The runaway success of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been exhaustively documented by this point. But the game’s ecstatic reception by players came as a surprise not only because the game was made by a small (though not that small) team, but also because it’s a turn-based RPG at a time when the market is dominated by roguelites and soulslikes and real-time action, with even Final Fantasy shifting toward fluid, reaction-based combat systems in recent years.
This hasn’t gone unnoticed by Sandfall Interactive. Indeed, Expedition 33’s creative director Guillaume Broche believes this to be part of a much longer shift away from turn-based games. “I could talk about the prejudice forever,” Broche told Automaton Media. “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'”.
I think it’s worth pointing out that Broche refers specifically to JRPGs here, though you could easily argue the phenomenon affected western RPGs just as much, with most RPGs adopting some form of real-time combat from Baldur’s Gate onwards, though that came full-circle with Baldur’s Gate 3.
Indeed, turn-based combat has seen renewed interest on PC in the last decade thanks to the post X-COM flood of tactics games, which then bled over into RPGs. But most of the roleplaying big-hitters outside of the CRPG revival still rely largely on real-time combat.
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For his part, Broche points to the Persona series as an example of successful turn-based JRPG combat, though believes it’s still an outlier within the modern genre. “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.”
Oh, and Broche stresses that Clair Obscur’s inclusion of real-time parry and dodging into its otherwise turn-based formula had absolutely nothing to do with this perceived prejudice. “It’s not like we added the parry system and built such a narrative experience because we wanted to avoid our game facing prejudice,” he claims. “We did it because we wanted to do it.”
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