Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, in my humble opinion, deserves the laurels it got—it’s a gorgeous, inventive, personality-filled romp with an ending that rips your heart out and stomps it into a pulp fine enough for use in paint. But I’d hesitate to call it ‘perfect’, mostly because I don’t believe in perfection as a concept, but also because there were a few moments where it lost me—like those freaking mimes. Hate those guys.
Anyway, in a recent interview with the YouTube channel Konbini, creative director Guillaume Broche says that—among a lot of other inspirations—he was inspired by games with clear and glaring imperfections, jokingly referencing the infamous Devil May Cry scene where Dante screams: “I should’ve been the one to fill your dark soul with light!”
“I think these games are really endearing,” says Broche. “You see their flaws and think to yourself, ‘yeah, it’s lame, but I don’t care. It’s part of the character’s flaws, and that’s what makes them’. You’re not looking for a perfect game. A perfect game is boring anyway.”
As a matter of fact, Broche has a theory of perfection that games with a bit of jank are better than games that try to cover them up: “Games that try to be perfect, that try to fix all their flaws—they’re usually just really boring.”
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Generally speaking, I couldn’t agree more—neither could my colleagues, who are often ardent defenders of eurojank: “My theory is that it’s just like people. People who try to be perfect are boring because they have no personality. Whereas people who embrace their slightly weird side—in the end, are the interesting ones.”
As far as the purposeful jank that made it into Clair Obscur, Broche brings up its intentionally-obnoxious minigames: “We knew when we were making them: it was going to be unbearable, people were going to lose it, but it’s part of the fun. We thought it was funny. And, well, it’s imperfect, but whatever—we’re putting it in.
“With Clair Obscur, there are plenty of design decisions that are fundamentally flawed. What we heard a lot before we released the game was: You’re making a game that mixes the challenging aspects of an action game—with dodging and parrying—with turn-based gameplay. No-one’s going to like it.”
I liked it quite a lot, but I’m both an RPG-lover and a parry fanatic, so Clair Obscur was so deeply designed for me it felt almost targeted. Still, Broche admits, “fundamentally there are a lot of design decisions [in Clair Obscur] that, from an outside or business perspective, make no sense at all.”
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