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.”
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.
- Released
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April 24, 2025
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ / Blood and Gore, Strong Language, Suggestive Themes, Violence
- Developer(s)
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Sandfall Interactive
- Publisher(s)
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Kepler Interactive
