When I put together my list of which 2025 indies to check out based on your 2024 favourites, I paired up Metaphor: ReFantazio (the best JRPG of 2024) with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (the most anticipated JRPG of 2025). That was the first time I had thought about Clair Obscur since it was featured in Xbox’s showcase at Summer Game Fest last year. But since then, I’ve been thinking about it a lot.
I hadn’t given Clair Obscur much consideration. I know there are a few people at TheGamer who have been excited for it for a long while, but it’s rare that I look ahead more than the current year for upcoming games, and rarer still for that courtesy to be extended to new games rather than sequels of things I already enjoy. And while I like JRPGs, I’ve seen just as many bad ones (maybe more bad ones) than I have ones I’ve adored. But something tells me Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 could land on the right side of this divide.
Clair Obscur’s Paintbrush Villain Is The Best Hook
Leaving aside games like Balatro that come out of nowhere, my two biggest surprises in the past two years have been meaty RPGs. Last year it was the aforementioned Metaphor, which I worried (thankfully incorrectly) might stumble as it tried to embrace high fantasy when Persona had nailed the cosmopolitan vibes, and the year before that it was Baldur’s Gate 3 as it took the world by storm.
The pattern won’t necessarily continue this year, and even if it does it might not be Clair Obscur – could Fable finally emerge? – but that does make Clair Obscur worth paying attention to. And I have to admit, I’m not sure I’ve been paying enough attention so far. All I really knew was that it was a turn based JRPG (and it describes itself as such despite not being Japanese, so let’s not go down that rabbit hole again) with a Belle Epoque, which I’m secure enough to admit my brain defaults to ‘it looks like Lies of P‘.
I had no idea of the story, but having read up on it, that seems like the biggest hook. The reason it’s called Expedition 33 is because the villain of the game, the Painter, decides once a year to paint a number with her magic paintbrush (next up, 33), and everyone who turns that age in the next year dies. Or possibly everyone who is currently that age dies on the spot. The game’s advertising so far has not been entirely clear on how this works, but I suspect that is by design – it’s such a unique hook, and so different from dull world ending stakes or played out wars with gods that every third JRPG seems to revolve around.
Turn-Based Plus Action-Combat Could Be A Recipe For Success
There’s also more to the gameplay than I first realised. The turn-based menus have the sort of flair we see in Persona, an attitude that is sorely lacking elsewhere in the genre, but it also merges real time action combat into the mix, too. This makes it the inverse of Metaphor – where Metaphor has you start with action combat to gain an advantage for the turn-based battles, Clair Obscur has you mash buttons during turn-based attacks to increase your power, add more strikes, or deflect blows.
I promise I have played JRPGs not made by Atlus, there’s just a lot of touchpoints here.
Of course, these ingredients need some substance behind it. The flourishes with which quicktime events are presented (generally considered dated in gaming, despite offering an action-edge here) is reminiscent of 2024’s Flintlock, which shared a publisher with Clair Obscur (Kepler Interactive) and disappeared without a trace. We may find out the reason why few games have merged real-time combat with their turn-based framework is because it doesn’t quite fit.
However, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has rapidly risen up my most anticipated list for the year, even if there are some fears over how all these elements come together, as well as notable pitfalls for a smaller studio taking on a genre that is infamously sprawling in scope. With it set to appear in Xbox’s upcoming showcase alongside Doom, South of Midnight, and an unannounced game (maybe Halo?), it might kick off the year in style, and go from strength to strength from there.
- Released
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2025
- Developer(s)
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Sandfall Interactive