Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 actor Ben Starr is well-known for their love of JRPGs. Prior to playing the role of Verso in Sandfall’s JRPG-inspired adventure, they took the lead role of Clive in Final Fantasy 16, and their love of the genre has been well-documented.
Expedition 33 itself draws from a lot of games in the genre with creative director Guillaume Broche citing Mistwalker’s cult-classic Lost Odyssey as a key inspiration. While Clair Obscur isn’t a JRPG due to the fact that it isn’t Japanese, the DNA of Final Fantasy, Lost Odyssey and others shines through, and that has connected with actor Ben Starr.
Speaking to GamesRadar ahead of the recent Golden Joystick Awards, Starr explained that the new game “was made with love, and it was made for a very specific audience, and it just turns out that the audience for this game was bigger than people thought”. While Starr and the team are still “shellshocked” at the game’s intense popularity, the actor is also a member of the “very specific audience” the game was designed for.
“As a huge fan of RPGs, a person who was raised on these things – what an amazing thing to have a game that is so widely loved, and celebrated, and represents so much of the reason why I continue to play games,” Starr said. “It’s the reason I’m in games. And I think it’s a timely story.”
The actor explained that the timeliness of the game’s story centres around its “existential pain”. In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the world is continually ticking down towards ending, and only a select few decide to fight against that every year while others become increasingly complacent in their fate.
Starr explains that Clair Obscur “asks incredibly hard questions, and it doesn’t give you an answer and it doesn’t resolve… “It basically says, ‘Here is existential pain, live with it. Ask yourself questions, go out in the world and see how you feel about it.’”
“If you go to a convention you’ll see thousands of people – I mean, literally, hundreds of people – in berets. Every time any person who says, ‘OK, this game affected me, I’m going to spend hundreds of hours making something, and allowing this to empower me as a person, and I’m going to walk up to the convention dressed like this because Maelle empowers me, or Sciel gives me strength, or Lune’s loss is my loss,’” they concluded.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s finale also gives players a choice, and it definitely doesn’t explain what ending is the “correct” or “canon” one—something I personally hope never gets explained. (At least Starr and his co-star Jennifer English both agree on which ending is best.)
