Final Fantasy fans have been begging for the series to return to its turn-based roots for years, and according to one analyst the success of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 probably has Square Enix feeling some regret over not catering to that niche sooner.
The biggest factors in Expedition 33's success are its lovable characters, great combat, and relatively low $50 price tag, as Rhys Elliott of Alinea Analytics tells GamesIndustry.biz. But he adds that "there was also an opening for a modern, realistic-looking JRPG" with a traditional battle system.
"Square Enix was reticent to do it with the Final Fantasy series," Elliott continues. "Now it's probably kicking itself. Expedition 33 has given RPG fans something they always wanted. If you asked Final Fantasy fans from the late '90s/early '00s what the ideal version of a JRPG should look like, it'd be something like this."
Back in 2022, Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida told GamesRadar+ that he understood the appeal of turn-based combat – after all, he came up alongside that style of gameplay just as series fans did – but he equally seemed to believe that action-based battles were a far better fit for games with realistic graphics.
"One thing that we found recently is that as graphics get better and better, and as characters become more realistic and more photo-real, is that the combination of that realism with the very unreal sense of turn-based commands doesn't really fit together," Yoshida said at the time. "You have this kind of strange gap that emerges."
Yoshida didn't attribute the decision to go all-in on action for FF16 to any sales directive, but there has historically been a feeling in the game industry that action games sell better than turn-based ones. Larian publishing director Michael Dose recently lamented how difficult it is to convince people that "your turn-based RPG will sell," but Baldur's Gate 3 certainly proved that there's still an appetite for that style of game. Expedition 33 is ably proving that the JRPG fandom's hunger is still alive, too.
According to Elliot, Expedition 33's sales are measuring up more than favorably against Metaphor: ReFantazio, the biggest turn-based JRPG in recent memory, and that game offers its own lessons on the power of old-school combat.
"One of the main selling points of a turned based battle system is the fact that players can take their time to think about the action they should take, and then in turn receive appropriate feedback based on those choices," Metaphor's lead battle planner Kenichi Goto told GamesRadar+ earlier this year, noting that games where you make "one wrong move and everything's lost" offer their own kind of thrill.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I hope the success of all these games helps to prove that there is, indeed, a market for turn-based RPGs, and not a niche one. I'm as desperate as anyone for Final Fantasy to return to its roots, but in the meantime there are still excellent games like Expedition 33 to fill the void.
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