You know you’ve created a great role-playing game when the makers of some of the most beloved RPGs of all time invite you to chat. This past week, the developers of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 went to Tokyo to meet with some of the team behind Final Fantasy. The developers from Sandfall Interactive met developers from Square Enix to talk, exchange ideas, and presumably fan-out over each others’ games.
Guillaume Broche, Francois Meurisse, Tom Guillermin from Sandfall, and Alexis Garavaryan from Kepler, the publisher of Clair Obscur, visited the Square Enix office to meet with Naoki Hamaguchi and Ryosuke Yoshida. Hamaguchi directed Final Fantasy VII Rebirth while Yoshida directed Visions of Mana.
Hamaguchi took to Twitter to describe the meeting of the minds as a “creatively rich exchange of visions and ideas.”
Guillaume Broche, Francois Meurisse, Tom Guillermin from Sandfall, and Alexis Garavaryan from Kepler—creators of EXPEDITION 33—visited the Square Enix office for a creatively rich exchange of visions and ideas.
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EXPEDITION 33のクリエイターであるSandfallのGuillaume… pic.twitter.com/hIhMNYZJ8c— 浜口直樹 / FFVII REMAKE is coming to Switch2 & XBOX🎉 (@nhamaguc) July 24, 2025
Since Clair Obscur borrows much inspiration from classic RPGs, especially JRPGs, it’s a nice full-circle moment. Who knows? Perhaps Final Fantasy will take a page from Clair Obscur‘s book next. It wouldn’t be surprising, especially as those at Square Enix consider returning to their turn-based combat roots. It would be something to one day see a remake of say, Final Fantasy IX, borrowing from the dynamic turn-based combat of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
But Square Enix isn’t the only team that the folks from Sandfall met with. Broche, Meurisse, Guillermin, and Garavaryan also got to meet with Hideo Kojima at his studio. The team even signed two copies of the game for Kojima, so it sounds like he’s quite the fan as well.
In our review, we called Clair Obscur “an amazing experience and game, especially when you consider its development.” We also awarded the game by the small French studio a perfect score. And its proven quite popular as well, selling over 2 million copies as of this past May. Clearly, its success hasn’t gone unnoticed by other developers either.
