The runaway success of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been exhaustively documented by this point. But the game's ecstatic reception by players came as a surprise not only because the game was made by a small (though not that small) team, but also because it's a turn-based RPG at a time when the market is dominated by roguelites and soulslikes and real-time action, with even Final Fantasy shifting toward fluid, reaction-based combat systems in recent years.
This hasn't gone unnoticed by Sandfall Interactive. Indeed, Expedition 33's creative director Guillaume Broche believes this to be part of a much longer shift away from turn-based games. "I could talk about the prejudice forever," Broche told Automaton Media. "Personally speaking, I think Japanese turn-based RPGs were super popular up until the Xbox 360 era. But around the time open-world games started getting more popular through gaming media, [JRPGs] started being considered 'uncool'".
