Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 did not emerge in a vacuum. It arrived into a gaming landscape crowded with exceptional RPGs that have set high bars for storytelling, combat design, world-building, and technical achievement. Comparing Expedition 33 to these established titans is not merely an exercise in rating one game against another; it is a way of understanding what makes this debut title from a thirty-person studio so remarkable and where it carves out its own unique identity. The comparisons are particularly interesting because Expedition 33 shares direct connections with several of these games through its voice cast and thematic concerns. Ben Starr, who voices Verso, also played Clive Rosfield in Final Fantasy XVI. Jennifer English, who delivers the award-winning performance as Maelle, brought Shadowheart to life in Baldur's Gate 3. These connections create natural points of comparison that go beyond genre conventions and into the specifics of performance and character writing. This article compares Expedition 33 against the best RPGs of recent years across multiple dimensions, examining where it surpasses its competitors, where it falls short, and why it ultimately earned the Game of the Year title at The Game Awards 2025.
Versus Final Fantasy XVI: Two Visions of Action RPG Combat
Final Fantasy XVI and Expedition 33 share more than a voice actor in Ben Starr; both games attempt to evolve the RPG combat formula by incorporating action-oriented elements alongside traditional role-playing systems. However, their approaches are fundamentally different. FFXVI embraces full real-time action combat with a skill cooldown system, essentially becoming a character action game with RPG progression layered on top. Expedition 33 takes the opposite approach, keeping a traditional turn-based system as its structural foundation and adding real-time defense mechanics on top. The result is that FFXVI's combat feels more fluid and cinematic, with smooth transitions between attacks, abilities, and Eikon summoning sequences, while Expedition 33's combat feels more strategically complex, requiring the player to engage both their tactical planning skills and their physical reflexes simultaneously. In terms of narrative, both games deal with themes of loss, legacy, and the weight of inherited responsibility, but Expedition 33's painted world premise gives it a more focused and thematically coherent narrative, while FFXVI's sprawling political drama sometimes loses its emotional thread. Ben Starr's performances in both games are excellent, but his work as Verso benefits from a more intimate and personal script that allows for greater nuance than Clive's often stoic characterization.
Versus the Persona Series: Turn-Based Evolution
The Persona series, particularly Persona 5 Royal, represents the gold standard of modern turn-based JRPG combat, and comparing it to Expedition 33 reveals both shared DNA and striking divergence. Persona's combat is built around the Press Turn system, where exploiting enemy weaknesses grants additional actions, creating a snowball effect that rewards careful weakness analysis and party composition. Expedition 33's Break system serves a similar function, rewarding players who identify and exploit enemy vulnerabilities with windows of increased damage. However, Expedition 33 adds the real-time defense layer that Persona entirely lacks, making its combat a more physically engaging experience that demands constant attention during enemy turns. Persona's strength lies in its social simulation systems, the calendar-based structure that interweaves dungeon crawling with relationship building and daily life management, creating a rhythm of gameplay that no other RPG has replicated as effectively. Expedition 33 does not attempt this kind of social simulation, focusing instead on a more traditional narrative-driven adventure structure. In terms of art direction, both games are visually distinctive, but Persona 5's pop-art aesthetic and animated cutscenes contrast sharply with Expedition 33's painterly, Belle Epoque-inspired visual design. Both approaches are effective, but Expedition 33's art direction arguably achieves greater technical sophistication through its use of Unreal Engine 5's Nanite and Lumen systems.
Versus Elden Ring: Difficulty, Exploration, and World Design
Elden Ring and Expedition 33 are both challenging games that require players to learn enemy patterns, manage resources carefully, and accept that failure is a natural part of the progression process. However, the nature of that challenge and the context in which it occurs could not be more different. Elden Ring is an open-world game built around emergent discovery, where the player's progression is largely self-directed and the difficulty comes from environmental hazards, hidden enemies, and the lack of clear guidance about where to go or what to do. Expedition 33 is a more structured, narrative-driven experience where difficulty is concentrated in deliberately designed combat encounters that escalate in complexity as the story progresses. Elden Ring's world is vast and interconnected, rewarding exploration with hidden items, optional bosses, and environmental storytelling. Expedition 33's world is more compact and curated, with each area designed to serve specific narrative and gameplay purposes. The parry mechanics in both games share a philosophical ancestor in Sekiro, but Elden Ring's parry is one option among many combat approaches, while Expedition 33's parry is an integral part of every encounter that cannot be bypassed. In terms of narrative, Elden Ring's minimalist, environmental storytelling contrasts with Expedition 33's character-driven, dialogue-heavy approach, and players who prefer one style of narrative delivery may find the other less engaging.
Versus Baldur's Gate 3: Narrative Branching and Performance
Baldur's Gate 3 and Expedition 33 share the distinction of featuring Jennifer English in a leading role, and comparing the two games reveals how the same performer can deliver equally brilliant work in radically different narrative contexts. In Baldur's Gate 3, English's Shadowheart is defined by slow-burn character development across a massive, branching narrative where player choices can fundamentally alter character relationships and story outcomes. Expedition 33's Maelle is a more linear character whose arc develops along a more defined trajectory, but English's performance brings a depth and authenticity to Maelle that elevates every scene she is in. In terms of narrative branching, Baldur's Gate 3 is the clear leader, offering a staggering number of meaningful choices that create genuinely different playthroughs. Expedition 33's branching is more concentrated, culminating in the final choice between Maelle and Verso but offering fewer meaningful divergences throughout the main story. The combat systems are also fundamentally different: Baldur's Gate 3 uses the D&D 5th Edition ruleset with turn-based tactical combat on a grid, emphasizing positioning, spell selection, and environmental interaction, while Expedition 33's hybrid system prioritizes reflexes and pattern recognition alongside strategic planning. Both games won Game of the Year in their respective years, and the comparison ultimately highlights how different the RPG genre has become, with both the classic CRPG approach and the action-hybrid approach capable of delivering exceptional experiences.
Versus Sekiro and Action RPGs: The Parry Connection
The connection between Expedition 33's parry system and FromSoftware's Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is one of the most frequently discussed elements of the game's design, and a direct comparison reveals both the influence and the innovation at work. Sekiro's deflection system is built around a posture gauge that fills when you deflect attacks and empties when you take damage, creating a rhythmic combat loop where constant engagement with enemy attacks is more effective than retreating. Expedition 33's parry system draws on this philosophy of rewarding active engagement over passive defense, but it integrates the mechanic into a turn-based framework that Sekiro does not share. In Sekiro, every combat action happens in real time, and the player's skill at parrying is the primary determinant of success. In Expedition 33, parrying is one layer of a multi-layered system that also includes strategic ability selection, resource management, and party composition. This hybrid approach means that Expedition 33's parry does not need to carry the entire weight of the combat experience, which allows it to be somewhat more forgiving than Sekiro's notoriously demanding deflection timing. Players who have mastered Sekiro will find Expedition 33's parry system intuitive and satisfying, while players who found Sekiro too punishing may find that the turn-based context makes the real-time defense mechanics more approachable.
Where Expedition 33 Surpasses Its Competitors
Expedition 33 achieves something that none of the games discussed above can claim: it delivers a level of visual and narrative quality that rivals the best work of studios with ten to twenty times its development team size. The art direction, powered by Unreal Engine 5 and inspired by Belle Epoque France and surrealist art movements, creates a visual identity that is immediately distinctive and consistently stunning across the entire runtime. The hybrid combat system is genuinely innovative, offering an experience that cannot be replicated by any other game on the market. The narrative, while more linear than Baldur's Gate 3's branching epic, achieves an emotional consistency and thematic coherence that surpasses many of its competitors. The voice cast, featuring talent from the biggest franchises in gaming and film, delivers performances that elevate the material beyond what the script alone could achieve. And the fact that all of this was accomplished by a team of approximately thirty people makes every aspect of the game's quality more impressive in context. When judged against its competitors on a pure quality-per-developer basis, Expedition 33 is arguably the most efficient and impressive game development achievement in modern RPG history.
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Where It Falls Short and Why It Still Won GOTY
Despite its many strengths, Expedition 33 has areas where it does not match the depth or breadth of its competitors. Its world is smaller and less densely packed with optional content than Elden Ring or Baldur's Gate 3. Its narrative branching is more limited than BG3's sprawling choice-and-consequence system. Its combat, while innovative, does not have the sheer mechanical depth that dedicated fighting game enthusiasts might demand from the parry system. The game's scope is more focused than any of its major competitors, which is both a strength in terms of narrative focus and a limitation in terms of content volume. However, The Game Awards 2025 voters clearly determined that what Expedition 33 does, it does at a level of quality and originality that surpasses the alternatives. The game's nine TGA awards, including Game of the Year, suggest that voters valued the originality of the concept, the quality of execution, and the achievement represented by a small team producing work of this caliber. In a year with many excellent RPGs, Expedition 33 stood out by doing something genuinely new and doing it exceptionally well, and that combination of innovation and quality is ultimately what earns a game the highest honors in the industry.
While You're Here
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