Shuhei Yoshida says he told Clair Obscur studio not to call it a turn-based RPG, because it would put people off

Former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida says he advised the developer of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 not to promote it as a turn-based RPG.

Yoshida was speaking at a session during the Busan Indie Connect conference in South Korea, where he was discussing how developers can pitch their games to potential publishers.

As reported by 4Gamer, Yoshida was asked whether publishers cared about trends, and he replied that it depended on the company – those who publish games that are nearly completed are more likely to care about trends, whereas those who get involved early in a game’s development may focus on it less because a trend could be dead in a few years.

Yoshida then suggested that sometimes a publisher may want to go against the trend if the genre is a niche one, citing a discussion he had with Clair Obscur publisher Kepler Interactive as an example of this.

According to Yoshida, he played a demo of the game at the Game Developers Conference about two years before its release, and was impressed by its battle system and its combination of turn-based combat (similar to many JPRGs) and timing-based actions.

At the time, however, Yoshida said turn-based JRPGs were considered “old-fashioned”, so when he discussed the game with developers at Sandfall Interactive he advised them that the game was very well made but they shouldn’t call it a turn-based RPG because players might ignore it based on that term alone.

Instead, Yoshida says terms like “reactive turn-based battle” were used to make the game sound more appealing to those who may not necessarily be interested in JRPGs.

What makes a JRPG?

Before the game’s release, esteemed Japanese publication Famitsu wrote a lengthy write-up giving its impressions on Clair Obscur, describing it as “the best love letter from France to Japanese RPGs”.

“This title is one of those so-called ‘foreign-made JRPGs’ that have been influenced by Japanese RPGs, and I think it’s a masterpiece that has been crafted with a level of visual quality and scope that rivals the biggest titles in the genre”, the report read (via machine translation).

“I don’t intend to delve too deeply into the definition of JRPG here, but personally, I think the key difference lies in the fact that Western RPGs often focus on ‘role-playing’ within a given world, while Japanese RPGs prioritise the characters created by the developers driving the story forward.

“In that sense, this game is unquestionably Japanese in its RPG roots, yet it goes beyond mere imitation to create something uniquely its own, infused with the developers’ sense of French culture and art.”