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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 developer Sandfall Interactive took inspiration from the anime adaptation of Fire Force when defining the sound style and effects for the game's combat system, as members of the audio team explained at GDC today.
During an audio post-mortem panel attended by GamesRadar+, audio lead and music designer Raphael Joffres, principal sound designer Maxance Playez, and technical and cinematic sound designer Olivier Penchenier reflected on the audio direction and production for the hit RPG.
Fire Force, adapted into anime by David Production based on the manga by Soul Eater creator Atsushi Ohkubo, got a special and somewhat surprising nod.
"Another strong influence was the anime Fire Force," says Playez. "Sound design by Jin Aketagawa and Yasumasa Koyama. Many sounds don't try to be realistic at all, and instead they behave almost like a musical element designed to impart power, rhythm, and impact."
The Japanese anime suits a JRPG like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and once you hear attack sound effects from the two works side by side, it's easy to notice the inspiration. In Fire Force, fantasy firefighters armed with fiery attacks and martial arts face off against monsters born of corrupted flames (to flatten a whole bunch of lore, anyway). Blows are often accentuated by slowdown and heavy bass, much like the weighty impacts of perfectly executed Expedition 33 combos and counters.
I spoke to Joffres and Playez about Fire Force after their panel. "He was listening to bass music before the game and wanted to bring bass music into the game," Joffres says of Playez. "I think it kind of got started as a joke, just showing some stuff from Fire Force, but they started to do it as a reference. We often joke about, with Guillaume [Broche], the creative director, we want more bass, always more bass, more powerful sounds. When they started to do it, craft some sound effects with this direction in mind, Guillaume was like, let's do more of that, and it shaped the direction of the game."
Playez says he hadn't actually watched Fire Force all the way through; he found the series through highlights or clips showing off the combat scenes.
"Because it was a JRPG, we tried to find a mix between Japanese sound design and European or American sound design, and we wanted to mix this," Playez explains. "When I started sound design with electronic bass music influences, I found a video about the sound design of Fire Force. And at this moment, I was like, it's exactly the same energy. So I showed it to Guillaume to see if he likes this kind of sound design, and we started to go in this direction."
"When Guillaume asked me to do some sound design, he always was pushing me to do something more powerful, more bass, more and more and more," Playez adds. "I thought I couldn't do more powerful. We started to go for something realistic, very powerful and realistic, and sub-based directly for a more powerful attack. You have classic attacks, gradient and counter attacks, these kinds of things, and we have more sub-based distort in this kind of sound to make the difference between the normal sound and powerful attack."
Playez speculates that Fire Force likely had some of "the same influences as me." When he found the anime during production on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, he says it helped cement that "it's possible to do something like a very sub and bass-heavy kind of design. Somebody already did it. So I think it was more confidence to go in this direction."
