Who is ADOL Christin?

Toshihiro Kondo explains how Falcom develops the hero at the heart of Ys

The first rule of writing for Adol Christin is that you don’t write for Adol Christin. The character has a number of key traits – his red hair, his friendship with Dogi, and his terrible luck with boats – but the most important one is that he doesn’t speak – and that’s a conscious choice. “Just so you know, within the company there have been many times when people have said, ‘Let’s drop this and have him talk,’” says Kondo. “When I first started taking over the Ys series, what I was told is that the reason Adol doesn’t speak is because he is an avatar for the player. The instant Adol talks, the player takes on a very passive role because the player is essentially being spoken to.”

“The difficult part is that we don’t necessarily know who Adol is either,” Kondo continues.

Where the creators behind other such long-lived characters might have a wealth of dialogue to refer to when looking to confirm a character’s values or motivations, Falcom has no such luxury. “Sometimes when we’re creating the game we have to think “what is he thinking?” or “how would he respond to this situation?” because we don’t necessarily know.” However, there are some basic traits that Adol has – or at least, that he’s expected to have. “Even though Adol might not speak, he definitely has a personality or characteristics that make him Adol,” Kondo confirms. “For one thing, we know that he’s a nice person. We know that he has pretty good luck with the ladies, as it were! But the interesting thing about these characteristics is that they’re things that the fans have attributed to Adol, not something that Falcom put into him.”

As a result, Adol’s character is something of a collaborative work – even though his portrayals all come from a single source, he’s subject to many interpretations. “Something I often say about the character of Adol is that he’s similar to historical public domain characters,” Kondo muses, “in that there’s these characters that exist in history that we look at from our perspective and have an idea of who they were and what they did, that might be at odds with what actually happened from a historical perspective. Adol is similar to that in that people have attributed things to Adol that might not necessarily have happened or been intended. That’s a really special thing – not every character is able to have that kind of background.”