JRPG Tourists and the Whitewashing of a Genre: The Expedition 33 Problem

Jesus, watching The Game Awards has always been a test of endurance. We all know it is just hours of glorified ad space with the occasional trophy tossed in to keep up appearances. But last night felt different. Seeing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 sweep the board with nine awards didn’t feel like a win for the underdog. It had the same vibes of the entire tech industry chugging the GenAI Kool-Aid.

I’ll be honest with you. I actually have the game sitting in my Steam library right now. It is installed. It is ready to go. But I can’t be arsed to click play. I have zero issue with derivative works in principle. I’ll probably get around to playing it in five years when the noise dies down. My problem isn't the game itself. My problem is the media narrative surrounding it.

The GenAI Parallel:

The comparison to GenAI fits perfectly, and I don't just mean that scandal where the devs left "placeholder" AI art in the game. I mean the hype cycle itself. This sweep feels exactly like the tech industry trying to convince us that Generative AI is the "future" when we all know it is just regurgitated stolen data.

The media and the awards committee decided months ago that this game was "The One." They are pushing this "AA Saviour" narrative because everyone is sick of AAA flops. They picked the safest, most marketable product to do it. It is manufactured hype for a product that is effectively a collage of better things.

Whitewashing the Genre:

The most nauseating part of this media circus is the "JRPG Saviour" complex on display. You have critics who have spent fifteen years mocking JRPGs for being "too anime" or "too tropey" suddenly losing their minds over this game.

Why? Because Expedition 33 gentrifies the genre. It strips away the colour, the spiky hair, and the cultural quirks. It replaces them with a grey, Western "Prestige TV" filter. The media loves JRPG mechanics like turn-based combat and melodrama. They just hate the Japanese identity attached to them.

They act as if JRPGs haven't been dealing with mature themes for decades. We had Persona 3 tackling suicide and Xenogears dealing with deicide and psychology twenty years ago. But because those games had anime aesthetics, the Western media dismissed them as childish. Now that a French studio does the same thing with motion-captured Western actors, it is suddenly "Shakespearian."

Look at the Like a Dragon (Yakuza) series. It has everything these critics claim to want. It has mature storytelling, deep characters, and realism. But it will never sweeps the awards like this. Why? Because it’s unapologetically Japanese. It has karaoke, weird humour, and heart. To the Western media elite, that makes it "niche." But when a Western studio copies the homework and makes it look like Game of Thrones, it is considered 'High Art'.

Sheep Herding and "Innovation":

Because the media is playing this up as the second coming, you have a herd of sheep who have never touched a JRPG in their lives acting like Expedition 33 invented the wheel.

They praise the "revolutionary reactive combat," completely ignorant that Shadow Hearts did the Judgement Ring back in 2001 and Lost Odyssey perfected the Aim Ring in 2007. They praise the "deep skill system," not realising it is a direct copy of Final Fantasy IX. Even the premise of humanity trapped behind walls by a giant entity is just Attack on Titan with a fresh coat of paint.

And don't get me started on the music. The composer is openly "inspired" by NieR, but this goes beyond inspiration. The tracks use a made-up "Chaos Language" just like Keiichi Okabe did. The difference is that Okabe used it to convey a world where history had dissolved. Here, it is just aesthetic wallpaper. It is shallow mimicry being praised by people who wouldn't know unique sound design if it hit them in the face.