Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 found commercial and critical acclaim for many reasons, but the heart of Sandfall Interactive's French RPG is a turn-based combat system that mixes in real-time elements like parrying enemy attacks and timing combo inputs. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and Remake director Naoki Hamaguchi reasons that such a hybrid of turn-based and action elements may have been "inevitable" as pure turn-based RPGs lost ground to action with younger, newer generations of gamers.
Speaking with Game Informer in an excellent reflection on turn-based combat, Hamaguchi, who's now helmed two massive JRPGs that largely pivoted to action combat, notes that action games have become more mainstream. As a result, he says "RPGs and JRPGs are increasingly brought up as legacy genres." However, he also stresses the strengths of turn-based games.
