Clair Obscur, and Timed Attacks in RPGs
/Sandfall Interactive’s Clair Obscur may be 2025’s smash hit, but the turn-based RPG genre as a whole is one that has seen a lot of ups and downs over the last 40 years.
While RPGs were roaringly popular in the 90s and 00s, concepts like random battles and menu-driven gameplay have never been great at attracting more mainstream, modern audiences. As a result, RPG developers often find themselves looking for ways to spice up the gameplay - and a classic solutions that has emerged over the years, is the concept of timed hits.
Perhaps the first game to incorporate timed hits was Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, for the Super Nintendo. While it was released in 1996, I think to this day is stands as the golden example - so before we talk too much about Clair Obscur, let’s look at how things worked out for Mario RPG.
The idea here is that a timed hit is executed by pressing a button in sync with attack animations. If successful, players will attack again, dealing bonus damage. Similarly, pressing in sync with an incoming enemy attack will instead allows the player to perform a timed guard, blocking some of the damage taken.
And with just that small inclusion, the concept of turn-based combat was flipped on its head.
Mario swings out with his hammer, scoring a successful Timed Hit. Talk about GIFs you can hear!
There are a lot of advantages to adding this timing element to the slower turn-based combat that is seen in RPGs. But when I first played Mario RPG as a kid, I can still pretty clearly remember my first thought:
“Wow, I can block even when it’s not my turn!?”
Rather than just watching combat unfold until the turn order comes back around, suddenly I was engaged throughout the entire fight. Every attack becomes a chance to express my skill - and even when it’s the enemy’s turn, I can still take actions to move the battle in my favour. It felt like taking the combat from games like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, and allowing the player to “cheat”.
The system is pretty clearly on the player’s side - notably, enemies are still trapped in the normal turn order, and so it feels like one more advantage players can leverage to overcome their enemies.
And it’s not too surprising that timed hits are a veritable dopamine factory for players - directly participating in the attack pulls players into the experience. But also, as a musician I can tell you how much humans just love rhythm and doing things on the beat - and timed hits evoke that same feeling. Even ignoring the extra damage, it's just satisfying to nail an attack timing, hear the victory chime, and see little stars pop out of the bad guy. 30 years on, I can still vividly recall the feeling of bashing enemies with Mario’s hammer.
The player dodges an incoming attack in Clair Obscur
We’ve come a long way from Mario RPG though, and the conventions around these types of mechanics have evolved since then. Modern audiences still want that extra layer of engagement on top of the traditional turn-based gameplay, but I think 30 years of baggage has muddied the waters a bit. So to dig deeper, let’s compare against modern RPG mega-hit Clair Obscur.
Right from the get-go, I think we can immediately tell that each game has a different approach here:
In Mario RPG, timed hits feel like a “win more” mechanic, which purely rewards the player. The whole game could be completed without performing a single timed hit, but good execution will still empower the player to succeed where they otherwise might not. Since enemy HP isn’t visible, there’s little feedback when a missed timed hit might have made a difference — no moment of “if only I’d nailed that input.”
The consequence for both success and failure feels low, and so the main way players interact with the system is to celebrate their victories.
On the flip side, Clair Obscur pretty clearly takes inspiration from the Dark Souls games, and in particular Sekiro. Timing mechanics here are decidedly not a “win more” mechanic. Rather, they are designed to test the player’s skill by putting them in scenarios where they must succeed or die. Living through fights requires the player to execute reasonably well, and there are so many mechanics tied to dodging and parrying that it’s almost hard to even call it the “enemy turn”. If anything, how the player handles incoming attacks is the biggest deciding factor to their overall success.
Good execution not only avoids all damage, but can also trigger a counter. A big swing in the tide of combat!
Clair Obscur has essentially raised their game’s skill floor, and there are both positives and negatives to this approach. Dark Souls players will all know how great it feels to clutch out a boss fight through the skin of your teeth - and Clair Obscur really does deliver that same fist-pumping rush of victory. It’s unquestionably thrilling to dispatch enemies that would crush you with less perfect play. On top of being satisfying, the feel of scraping through a lethal situation also really suits the game’s narrative themes.
But with that being said, it’s also kind of gutting to look at a bad situation and think “this would have gone so much better if I didn’t suck at dodging”.
By now we’re all well aware of the discourse around Dark Souls and game difficulty. Ramping up this kind of skill expression means players will feel both their victories and their failures much more poignantly - victory is intensely satisfying, but asks a lot more of the player. There’s a lot more potential for frustration, and some players simply will not have the means or will to tackle the challenge.
Is this what RPG fans are looking for? The RPG genre is generally known more for challenging a player’s optimization and strategy - skills which the player doesn’t need quite so much of if they can simply dodge every attack. One would expect this out of a game like Sekiro, but RPGs tend to be pretty light on mechanics which challenge the player’s raw execution skill.
A rare examp[e of a perfect block, in the Mario RPG Remake.
Part of the problem is that, at least in Clair Obscur, these timing mechanics have a very binary, pass-or-fail nature.
Enemies tend to do a ton of damage, and a successful dodge will prevent all of it. On top of that, it also grants the player resources to fuel their own offence in response. A single parry can represent a huge swing in the fight - and so much like in Dark Souls, it sometimes feels like the fight is over after a single mistake.
By contrast, timed hits in Mario RPG are far more accessible. There’s only one button to press, and even if the player’s timing isn’t great, there are levels of success.
A perfectly timed block might avoid all damage, but a mediocre block still avoids half. A mediocre block still feels good to perform, and there’s never a feeling of “I didn’t execute perfectly, so now I can’t win”. Half damage is actually the most common result, and so there’s much less variance in the incoming damage - meaning players have room to plan around incoming attacks, rather than feeling like their only way to live is to dodge.
Unlike in Mario RPG, the timed hit system in Clair Obscur is decidedly not on the player’s side. It is not a friendly and accessible system, and it isn’t there just to feed you dopamine. This is a game , it’s there to generate drama and challenge. Some people may be more or less into that than others, but generally humans enjoy having a variety of challenges to overcome.
Combat might be lethal, but at least we always have the Reserve Team to try and clutch out a victory.
This isn’t to say that Clair Obscur has done something wrong - I appreciate the mechanics built into the system, and the strategy behind it. When things go right they really go right, and you simply feel like an indomitable beast.
But it’s also true This is a game that requires a lot from the player. The skills it’s testing are fundamentally different from what you would see in traditional RPGs, even in ones with timed hits. For that reason, I think it’s understandable if RPG players feel like this is not the game for them.
I don’t like feeling that a fight “would be easy if I could just dodge”, and I wish the game had more quality of life features that embraced the volatility of combat - but the process of learning how to fight an enemy is usually satisfying enough to make up for it. The most thrilling fights are always the ones you barely win, and I’ve found Clair Obscur to be great at delivering those moments. Even after a party wipe, it’s a great feeling to send in the Reserve Team to edge out a hard-fought victory.
These days, modern audiences are very used to the Action and RPG genres bleeding into each other, and I think there’s very clearly a place in the games landscape for a title like Clair Obscur, even if it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.