Clair Obscur director: ‘The prejudice against turn-based RPGs isn’t completely gone’
Guillaume Broche believes the genre became “uncool” when the HD era started
The creative director of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 says there’s still a prejudice against the turn-based RPG genre.
Despite the commercial and critical success of Clair Obscur, Guillaume Broche told Automaton that he believes his game and others like Persona are exceptions to the rule, and that there’s still some way to go until JRPGs become as popular as they used to be.
“I could talk about the prejudice forever,” Broche laughed. “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, [they] started being considered ‘uncool’.”
He added: “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.”
Broche also stressed that the addition of moves such as parrying and dodging in Clair Obscur were purely a design choice and weren’t added to appeal to players who didn’t like turn-based RPGs.
“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 explained. “We just did it because we wanted to do it.”
In another snippet from the same interview published earlier this week, lead programmer Tom Guillermin said there were no plans to expand the size of Clair Obscure studio Sandfall Interactive despite the game’s success.
“I think that, for now, I’d prefer working as a small team,” Guillermin explained. “I’m not sure how big ‘an ideal team’ would be, but when it comes to making a full-priced turn-based RPG, I believe that the team we have now is just the right size.”
33 days after its release, Expedition 33 achieved 3.3 million copies sold, a sales milestone so oddly fitting that its studio had to promise on social media that it was real.
The studio has also received praise from Death Stranding creator Hideo Kojima, who has said the French studio’s smaller team size is “ideal”.
