Xbox’s Summer Games Fest showcase was a banger that brought back the classic E3 vibes – but of all the games featured in the broadcast, one new title caught my eye – the slick-looking role-playing game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
I recently got to see a little more of the game – and I’m thrilled to be able to say that my initial curiosity appears to have been well-placed. Who doesn’t love being proved right, after all?
The developers of Expedition 33 describe it as an “evolution of JRPGs”, and that’s what the grand comparison in this article’s headline is derived from. I’m talking, of course, about 2004’s The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, a fascinating EA-developed licensed tie-in that saw a Western development team deliver a Tolkien universe game that, under the hood, was basically Final Fantasy 10. EA embraced this; they even ran marketing tie-ins with Final Fantasy fansites, in a time when such sites served the role influencers do now. The resulting game was both fascinating and rather good.