Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is reminding me of the greatest Lord of the Rings game

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.

For Expedition 33, the comparison is another Japanese-developed role-playing behemoth: Persona 5. While this game doesn’t feature the relationship bond tracking system that defines Persona, in combat it looks wildly familiar - lifting sweeping camera movements, animations tied to your movements within menus, slick user interface cues, and so on. It’s a nebulous thing to elucidate, but the point is that you look at it and say ‘Oh, this is Persona’. That’s exactly the reaction that first reveal trailer prompted online - and the full game shows that was no fluke.

Combat follows the general pacing of Persona 5. I ask the developers if there’s an equivalent of the ‘baton pass’ mechanic, which lets players twist up the established turn order, as I don’t see that in the demo. “Of course,” they reply, grinning. These similarities make sense - Persona 5 is arguably the most exciting-looking iteration of traditional turn-based combat yet delivered, after all. Representatives from developer Sandfall Interactive don’t shy away from the comparison. If anything, they’re proud of it - they wear their inspiration on their sleeve.

That inspiration is mixed with other ideas, however, like frequent in-combat quick time events and timing-based inputs, designed presumably to ensure combat feels more active than simply picking the most effective attack from a menu. At the end of battle, bonuses are dished out for having a damage-free encounter, while successful parries and dodges get totted up, as does total damage dealt.

Regardless, it follows that it thus becomes difficult to not preview this game, especially from a hands-off perspective, without comparing it to Persona. It for instance feels appropriate that this Western take, developed in France, isn’t focused on high-schoolers. Instead the mortal struggle is that of thirty-somethings. In the world of Clair Obscur, a god-like being paints a number into the sky above an alternate-timeline Paris. The number painted is a death sentence: everybody that age will soon die. Their number up, an expedition of 33-year-olds set out on a trip to attempt to kill the god and save their own lives.

It’s gorgeous-looking, and something I was pleased to see is the range of the environments. I worried it might all be in this steampunky version of Paris, but no - part of this hands-on seemingly takes place underwater. In a short vertical slice the narrative is nonsensical - but performances and good-looking character models sell the idea that this should be a narrative journey worth taking.

Last year, Final Fantasy 16’s director Naoki Yoshida kicked off a whole debate about the term ‘JRPG’, and even raised the question of if the term was discriminatory against Japanese games. At the time I had a different take. “I use the term ‘JRPG’ to refer to a subset of design & stylistic hallmarks that were bred in Japan in the 80s and 90s,” I opined. Ironically, the game Yoshida was making was indeed a role-playing game made in Japan - but to me, it didn’t bear the hallmarks of a JRPG. He was making a different sort of game.

Every now and then, a game comes along that embodies that. You get Lord of the Rings: The Third Age to FF10, or Undertale to Mother 2. And now, we arguably have Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to Persona 5. I think what it’s offering is thrilling - said with the caveat that I’ve only seen hands-off footage so far - and a game like this really has to be played, and for an extended period of time, to be truly understood. What I can say for sure is that my interest is now locked in. I hope the full game can live up to the lofty status of its inspirations.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is releasing at some point in 2025 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series S/X.