—or just don't know Japanese—'kawaii' means 'cute'.
That's per the creator of Kawaii Physics, Kazuya Okada (Okazu) who noticed that, during a Sandfall Interactive lecture, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 uses his engine. Primarily designed to make anime girls look cute while they do cute stuff, it's been weaponised by Sandfall to make Gustave's coat tails look super neat (thanks, Automaton). You can see a tech demo example of KawaiiPhysics below.
"It looks like Clair Obscur Expedition 33 uses KawaiiPhysics! Thank you so much!!!" Okazu wrote on X.
KawaiiPhysics, which "allows you to easily and cutely animate things that sway, such as hair, skirts, and breasts," is a labour of love on the part of Okazu. It's available for free on GitHub, and while you can pay for it, there's zero difference between the paid and free versions.
You can actually see all the projects KawaiiPhysics is used in on its website (at least, the notable ones) and it's downright widespread. Here's some highlights I picked out:
- Wuthering Waves, a gacha game, in which 'cute anime girls' is the benchmark for success.
- Stellar Blade, which tracks. So far, so normal.
- Princess Peach's Showtime? I mean, there's a lot of cute dresses in that game, makes sense
- Uh. Tekken 8. Which I guess has a lot of anime influences…
- Lies of P. I guess Pinocchio is sort of ikemen.
In all seriousness, given Expedition 33's limited budget and team size—not 'just 30 developers' as is often-repeated, but still downright petit when compared to most large studios—Sandfall's use of KawaiiPhysics makes total sense.
Grabbing a freely available physics engine strikes me as happening for the same reason Sandfall used big-name talent for its voice acting, then married it with equally talented (but lesser-known) mocap actors for its cutscenes. With some savvy editing (which makes its naturalistic conversations all the more impressive, given they're two performances stitched together) you can really get a bang for your budget. C'est sugoi.
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