'Clair Obscur: Expedition 33' utterly destroys Square Enix's gaslighting over Final Fantasy turn-based combat

"You think you want it, but you don't."

This is a comment from former Blizzard president J. Allen Brack, responding to players asking for a World of Warcraft "Classic" mode. It has since become quite notorious among World of Warcraft fans, not only for its pretty arrogant and callous dismissal of an entire section of the fanbase, but also, because Blizzard eventually capitulated and gave players what they had been asking for.

Now under new leadership, World of Warcraft has changed its philosophy to: giving fans exactly what they want. A shocking revelation, I know. But the game has never been in a better spot, with a variety of modes for different types of players, killing off its previous "one shoe fits all" dispassionate telemetry-first design philosophy. We're even getting player housing.

It's perhaps ironic, then, that the main reason we're getting Player Housing in World of Warcraft is due to competition from a competing MMO: Final Fantasy 14.

World of Warcraft was forced to throw their playbook out of the window to meet fans where they were, rather than what the "data" was telling them. Activision's telemetry must have told them that "nobody wanted" player housing, but the popularity of the feature in Final Fantasy 14 certainly suggested otherwise. FF14 innovated where World of Warcraft had failed, and won itself a large and thriving fanbase of its own on the back of that innovation.

For whatever reason, Square Enix began ignoring its own successes when it comes to the mainline Final Fantasy games, which, in recent years, have been on a steady decline in popularity and relevance.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 proves

Square Enix's most recent Final Fantasy projects, namely 15, 16, 7 Remake and 7 Rebirth have found decent success, but I would argue none of them received the fanfare some of their predecessors enjoyed. The Final Fantasy 7 remakes has proven that there's still magic to be found in the franchise — even if they flooded Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth with dull Ubisoft-inspired open world drudgery.

Where there's been less success is in the truly new Final Fantasy games. 15 and 16 are both neither what I would describe as classic entries in the series, and represent something of a low point. Square Enix fully abandoned what made the series great, opting away from what fans want in favor of chasing other popular games in a desperate, mis-guided attempt to get more money.

It's utterly insane to me that Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth features Ubisoft-style towers to unlock additional content in the open world. It speaks of a complete dereliction of gauging what is actually fun, and smacks of the type of design decision led by Microsoft Excel rather than good sense.

A little game from France called Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has shone a spotlight on Square Enix's design decisions around Final Fantasy — which was famously a variety of turn-based, command-based, and active-turn-based over the years, with tactical gameplay at its core. Expedition 33 borrows from classic JRPGs like Final Fantasy 8 and even the Super Mario RPG, atop some AAA production values, photorealism, wrapped in a dark fairy tale plot.

Square Enix has previously claimed that people don't want turn-based games anymore. Clearly, with Expedition 33 selling a million copies already — not including Xbox Game Pass — that simply isn't true. This isn't an established franchise like Dragon Quest or Persona, either.

Is Square Enix simply out of touch now? There's nowhere that drives that possibility home more strongly, for me, than Square Enix producer Naoki Yoshida's own words.

Square Enix: it's time to stop the gaslighting over turn-based tactical combat

Naoki Yoshida is credited with the revival of the MMORPG, Final Fantasy 14, which found success by chasing World of Warcraft's model more closely, albeit with that classic and cozy Final Fantasy veneer. While I would say drawing upon inspiration from World of Warcraft did work incredibly well for Final Fantasy 14, this new approach clearly harmed the production of Final Fantasy 15, 7 Rebirth, and 16.

Final Fantasy 16 in particular dropped all pretence that Square Enix wanted to honor the legacy and passion of decades of Final Fantasy precedent, ditching all command-based, tactical gameplay in favor of a derivative and half-baked "Devil May Cry" hack n' slashery. But why? Yoshida gave his "reasons" in a previous interview.

"One thing that we found recently is that as graphics get better and better, and as characters become more realistic and more photo-real, is that the combination of that realism with the very unreal sense of turn-based commands doesn't really fit together."

Stylized turn-based games like Persona, Octopath Traveller, and Dragon Quest are okay, but not photorealistic ones? Huh? What?

In my view, this is the damning quote that proves to me that Naoki Yoshida and the team leading Final Fantasy have utterly fallen out of touch, not only with Final Fantasy fans, but the wider audience in general.

"Some people are fine with it. They're fine with having these realistic characters in this unreal type of system. But then on the other hand, there are people that just can't get over it. I mean, if you have a character holding a gun, why can't you just press the button to have the gunfire – why do you need a command in there?"

A little game from France, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, solved this made up "problem" by letting you free-aim with the character's guns. It's almost as if Square Enix is trying to explain away the lack of creativity.

Seriously though; the whole argument falls apart entirely when you consider that video games aren't meant to be realistic from the ground up. Final Fantasy 16 has some of the most vacuous, boring, and patronizing combat I've ever experienced in an action game — the game effectively plays itself, with boss battles playing out in cutscenes rather than active combat. And Yoshida has the audacity to claim players won't want to input commands?

It's not the first, or last time, we've seen the industry try to downplay turn based games, and it's not the first, or last time, games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 or Baldur's Gate 3 will show up to prove everyone wrong.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has a core team of just 33 people, built in part by Ubisoft veterans who were finally free of "telemetry"-based corpo-style game development — which has led the industry down this cul-de-sac of anti-creativity. It's potentially the highest user-rated game on Metacritic in history, as fans pour in not only to praise the game, but also to send Square Enix a strong message: stop gaslighting us.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is available now on Windows PC, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Game Pass.