Uh-oh, is the rest of the world making JRPGs better than Japan?

Japan Times

7 days ago

Hailed as 2025's first bonafide game-of-the-year candidate, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 released on April 24 from out of absolutely nowhere. More surprisingly, its gameplay and narrative, heavily influenced by Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs), were crafted by a team with little to do with Japan at all.
Developed by French studio Sandfall Interactive, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 sets the player in a Belle Epoque-inspired world devastated by an enigmatic apocalypse that annually culls survivors of progressively younger ages. As the game begins, the lone bastion city of Lumiere gathers to bid farewell to all 33-year-old residents as well as Expedition 33, the latest in a long line of doomed task forces charged with traveling to a distant continent where, it's believed, lies a solution to the deepening crisis.
You'd be right for thinking none of that sounds particularly Japanese, but make no mistake: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a JRPG, a genre that has outstripped the geographical limitations its name might suggest, but it's quite possibly the best JRPG of the decade to date.
So what even is a JRPG? In the 1980s and '90s, a cut-and-dry definition of 'role-playing games made in Japan' sufficed, but the gameplay mechanics established in this era — turn-based combat, an overworld punctuated by smaller dungeons and recruitable party members often differentiated by specializations like physical damage, magic-wielding or healing powers, etc. — came to define the genre as a whole.
Aesthetics and narrative style also developed their own JRPG niches. The former increasingly took on anime-influenced character designs and voice acting idiosyncrasies, and the latter came to embrace predefined stories (as opposed to ones that change based on player choice) of ragtag groups of ostensibly ordinary adventurers drawn into world-altering struggles with kings, demons, gods and more.
The tricky thing is that none of these elements are unique to JRPGs as a genre, and if one or more of them are missing, that doesn't necessarily disqualify a game from the label. More often than not, what separates a Western-style RPG like Baldur's Gate 3 from a JRPG like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 — both developed by non-Japanese studios — is an 'I know it when I see it' litmus test, as ambiguous in some cases as it is foolproof in others.
In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's case, I see a JRPG when I look at this game, which raises a more pressing question than a debate over what is or isn't a JRPG: Why aren't Japanese developers cranking out the type of games that once made the genre the source of some of gaming's best efforts?
While developers outside of Japan are making games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, some of the pillars of the country's domestic JRPG scene are focused on remakes and remasters. |
SANDFALL INTERACTIVE
By critical metrics, the last truly great Japanese-developed JRPG was 2016's Persona 5 (with honorable mention to 2019's Kingdom Hearts III). Last year's Metaphor: ReFantazio was an admirable stab at a new story and setting from former Persona devs, but otherwise, the domestic JRPG scene has since become dominated by remasters and remakes. Industry giant Square Enix is preoccupied not only with sticking the landing on the third and final installment of its multipart remake of 1997's Final Fantasy VII, but it's also working on a remake of the original Dragon Quest (1986) and Dragon Quest II (1988) — following up a similar reworking of Dragon Quest III (1988) released earlier this year.
This is hardly a problem specific to Square Enix. Over at Nintendo, Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition released in March, remaking the 2015 game of the same name (setting aside the discussion of whether a 10-year-old game needs a remake at all).
It's not that these remasters and re-releases make for objectively bad games, but they do little to move JRPGs as a genre forward. The plucky studios of Japan's past have since become or been subsumed into giant corporations, whose inexorable profit motive rewards commoditization of nostalgia over creative and financial risks aimed at the future.
Meanwhile, developers outside Japan continue to experiment with the genre. In 2022, German developer Matthias Linda released Chained Echoes to critical acclaim, and in 2023, Sea of Stars, developed by Montreal-based Sabotage Studio, drew similarly high praise. These games were small in graphical scale, but they were original efforts that drew inspiration from JRPGs' earlier eras instead of repurposing and repacking them.
Now, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has set a new high-water mark in modern JRPGs. The next mainline Dragon Quest game is still at least a year or two away from launch, and the Final Fantasy franchise has no releases planned for 2025. So if Japan is to answer the call set down by France's triumph, it just might have to be a daring unknown, a tried-and-true genre trope, that puts Japan-made JRPGs back on the map.