Expedition 33 is a strong contender for Game of the Year 2025. It has borrowed a lot – but in an extremely good way.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has taken the RPG fan world by storm and has become a massive hit. Especially considering that this game is the debut work of Sandfall Interactive and many of its employees. Expedition 33 seems to evoke a lot of emotions in its players, combining fluid gameplay with a great story and wonderful art style.
The reason why all this works so well is that pretty much every mechanic in the game is “borrowed” – but in the best possible way.
Spoiler Warning: In this article, I will also touch on the story of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. If you haven’t finished it yet, there may be spoilers.
In the style of the Princes “Everything is just borrowed,” gaming veterans will recognize an overwhelming amount of parallels and inspirations that the game has drawn upon in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Especially Final Fantasy and the Persona series are hard to overlook.
The basic design of the game world, with an “overworld” where players can travel around to visit individual locations, also reminds one of RPGs from over two decades ago. The entire Final Fantasy series utilized this up to part 9, and many other JRPGs have also taken inspiration from this. In those games, players start out on foot and then gain access to more areas by ship and later by airship, allowing them to discover hidden places.
Unusually, Expedition 33 utilizes a turn-based combat system. This is considered “outdated,” so much so that even Final Fantasy has moved away from it in its later installments, opting instead for action. This is something that many fans dislike.
However, Clair Obscur didn’t rest on its laurels; rather, it combined everything with another extremely successful system: the Souls games. With precise time windows of only 150 milliseconds for parrying, players need patience, skill, and have to memorize combat patterns. This is challenging, but never overwhelming and always fair.
Moreover, Expedition 33 has meticulously ensured to remove all the things that annoyed players in Metaphor or Persona. If a battle doesn’t go according to plan, you don’t have to awkwardly die but can reload immediately and start over.
Save points are not rarely distributed; instead, the game saves every time you adjust the characters’ equipment in the menu in some way.
The skill system is also taken from Final Fantasy IX. The Lumina are basically a one-to-one adaptation of the Ability system. Equip items to gain passive effects, and after wearing an item long enough, you “learn” the passive effect and can activate or deactivate it using distributable points. However, in Clair Obscur, you don’t have to repeat this for each character.
Even the story heavily borrows from Final Fantasy
Finally, I want to touch upon the story. Because even though it is absolutely outstanding, complex, and heartbreaking, you can also find a lot of inspiration from Final Fantasy X here. Would you like a few examples?
In Final Fantasy X, people try to fight against a threat that periodically wipes out entire cities. Here, that is the beast “Sin,” which in Expedition 33 is represented by the painter.
In the end, it turns out that Sin is not just a villain (just like the giant painter), but Sin acts on behalf of someone else – just as the painter does.
If you destroy Sin, you aren’t just defeating a threat to the world, but obliterating an entire world and everyone living in it. The same applies to the painter, whose defeat (almost) wipes out all humans on the planet.
The protagonist’s father, Renoir for Verso and Jekkt for Tidus, starts as a villain who seems irrational, self-satisfied, and malicious. Only at the end does it become clear how much his family means to him.
One of the protagonists in both games (Tidus and Verso) does not even exist. While Tidus is only a “dream of the past,” Verso is merely the painted reflection of a memory of the real Verso, who has died. Breaking the cycle and defeating the antagonist leads to the protagonist’s death.
I could go on like this for a long time. Almost every significant “story beat” also appeared in a modified form in Final Fantasy X.
Borrowed, improved, and created a masterpiece
I don’t mean all these points as criticism. The way Clair Obscur combines all these elements – from the story to the combat system and atmosphere – and creates something new out of it is nothing short of phenomenal. I would almost call this the “Blizzard principle,” where successful systems are adopted and refined until they are nearly perfect. Sandfall Interactive has clearly succeeded in this with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
I am very grateful to the development team for drawing inspiration from so many classic JRPGs of the Final Fantasy series and combining them with modern mechanics from action games like Dark Souls or Elden Ring.
During the roughly 50 hours of gameplay, I felt like I was 20 years younger again. As if I were exploring a world that captivated me as much as Final Fantasy X did back in the day, where every single level was a work of art, full of secrets to explore and understand.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has taken this nostalgia, forged it into a new visage, and created a masterpiece that I thought would no longer come in today’s gaming world. It has very few ideas that are truly “new.” Only the combination of all the game elements has not been seen in this form. That is enough. That, and the palpable passion of the developers in every minute, that they have created a game that they themselves want to play.
Expedition 33 is already for me the game of the year and one that I would return to very, very, very often. This will be my new “comfort” game, the one I refer to every 1-2 years when I want a weekend to myself and just want to have a good time without getting annoyed by how frustrating modern games can be in many ways. Thank you for that. This game has been a true enrichment for my life.
Even if I overlooked many secrets at the beginning…
