Vaspaan Dastoor is an Editor for TheGamer. Previously worked at IGN India and constantly tries to get people to make time for an LOTR marathon. He can be found giving hot takes for cold responses at @DastoorVaspaan
It’s been Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s year, as the game has been sweeping up awards across the board. It has so many awards that even being stripped of one due to the use of AI hasn’t dented its success. Sandfall Interactive has received global acclaim thanks to the game, so it’s no surprise that there’s already a clone of it.
Sword and Fairy 4: Remake, a Chinese game developed by UP software, just received an announcement trailer a few hours ago. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a translated version of it yet, so it’s not exactly clear what’s going on, except that it features a Chinese fantasy setting, and the combat looks like it’s straight out of Clair Obscur.
Sword And Fairy 4: Remake s Combat Looks Very Familiar
The trailer was revealed on Gematsu’s YouTube channel, but there’s also one on China’s bilibili that translates to The Legend of Sword and Fairy 4, but that might just be a translation error. The first half reveals the mythical setting of the game, with various biomes and even a populated city, but once the combat started, you could see it was clearly inspired by Clair Obscur. Unfortunately, we don’t know any more about the game.
While Sandfall Interactive didn’t exactly invent something new with Clair Obscur’s combat, the perfect parries, dramatic choreography, and larger than life abilities added a whole new dimension to its turn-based system. Sword And Fairy 4: Remake’s trailer shows very similar combat, down to the camera placement and some of the UI. In some shots, you’d think it was a Clair Obscur DLC.
Of course, the comments also echoed that it looks a lot like Sandfall’s game. “The original 2007 game looks like a suikoden game and now the remake version looks like a E33,” said one comment. Another noted that “E33-likes are closer than they may seem in the reflection.”
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While we might see a few more games being inspired by Clair Obscur, it seems unlikely that it’s going to spawn an ‘Expedition 33-like’ genre like Dark Souls did. Turn-based combat existed long before it came out; Sandfall just added a great personal touch to it.
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It was already a turn based game originally. Seems like a natural progression to get flashier.
The party system could have been inspired by clair, or any other game that has reactive turn based combat. People so quickly forget clair wasn’t the first to do this but I guess now starts the comparison of every turnbase game as a clair like … Sigh
2025-12-29 09:31:36
It’s a remake of a game from 2007. I guess it was too much to do some basic research before publishing, eh?
2025-12-29 09:58:07
“getting a lot of boss baby vibes from this one”
I believe the first preview of this game was released last year so likely it’s gameplay mechanics (like the parry) were already planned and designed before Clair awards success.
Calling it a clone bc it’s Chinese game just shows you didn’t do a proper research about this series or jrpgs in general.
Guess we will be seeing lots of “this game is Clair Obscure!!!” from now on…
2025-12-29 10:59:33
Here we go again, when will marjeting people understand that these games have massive succes because they are well made, i personally didn’t enjoy to much the quit time events for attacking and dodging/parrying style, i either prefer a full turn based experience (no QTEs) or real time game if not, but anyway i loved E33 because the story was awesome, the mechanics of the game were great, was not too short and was not a skimped AAA game that cut corners trying to “minimize risks”
2025-12-30 02:10:45
