Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 didn’t invent Final Frenchtasy or the J’RPG: the newly dubbed subgenre has a long and complicated history
Sometimes all it takes to make a new subgenre is an apostrophe. With just one hardworking punctuation mark, the newly christened J’RPG describes a refreshingly French spin on Japanese turn-based roleplaying games, and players can’t get enough of its irresistible je ne sais quoi.
J’RPG is a particularly brilliant fit for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Sandfall Interactive’s tale of saving dark-fantasy Paris from a series of increasingly unhappy birthdays boasts whimsical mimes, gilded Belle Epoque architecture, and an English voice cast able to drop merde and putain like they’re in a Marseille rap battle. But Sandfall’s debut—undeniably, spectacularly, proudly French—is just the latest title to deserve the name J’RPG.
Last year’s Sea of Stars, which just released its free DLC Throes of the Watchmaker, was made by French-Canadian Sabotage Studios in Quebec. While you won’t spot Québécois famous landmarks like the Château Frontenac hotel recreated in pixel art to answer Clair Obscur’s crumpled Eiffel Tower, you will find Gaëtan Piment, a character who speaks entirely in the regional French dialect (there’s even a French Canadian language option), phoenix down replaced by poutine as must-have revives, and groan-worthy French puns whenever you discover a new enemy.
These J’RPGs may share Francophone origins, but they’re two sides of the same coin. Clair Obscur’s influences are 3D JRPGs: its combat systems, environment design and kaleidoscopic UI effects infused with the DNA of Final Fantasy 7–10, Lost Odyssey, and Persona’s PlayStation 2 and later entries. Sea of Stars looks further back to the 16-bit era, evoking the lush pixel art of Chrono Trigger and timed attacks of Super Mario RPG, with thoughtful modernisations to take the sting from bugbears like MP management and level grinding.
There’s a simple reason for that crucial difference: The Great JRPG Divide. Sabotage Studios’ Canadians grew up immersed in the SNES JRPG golden age. Due to the cost of translating text-heavy scripts to multiple languages, Sandfall Interactive didn’t. Europe, and other PAL regions like Australia, existed in a parallel timeline.
If you didn’t have a chipped console and an import-savvy retailer you were out of luck. We didn’t play Chrono Trigger and Earthbound on the SNES, we got them a decade later on the DS and Wii U. Our first Final Fantasy was number 7. Our first Dragon Quest was the cel-shaded eighth instalment on the PS2. Thanks to magazines, enthusiasts knew about these fabled videogames, but broader awareness was non-existent. Culturally we were cut adrift—like Clair Obscur’s city of Lumiere, tragically separated from the mainland.
Of course this meant when a wave of indie developers made nostalgic 16-bit JRPG homages, they came from North Americans inspired by the SNES JRPG canon we Europeans mostly missed. Californian Zeboyd Games made some pretty excellent retro JRPGs like Lovecraft parody Cthulhu Saves the World and space opera Cosmic Star Heroine in the 2010s. Shadows of Adam in 2016 played Conan-esque fantasy reasonably straight, but some like Omocat’s 2020 hikikomori horror RPG Omori pushed the genre towards its conceptual limits. With Threads of Time in the works from a Toronto-based team, the North American 2D JRPG homages are far from over.
French-speaking Europeans still left a mark on the 2D RPG scene, though. Thanks to its impressively easy-to-use nature, the 2D game engine RPG Maker had a strong Francophone community across both Canada and Europe in the mid 2000s. It’s just that without the formative impact of 16-bit classics Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, Dragon Quest, and Final Fantasy 1–6, European 2D games followed a different evolutionary path.
OFF, from the French-speaking Belgian team Unproductive Fun Time, became one of the French RPG Maker scene’s biggest successes in 2008, even admired by Undertale’s Toby Fox. This fever dream of an RPG has an unusual cooldown-driven combat system, plus an eclectic set of influences including Killer 7’s lurid fluorescent colour palette and Silent Hill 2’s disturbing monster designs. With a remaster due later in 2025, it’s another J’RPG to watch out for this year.
A more recent RPG Maker example came out in 2023. Black-and-white timeloop RPG In Stars and Time was made by creator Adrienne Bazir, whose French upbringing shows. Chrono Trigger would usually be the obvious reference point for a 2D timeloop RPG, but Bazir’s influences are instead Gamecube classic Tales of Symphonia, Undertale, and a game Nintendo denied both PAL and NTSC regions: Mother 3. The result, like OFF, is a true original, a moving and inventive experience, remixing the age-old ATB combat system devised by Mr Final Fantasy Hironobu Sakaguchi with an equipment system using memories from past runs.
Clair Obscur’s AA western take on the 3D JRPG stands out because it looks expensive in comparison. Recording every one of Gustave’s gallic shrugs in motion capture doesn’t come cheap, and presumably neither does his voice actor Charlie Cox. Perhaps another factor in its rarity is how Northern American developers gave the western JRPG a mixed reputation, with Ion Storm’s enjoyably barmy 2001 effort Anachronox and BioWare’s biggest non-live service regret Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood both considered failures. For me, it’s a point of pride that Europeans, locked out from much of JRPG history, were the ones to finally do the 3D era justice.
Back in the ’90s, it sucked being an JRPG fan in PAL regions. It felt like watching North America enjoy a party we weren’t invited to. Decades later, those quirks of regional distribution are producing wonderfully distinctive takes on a classic genre. The Great JRPG Divide may be over, but its influence is still with us—even if we’re still waiting for Xenogears to get that unbelievably overdue official release.
