NIHON FALCOM
How the longest-running Japanese RPG studio continues to blaze its own Trails
You might expect a studio’s longevity to be marked like the rings of a tree, something that can be traced through to its size and growth. But that’s certainly not the case for Nihon Falcom. The oldest RPG developer in Japan, currently celebrating its 40th anniversary, it’s also one of the smallest, with a headcount that has remained firmly in the double digits. As a Japanese developer that has stuck to its native territory for the majority of its lifespan, its games aren’t household names like Final Fantasy, Persona or even Dragon Quest. Far from a disadvantage, though, the company’s president, Toshihiro Kondo, views this as a strength. “The fact that we do everything, from game development to music and video production to package design and marketing, all in-house helps us avoid inaction due to a lack of knowledge,” he tells us.
Nihon Falcom’s real success is in enduring all these years as the underdog. It may lack the production values and global reach of Square Enix or Bandai Namco (the latter, incidentally, is the publisher of several of Falcom’s The Legend Of Heroes games overseas) but it has weathered the storm of the Japanese game industry’s most turbulent periods without having to be acquired by or merged with a larger operation in order to survive. While it has shifted from its origins as a PC-first developer to prioritising consoles in the past decade, it has neither compromised on its JRPG roots nor taken the free-to-play path on mobile like so many of its contemporaries.
However, the studio’s size certainly hasn’t hindered its ambition, nor the scale of its unique brand of storytelling. Last year saw the English release of The Legend Of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV, concluding the Erebonia arc of the four-part series. This is just one part of a huge overarching connected universe set on the continent of Zemuria, where rival nations and unexpected alliances cross over, which began with the Trails In The Sky trilogy, directed by Kondo himself.
Where its rivals are happy to move on to a whole new world with new characters and stories in the next numbered instalments in their flagship series, Falcom has built up a rich, complex tapestry of worldbuilding and continuity that’s probably only matched in print, by the likes of George RR Martin. By the time you reach Trails Of Cold Steel IV’s finale, the cast has expanded to be as eye-wateringly enormous as the MCU’s roster – and those are just the playable characters.
Indeed, this epic is still far from over, with a whole game acting as an epilogue for the past few games yet to come, in the form of
Trails Into Reverie. Meanwhile, the studio is developing a new Trails title, known currently by its Japanese title Kuro No Kiseki, which will kickstart another lengthy arc in Zemuria. If that all sounds like the result of a lot of ambitious planning, it wasn’t necessarily what Kondo expected when he took the reins on the series’ third arc. “[Trails In The Sky] was my first relevant experience, so I was probably too busy with the task at hand to think too long about it,” he says. “I knew I wanted to continue the story of the Erebonian Empire and the Republic of Calvard since they were set during this time. However, this was something I merely hoped would happen, and I never imagined that things would continue for as long as they have.”
Kondo’s route to the role of Falcom’s president has been an unusual one, taking him from a fan of its games to the face of the company in the west in record time. And, given his earliest encounter with those games, it could have been a totally different story. “The first Falcom title I played was Ys III at a friend’s house,” he says. “At the time, I found the game difficult and wound up getting ‘game over’ after a short while.”
That unforgiving introduction, however, wasn’t enough to deter Kondo’s fascination with the studio’s output. After building a fan website in his time at university, he realised this could be
a foot in the door at his dream company. Falcom was already familiar with his website, not least because Kondo had phoned the company to ask if it would be OK for him to use its copyrighted images. So when the Finance graduate tried applying for a more ‘respectable’ position in the company’s accounting division, it was decided instead that his knowledge of the Internet made Kondo the perfect candidate to put in charge of maintaining and handling the company server.
Despite having no prior game development experience, Kondo would eventually move to writing for a number of games, as a result of providing his own ideas and feedback to the team when he was creating websites for the games, before discovering he was also adept at managing team schedules, which led to him becoming an executive. Then, when Falcom’s founder Masayuki Kato had to step down as president in 2007 for health reasons, he asked Kondo to pick up the reins. For an up-andcoming employee to become president of a major Japanese game company in less than a decade is extremely rare, putting Kondo next to the likes of FromSoftware’s Hidetaka Miyazaki.
Did Falcom being a smaller company make it easier for him to be noticed by the higher-ups? “I don’t know whether that helped or not, but I had it in my mind that joining a company with a small number of employees would be better for me in many ways,” Kondo says. More important, he says, were the opportunities afforded in spite of his prior experience,
IT HAS NEITHER COMPROMISED ON ITS JRPG ROOTS NOR TAKEN THE F2P PATH ON MOBILE LIKE MANY CONTEMPORARIES
something Kondo believes brought out the best in him. It certainly worked for one of the studio’s most famous alumni. Makoto Shinkai, who cut his teeth making the animated sequences in Falcom’s games, despite having no moviemaking knowledge when he joined the company, went on to direct the 2016 romantic fantasy Your Name, one of the most successful anime films ever made.
Kondo’s tenure has seen a slow but steady push into the western market – and it is here that the mismatch between Falcom’s ambitions and its size really comes to a head. Unless a series has proven global reach, Japanese titles typically focus on the local market before moving on to localisation. Falcom, however, has no in-house localisation team in place, meaning it relies on publishing partnerships to take its games overseas. Fans in the west have had to be incredibly patient, with each instalment in the Trails Of Cold Steel series arriving two years after its respective Japanese release – although this could be considered quick in comparison to previous efforts.
Localisation takes so long mostly because of the monumental amount of text that requires translation: Trails Of Cold Steel III alone consists of 1.6 million Japanese characters. “In the past, there was also the fact that all the work was completed in-house and the data structure of the game was only understood by people at the company,” Kondo adds. “Our tools were also made in-house, and there were no proper manuals. Now we are reviewing the data format so that it can be easily shared with people outside the company.”
Given that Falcom’s main strength lies in the interwoven history of its characters and world, the accessibility of its library is another issue. For instance, console players new to
Trails Of Cold Steel who meet Estelle and Joshua and find themselves wanting to experience their story over in the Trails In The Sky games will be stymied by the fact that the latter series is only available on Steam.
Nonetheless, progress is being made. It was recently announced that Trails From Zero and Trails To Azure – titles from the Crossbell arc but closely intertwined with the events of Trails Of Cold Steel – would finally be coming to the west. While these aren’t due until autumn 2022 and early 2023 respectively, fans will nonetheless soon be able to enjoy the whole Trails Of Cold Steel series without feeling like they’re missing half the story.
Still, there’s no getting around the fact that both games are more than a decade old and were originally made for PSP, released before the company committed to making fully 3D console titles. It’s a challenge of which Kondo is all too aware. When we ask whether there’s a chance of the Trails In The Sky games he directed making the jump to more modern platforms, Kondo says that he would prefer to see a proper remake of the trilogy rather than a port. “However, we are a group of people who want to develop original games, so for now, our first priority is to focus on that and expand the scope of our work through collaboration with other companies.”
In other words, though Falcom takes pride in keeping as much of its development in-house as possible, it naturally has to outsource some work if it is to reach as wide an audience as possible. This was the case for Switch – now by some distance the dominant console in Japan, but one Falcom appeared slow to support, until new publishing partner NIS America suggested porting Ys VIII: Lacrimosa Of Dana to the console in 2018. “Originally, we did want to release games on the Switch, but were too busy to make that happen ourselves,” Kondo explains. “We wound up meeting with a partner company who worked with us on that, and now we are able to release Switch titles consistently.”
The jump to a new platform has resulted in some awkward chronology: the third and fourth instalments of Trails Of Cold Steel are available on Switch, but the first two parts are only just arriving this summer, and so far only in Japan. For future releases, however – including never previously localised action RPG The Legend Of Natuya: Boundless Trails – Falcom is targeting simultaneous launches on multiple formats.
Meanwhile, the next Trails game is due to be released in Japan this September. Kuro No Kiseki has yet to be confirmed for a western release – NISA’s translators already have four games’ worth of text to be getting on with, after all – but we get the impression that, if we sit down again with Kondo for the company’s 50th anniversary, it will be to discuss a company that looks much more internationally aligned. And even if it takes that long for the next game to make it to these shores – well, to Falcom fans, what’s another ten years?
FALCOM ANIMATOR MAKOTO SHINKAI WENT ON TO DIRECT ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL ANIME FILMS EVER
1 Trails In The Sky is set in the relatively peaceful nation of Liberl, one of many territories caught in a power struggle on the continent of Zemuria.
2 Falcom was committed to pixel art for its characters in Trails In
The Sky. The aesthetic suited Sony’s PSP handheld.
3 Ys’ red-haired hero Adol is the longest-running character in Falcom’s storied history.