The Japanese RPG genre so venerates its icons, like the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series, that new games in its tradition replicate rather than innovate. It took a studio halfway around the world, in France, to make a JRPG that stands out of those titans’ shadows — one so starkly novel in its world and systems that it tells a story you don’t want to put down.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the debut game from French studio Sandfall Interactive, achieves a bundle of superlatives. From the writing to the worldbuilding to the combat to the music, it’s easy to find aspects that are individually excellent. But more importantly, they weave together into a cohesive and thematically potent game that tells a mature story with confidence and style, packing a certain (forgive me) je ne sais quoi that immersed me in a world of passion and loss.

Expedition 33’s story explores a fantasy land at the mercy of a super-powerful being, the Paintress, who has been culling humanity once a year for generations. On a certain day, the residents of seemingly the only city left, Lumière (a devastated Paris, overrun with rubble and vines), bittersweetly gather to bid their loved ones adieu. They watch as, far off in the distance, the Paintress lowers a glowing, omnivisible number by one. Slowly, anyone that age disappears into dust, and humanity’s age limit is reduced again.

Lumière resists by sending armed groups of volunteers over the ocean into the wilderness every year to defeat the Paintress — and though they’ve been so far unsuccessful, the tradition lives on, populated by desperate believers and older soldiers choosing to use their little time left to challenge fate. 

Gathering a collection of plucky adventurers to take on God for the sake of the world is textbook JRPG, but the tones of most games in the genre oscillate between the puerile extremes of naive optimism and cynical nihilism. Sandfall Interactive’s story instead envisions characters embarking from a society fluent in despair and still taking action, channeling anxiety into a belief in resolute progress. Throughout the game, the main characters repeat their city’s mantras: “For those who come after,” and, “Tomorrow comes.” Earning meaning, even in a slowly constricting apocalypse.

Through the game’s commitment to its tone, its prism of beauties shines through. The plot, alternating between sublime wonder of a vibrant new land and brutal reckonings in a world without sympathies, is full of surprises. The music is tenderly emotional, with haunting piano and violin arranged by composer Lorien Testard and achingly, hauntingly beautiful singing by Alice Duport-Percier for an hours-long original soundtrack, as Expedition 33 producer François Meurisse told me. 

The wild, friendly characters you meet, the stunningly gorgeous environments, dappled with light and shadow, the truly excellent English voice cast — the game is a symphony of well-executed elements that combine into something new.

That alchemy of novelty leads to a feeling that’s rare among JRPGS, let alone games as a whole: Frequently along the way, I truly didn’t know what to expect next. For gamers jaded by tropes and tradition, a game grappling with death in uncharted territory is like water in a desert. 

All of which wouldn’t matter if the game wasn’t a riot to play.

Fighting against fate with soulslike turn-based combat

Unlike more open-ended RPGs such as this year’s Avowed and The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remaster or 2023’s excellent Baldur’s Gate 3, there isn’t any choice in how Expedition 33’s story goes — at least as far as I’ve experienced in a little over 20 hours of the game. Where you do get control is in the battle system, which provides some of the most interactive turn-based fights I’ve ever played.

That’s primarily due to the reactive capabilities built into the system. Players can press a button to dodge when enemies attack with a pretty generous window. Those with more confidence can try to parry attacks, and if done for the entire enemy combo, the character will counter for severe damage. It took me around a dozen hours to be confident enough in timing to successfully parry attacks, though you can reduce the difficulty or equip particular abilities to mitigate that. Later in the game, there are even more enemy attack mechanics.

The defense system was inspired by FromSoftware games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring, though there are also parts of the game inspired by Final Fantasy 10 and Persona 5, producer Meurisse told me. The latter is evident when switching between submenus in combat, which slightly shifts the camera view — “every button you click triggers some camera movement,” Meurisse said. 

The cast of characters you gather isn’t large, but each has unique skills and their own distinct mechanic that functions almost like a turn-by-turn mini-game to ramp up damage potential. For protagonist Gustave, attacking builds up charges to unleash in a massive lightning attack; Lune the mage gets elemental “stains” after casting spells that can be spent to empower later spells; the fencer Maelle switches between stances every time she uses a skill.

Some other aspects are more conventional, with a range of status effects that can be applied to enemies like a damage-over-time burn, a slow or marking the enemy to take higher damage. But players can also, through guns or unspecified magic, shoot enemies to target weak points. Each shot costs AP, the resource used to also power spells and skills, so it takes some restraint not to gleefully fire off volleys. 

Which is a lot to keep in mind already, but the Picto system escalates the complexity. Pictos are essentially bonus passive abilities that characters can equip up to three of at a time. After a handful of battles, they can unequip the PIcto and add its ability to their character, provided they have enough ability points to afford it. Juggling this budget is key to the late game and, incidentally, to breaking the combat altogether: Many of these Pictos offer bonus damage or effect if conditions are met, like they attack an enemy that already has a status effect. With scores of these Pictos picked up across the game, players can make builds and synergize between characters to rack up dizzying damage totals.

Mastering the deep combat and deeper Picto system is a joy for the RPG fan who loves diving into granular strategies, making short fights and long boss battles more engaging and interactive than most other JRPGs. It satisfies a crunchy part of the brain that delights in overclocking a system willingly ripe for abuse from the determined player. And it serves as both a distraction from and a harmony with the themes of the game — of companions soaked in a lifetime of death vainly endeavoring to stop it for “those who come after” until, inevitably, they’re cut down too.

Expedition 33’s dance with death and meaning

When I heard that a French game studio was taking on the venerable JRPG genre, I jokingly wondered how many berets, baguettes and mimes would make it in. Plenty, it turns out, as you can fight some surreal, optional and tough mime mini-bosses. Do so and claim ridiculous but chic outfits for the main characters wearing sunglasses, berets and long loaves of bread strapped to their backs like swords.

Expedition 33 embraces this oddness as a complement to its melancholy tone, and it’s all the richer for it. There’s something beyond the stereotypical French organ music and mimes that Sandfall Interactive admirably threw in — a desire to tell a story not just about a different world but how people muddle through its severe and unfair limits to reach some meaningful end anyway. In the absence of JRPG tropes like the plucky, annoying protagonist ticking off Joseph Campbell’s heroic checklist, Expedition 33 is populated with somber realists devoted to each other but expecting loss, all in dedication to a future they believe they won’t see. 

Expedition 33 was partly inspired by a 2004 French novel called La Horde du Contrevent (“The Horde of Counterwind”), Meurisse said, a cult classic telling the story of successive expeditions of people sent to find the origin of world-warping winds. Similarly, the Paintress ticking down humanity is an unknowable force at the world’s edge, and pushing back against her seems futile. 

Over the course of the game, I discovered journals from previous years’ expeditions, each trying a new way to succeed where others failed, some ending humorously or ignobly, others in a grim blaze of glory. But I found their bodies regardless, locked in a final pose, bronzed in a strange process as begets all humans venturing beyond their city — a marker for those who follow, and hopefully, surpass.

The strange landscape beyond Lumière is forever changed by the Fracture, a calamity that happened a century ago before the Paintress started ticking down humanity’s clock. In its wake, islands float in the sky and antediluvian buildings meld into dirt and rock. With the light dappling through the trees or around airborne archipelagos, I frequently stopped to stare at the landscapes, as beautifully alien to me as to the characters of the game. I’ve racked up over a hundred screenshots, mostly of areas where I was struck with awe.

In chatting with Meurisse, I asked him what was uniquely French about the game, and he listed the clothes and architecture inspired by France’s Belle Epoque era of the late 1800s and Art Deco stylings, which are featured in the gilded gold-and-black walls of the doomed buildings, long abandoned and entombed in the dirt beyond humanity’s reach. But there’s another perspective blended into Expedition 33 that is different and fresh — creating a world where its characters still bask in wonder even when swimming in death. 

I did, too.

Expedition 33 will be celebrated for its many excellences, and deservedly so. But above all, it tells an adult story about what’s left for us when the future is ripped away bit by bit — and why it’s worth fighting against the inevitable anyway. You never know what wonder you’ll get to see before the end.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is available now on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X and S.