After delivering one of the strongest JRPGs in years, the creators of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 are now staring down an even bigger hurdle. Sandfall Interactive went from near-total obscurity to a breakout success so loud it effectively bought them complete creative freedom for whatever comes next. And freedom, at that scale, can be its own pressure cooker.
A year ago, hardly anyone could have guessed how profoundly an unknown French studio’s debut would end up shaking the industry. Even though its first big reveal during Microsoft’s June 2024 showcase caught plenty of eyes – mine included – the slightly clumsy title and the lack of a famous “legacy” behind the team kept expectations in check. Then April arrived, people finally got their hands on it, and everything shifted. In many ways, this wasn’t simply a loving nod to classic Final Fantasy – it felt like an unusually confident passing of the torch, as if the game had come to restore what years of disappointments had eroded. Suddenly, what everyone had been insisting for ages could never be recreated wasn’t just an idea anymore – it became something real, tangible, and lived.
Nearly a year later, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is collecting awards at a pace that puts it in the same conversation as cultural juggernauts like The Last of Us Part II and Elden Ring. The most recent sales number available sits at 5 million copies, but I’m absolutely convinced that figure will double before the year is over, leaving the results of most Japanese peers in the dust. The most striking part is that a title built by a crew of very young enthusiasts could end up threatening the legacy numbers of institutions like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.
The Latest Figure Is 5 Million Sold – and I’m Certain It Will Double Before Year-End
I honestly can’t imagine the dizzying sensation Guillaume Broche and his team must be living through right now. When a creator hits that level of explosive recognition with a first release, the next step often triggers a kind of creative paralysis – the music industry is full of famous cases. In video games, success usually arrives after several attempts, but after a breakthrough comes doubt, fear, and that creeping insecurity that can poison a follow-up. Just ask the studios behind Celeste or Batman: Arkham Knight.
That said, I get the impression Guillaume is not the usual case. Despite being young and relatively inexperienced, he seems to carry an unusually sharp, deliberate sense of direction. One of his smartest moves can be read directly in the game’s naming logic. Expedition 33 perfectly captures the heroes’ journey and their place in history – but it’s also a terrible foundation for sequels. Expedition 34 would sound ridiculous, and Expedition 32 even more so. That’s precisely why Sandfall made the smarter long-term call by anchoring everything under Clair Obscur instead: a more ambiguous phrase with fewer fixed meanings inside the fiction, yet one that ties directly into the visual identity and that bittersweet tone where tragedy and lightness coexist. Clair Obscur is the franchise name. It may not carry the mythic weight of Final Fantasy, but it’s already a remarkably solid brand.
I Hope Success Doesn’t Go to Their Heads – and That They Keep Digging Deeper Into What They’ve Started
In my mind, there’s little doubt about the road the Montpellier team should take next. They might shock us by swerving into something completely different, but I trust they won’t let the spotlight distort their judgment, and that they’ll have the discipline to build on the path they’ve already opened. They’ve uncovered a real market hunger: the classic 90s Final Fantasy blueprint of wide worlds and turn-based battles, but paired with a much more literary approach to character writing – farther from shonen excess and adolescent melodrama. The heroes of Expedition 33 might be too young, at least realistically, to carry the existential weight placed on them at the start of the game, yet by JRPG standards they almost play like aging mentors. That shift toward a more mature lens feels like fresh air in a genre that so often struggles to leave perpetual adolescence behind.
Beyond all of that, there’s also the question of total freedom. Verso’s story is complete. Going back to Lumiere and the Continent would be a massive mistake. And with the Dessendre family secret now revealed, I’d personally argue for an aggressive step-change. If painters and writers are in conflict, it implies there are more creators out there – other world-makers able to breathe life into their own artistic expressions. I want to dive into a radically different universe, with new circumstances and new problems. Ideally, I’d like to see them tackle a premise that isn’t immediately drowning in existential catastrophe – let it be exciting, sure, but not soaked in despair from minute one.
Mechanically, though, I hope they don’t fall into the trap of reinventing everything just because they can. One of Final Fantasy’s long-running self-inflicted wounds has been its obsession with rebuilding combat from scratch in each entry. It’s not necessary. The system created for Expedition 33 already works extremely well. It can absolutely welcome fresh ideas, refinements, and evolution – but discarding the foundation to start over would be wasteful.
As for ambition, I’ve already read comments suggesting Guillaume doesn’t want to massively scale the team or radically shift the working environment. That’s a decision I genuinely respect, especially after watching so many studios balloon during pandemic-era investment waves, only to collapse into layoffs once the money ran out. Today’s success doesn’t guarantee tomorrow’s. A cost-controlled approach is smarter. That said, I do want the next game to aim for a richer, more cohesive experience – one packed with more of the elements that define the JRPG genre. More cities, more NPCs, more diverse environments, and more meaningful activities beyond combat in the sequel.
The First Game’s Budget Is Estimated at Around $10 Million – and That Surprised a Lot of People
The debut title’s budget is estimated to have been around $10 million, which shocked many considering how cinematic the game looks. But when you analyze it closely, the shortcuts are easy to spot. The near-exclusive use of gesturing stand-in characters to represent most NPCs makes it clear there weren’t the resources for expressive faces or actors driving dialogue. The number of dark caves with interchangeable textures is hard to ignore, and the “fractured world” excuse conveniently allows the reuse of the same urban assets over and over, scattered everywhere – even stacked mid-air without feeling out of place. With a moderate upgrade in production values, the sequel could deliver far more environmental variety, more expressive human NPCs, and a more grounded aesthetic that doesn’t lean so heavily on surreal abstraction to justify repetition.
The game’s length is already ideal. Roughly 30 hours for the main story, plus another 30 for optional content. Nothing more is needed. I firmly believe every game has its perfect length, whether that’s ten hours or a hundred. But for too long, the industry inflated runtimes to “justify” pricing, instead of letting design dictate length. One of Sandfall’s biggest strengths in its debut was pacing – at least up until Act 3, when they made a couple of dungeons optional even though they should have been mandatory to better land the final confrontation. A similar structure could allow the next game to raise production values without bloating content purely for the sake of being longer.
They Shouldn’t Overthink It – It Should Be Ready in Just Over Three Years
The final piece is release timing. They shouldn’t overthink it. It should be ready in just over three years. They have pipelines, experience with the engine, established gameplay foundations, and now a committed audience. Please don’t let the project sink into endless development loops fueled by insecurity and false restarts – the industry has seen that story too many times already. If there’s one key move to avoid a sophomore slump, it’s shipping the follow-up quickly enough to silence doubt.
A major reason modern game budgets have become absurd is that development now drags on close to a decade. It makes no sense from any perspective. I genuinely believe games should take a maximum of four years to build. Beyond that, everything becomes harder, and we can’t normalize studios letting an entire console generation pass without releasing anything meaningful.
Ultimately, the sequel to Clair Obscur needs to double down on the franchise’s anthology-style approach, expanding into different stories, fictional universes, and character types. Paintings and books form a perfect narrative framework to host wildly different creative sensibilities. At the same time, the game should iterate on the mechanics already established rather than chasing reinvention for its own sake. Keep the scope, raise the production values, build more detailed cities, introduce greater NPC variety, and add activities that complement combat in a way that feels more defined than the Gestrals’ beach games. With music by Lorien Testard, the visual imagination of the art team, another top-tier cast, and an inspired story, I’m confident Guillaume and his team can lay the groundwork for the defining role-playing saga of our time.
Source: 3djuegos
