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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 creative director Guillaume Broche has revealed another of the game's inspirations, but you'll need to know French to check it out.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 clearly has a lot of inspirations, with Verso's moveset being one big Devil May Cry reference, while Final Fantasy, Shadow Hearts, and Persona inspired its classical JRPG elements. And of course there's a good 40-odd years of JRPG and action game greats to be inspired by – even if the game that made Broche fall in love with the medium was Sega's 1988 stinker Altered Beast (definitely a guilty pleasure for some, no judgement).
In an interview with GameSpot, when The Legend of Dragoon's similar QTE-filled combat was brought up, Broche mentions, "I didn't play Legend of Dragoon before coming up with the QTEs (quick-time events) during skills. I learnt later that a game did something similar! There are also other inspirations like the Persona series, but also action games like Devil May Cry and Nier."
However, it wasn't just games that inspired Expedition 33. According to Broche, "One major inspiration is a French novel called La Horde du Contrevent." He explains, "It tells the story of a group of explorers – or an expedition – travelling across the world to find the source of the supernatural wind that sweeps across the world. Their tale, and the human stories of the team and their discoveries as they travel the world, were also an inspiration for us as we developed a story of our own expeditioners traveling across the world."
Of course, Broche would "recommend that anyone who's a fan of our story picks up this book" but adds, "I don't think it's been translated into English fully since it's so densely written with so much nuance in the French language. So I guess maybe fans should learn French, and then read the novel!"
