If you’re getting Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 vibes from the new trailer for Sword and Fairy 4: Remake, you’re not alone. Some are pointing to the upcoming RPG as evidence that we’re about to get lot of copycats trying to ape the 2025 Game of the Year’s aura, similar to the wave of open-world games that borrowed elements from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild after that game’s incredible success. But Sword and Fairy 4: Remake didn’t spring up out of nowhere, and the series it’s a part of has a long history of its own.
“This single-player turn-based RPG is reborn in Unreal Engine 5 with the latest technology,” publisher CubeGame announced on Monday. “Set off on a journey to find the immortals with Tianhe Yun’s team. In the meantime, a hidden truth that has been sealed for a long time is revealing itself.” The update was accompanied by a fresh trailer that’s been turning heads for both its high production values and its flashy turn-based combat.
That last part is the biggest reason why the game’s been drawing comparisons to Clair Obscur. Like this year’s hit RPG, Sword and Fairy 4: Remake seems to feature cinematic battle animations with lots of motion blur and slowdown, as well as a command wheel integrated into the scene rather than situated off to the side with the rest of the HUD. The fact that the whole thing is in Unreal Engine 5 adds another level of hyper-realistic sheen reminiscent of Clair Obscur.
But while the internet has a penchant for condensing new stuff down into familiar buzz phrases and using the most popular things as lenses for understanding everything else, Sword and Fairy 4: Remake didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree. Quoting one site’s post about the game that called it a “Clair Obscur-like,” The CRPG Book editor Felipe Pepe wrote, “I really hate how games media handles anything out of China. We’re getting a gorgeous remake of one of their best RPGs ever, but the clown does zero research about it and just goes ‘I’m getting a lot of Boss Baby vibes from this…’”
The original Sword and Fairy 4 looked like this, the second screenshot is the remake, and the third is Expedition 33.
The only bar you have to clear is to recognize shape and colors at this point, and you are failing miserably. My 3-year old cousin can see the similarities https://t.co/HCNNmqtPFV pic.twitter.com/0X9sXdrz9o
— Dream’s Longest Day (@Dreamboum) December 29, 2025
The first The Legend of Sword and Fairy launched for MS-DOS in 1995 and served as an analogue to Final Fantasy rooted in Chinese mythology, but it was never localized outside of East Asia. The most recent entry was 2021’s Sword and Fairy 7 which abandoned turn-based combat for real-time action and is available on both PC and console. Sword and Fairy 4: Remake, meanwhile, is an update to the 2007 entry which also happens to be available on Steam. It only looks like Clair Obscur to the degree that all turn-based battle RPGs have you similarly watching a static row of fighters enact the commands you select from a menu.
It’s definitely possible that Sword and Fairy 4: Remake developer UP software has leaned into some of the stylistic RPG design choices we now associate with Clair Obscur in the year since that game blew up (trailers for it were getting fans hyped well before its 2025 release, too). But Clair Obscur owes some of those elements, including its flashy command wheel, to series that came before it, like Persona. As RPG fans have been reminding each other a lot this year, the genre extends well beyond Final Fantasy and a certain modern French riff on the franchise.
Maybe Sword and Fairy 4: Remake will be the latest one to help players continue to expand their turn-based horizons.
