In 2023, Final Fantasy Final Fantasy XVI producer Naoki Yoshida indicated his distaste for the term JRPG, saying that Square Enix doesn’t go into its games trying to make a JRPG. “We go into them thinking we’re going to create RPGs,” he explained.
Before this, Nintendo producer Hitoshi Yamagami, who worked with MonolithSoft on Xenoblade Chronicles X, echoed similar sentiments, saying, “I feel like we just make RPGs, I don’t need anyone to add the ‘J’, personally.”
In these two instances, there is both a direct and an implied acknowledgement that although there can be positive connotations attached to the label, “JRPG” can also feel limiting and discriminatory.
Over time, the term JRPG has felt more and more outdated, partly because Japanese developers have expressed opposition to the pigeonholing of their art, and partly because the characteristics that were typically used to demarcate a JRPG have become less and less exclusive to Japanese developers.
Final Fantasy, in particular, underwent a noticeable evolution in style and substance that made it more appealing to western audiences–Shonen-esque narratives have given way to stories aimed at older audiences, and a shift away from turn-based battles has given combat a more action-oriented flow.
As new generations of people have stepped into the roles of creators and designers on games inspired by the Japanese titles they loved playing, the hallmarks of what made a so-called JRPG have broken out of any kind of geographical attachment they may have been saddled with.
There is no clearer example of this than Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a game that, by its developers’ own admission, is inspired by role-playing games developed in Japan, but was created by a small team of developers in France. It is a triumphant testament to the universality and potential of what those games offered then and still do now.
Why Clair Obscur Expedition 33 Is GameSpot’s Game of the Year 2025
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The framework of Expedition 33 can very easily be traced back to specific classics and iconic franchises, such as Final Fantasy 10 and 8; The Legend of Zelda; Kingdom Hearts 2; and the Saga series. However, it also draws from more recent games, such as Nier: Automata, Sekiro, and Dark Souls. But what makes Expedition 33 special is that all of its inspirations are brought together in a way that is unique to itself, its creators, and the time in which it was made and released.
Expedition 33 feels like an all-time classic role-playing game that has just been rediscovered. It shows where the genre could have gone had it not pivoted after Mistwalker’s Lost Odyssey. In that way, it is a love letter to an era of role-playing games that has been lost to time.
And at the same time, Expedition 33 is able to proudly stand alongside contemporaries thanks to its utterly bewitching storytelling, which deals with heavy subject matter such as grief, the value of life, and the perils of not being able to let go. It explores all of this with elegant writing and spellbinding performances that, together, make for profound emotional moments of empathy and understanding. It’s a game about death that, somehow, is also able to inspire hope and find humor amid its darkness.
This is all driven by a thrilling sense of adventure that pushes players to explore surreal environments as they go toe-to-toe with everything from shockingly powerful mimes to enigmatic divine entities with the ability to remove thousands of lives from existence with the stroke of a brush. Its turn-based format, reactive combat, and character development systems may be a combination of familiar ideas, but it’s all deftly married together in a way that makes it satisfying to engage with. At every step, carefully crafting roles and strategies is compelling, and the pure joy of perfectly timing a parry to survive impossible odds never dulls.
More impressively is how developer Sandfall Interactive does all this while also presenting the game with an unmatched style. Expedition 33’s otherworldly visuals give its setting a dreamlike quality, and the hauntingly beautiful soundtrack emphasizes the melancholic nature of the journey players go on. The studio triumphantly draws from French artistry and culture to provide a window into not just an unforgettable fantasy world, but the real world, too, and how it has shaped the people behind Expedition 33’s creation.
Like Yoshida and Yamagami, Sandfall set out to make an RPG that anyone can find value in experiencing. And what Expedition 33 became, and is about, proves that artistic expression doesn’t belong to a single group of people or a place, and that there is no such thing as a JRPG–there are just ideas that have the power to move and inspire people, and that can be realized in ways that feel deeply personal to and representative of those that bring them to life.
