I had the chance to talk to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 producer François Meurisse during the 2025 Game Developers Conference, and the Sandfall Interactive COO got down to brass tacks about how the game draws on JRPG history, the types of stories that can be told with these mechanics, and how the ambitious Expedition 33 has more in common with previous JRPGs than it might seem.
Meurisse told me that the game came about because Sandfall founder and Expedition 33 creative director Guillaume Broche "was kind of starving for new turn based RPG games when he started development as a passion project in early 2019."
Coming on the heels of Persona 5's breakout success, and looking at his own yearning for more such games, Broche concluded there had to be a market for the turn-based, JRPG-style game he wanted to make. It's a sentiment that reminds me of how Larian took a chance on the first Divinity: Original Sin, or New Blood's mission to revive old genres beloved by its developers.
The first games I thought of when playing a preview build of Expedition 33 were Paper Mario and the Mario and Luigi RPGs, which spruced up an otherwise-old fashioned style of JRPG combat with timing-based minigames—Expedition 33 has a parry system for mitigating attacks, as well as the ability to free aim with ranged weapons to hit enemy weak points.
But according to Meurisse, project lead Broche was drawing on other sources of inspiration. "It was really funny, because I'm a big Nintendo player, so when Guillaume came up with the defense system, I was like, 'Okay, this is from Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door,'" he said. But Broche had never played, and actually only checked out the Nintendo classic after development had already started, on Meurisse's recommendation.
Meurisse said that Broche "was playing FromSoftware games at the time of development, and Sekiro in particular. He felt like, 'Oh yeah, what if I can get the feeling of the party in Sekiro, but into a turn-based game.'
"His influences are way more about Final Fantasy, Lost Odyssey, FromSoftware, and I'm much more on the Paper Mario, Earth Bound influences."
So even with Expedition 33's unique aesthetic and eclectic combo of mechanics, Meurisse sees it as having a lot in common with prior JRPGs, as opposed to being a big innovator or disruptor.
"I don't know if we're super innovative in our gameplay mechanics," he said. "I think not, but they're just assembled in a unique and clever way." That's not necessarily a bad thing: Everything that made Baldur's Gate 3 special can be found in other CRPGs—Arcanum, Fallout, Dragon Age, and Divinity, to name a few—but never under one roof before.
We finished by discussing the increasing variety in the types of stories and aesthetic presentation we've been seeing in JRPGs and JRPG-style games in recent years: Like a Dragon, Undertale, Persona 5, and Expedition 33 are some bigger-name examples, but there are also weirder, more experimental indies like Hylics, Felvidek, or Fear and Hunger. "If it's done with the right ideas and creativity and the right creator," said Meurisse, "I think any kind of gameplay can fit any kind of story." Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 will release on April 23, and you can wishlist it over on Steam.
