Nihon Falcom President Toshihiro Kondo started a busy weekend on July 4th anime expo. He and other Nihon Falcom staff spoke with fans at various panels and press conferences USNIS They were eagerly testing the company’s signature Japanese role-playing game at the booth. President Kondo was originally part of the development, and he continues to be hands-on in creating every game while leading the company. Most recently, he served as a member of the writing team Ys X Nordic. Currently, Falcom’s main franchises promoted internationally are Ys series and Trail (or trajectory) series.
Anime News Network had the opportunity to chat with President Kondo about the latest issue of the anime Ys franchise and recently released The Legend of Heroes: Road to Dawn. Before the talk, I played a short demo Ys X Nordicthe upcoming game promises to feature the exciting, reactionary action-based combat system that the IP is known for. Ys X Nordic It tells the past adventures of the protagonist Adul. One of the Funniest Running Jokes Ys The series follows Adol’s unfortunate propensity for shipwrecks, which is often the starting point for his journeys in the New World. Stay tuned to see if President Kondo will be on the boat with Adol!
2024 marks the 43rd anniversary of Nihon Falcom. What makes Falcom so successful?
Kondo: Because I have only been in the company for about 20 years, I can only speak about half of it. What I can say is that we make the types of games that resonate with players, and we have a lot of repeat customers. They kept buying the games we released and we built a strong relationship of trust.
In terms of scale, our actual headcount is that of a small company. However, the things we can do with these little people may not be things like graphics. We compensate for this by thinking carefully about how we design the game and how we make it so that it’s fun to play. To illustrate what I mentioned earlier, take Trail series. While we can’t compete with many games on the graphics side, what we can do is compete on the story side. In a team of 20 people, if no one can write a good story, there’s no point. We had to make sure we could write it well, which is why we decided to focus our efforts and efforts on making a story that would be engaging and interesting for players. This is the arena we choose to fight in trace series.
Fans have been enjoying it hero legend World building, including NPC growth. How big is the writing team? hero legend series? I read in previous interviews that only a handful of people were responsible. Ys game.
Kondo: At its largest, there were six or seven people on board Trail Writing staff. Sometimes, and in some cases, there are even fewer writers writing other games. Even among those, about three people will be working exclusively on the main story. The rest will handle quests and NPC conversations, and of course, everything is taken care of. As far as the people who write it are concerned, quite a few people perform many tasks.
in the case of traces of skythe first three games in the series, were written by only three people.
Falcom has more limited resources and fewer employees than larger publishers. With a game catalog history as old and extensive as Falcom’s, how do you decide how to allocate focus among existing franchises (Ys, hero legend/Trail), new IP and remakes/remasters?
Kondo: Within Falcom, we don’t strictly define people’s roles and hold them to those roles. It is very typical for employees to take on different roles. For example, now I’m president. But I’m the writer, director, and producer of our game. This isn’t limited to my recent corporate job. When I first started, I wrote scenes and worked on web design. in the case of traces of skyI also scripted the game events.
This is common among most employees within a company, and usually no one is directly responsible for things like level design. Level design is usually done at the end of the process, so the person doing level design early on may be doing other things. Although there are not many of them, they are able to take on many different roles, and they are able to take on many different aspects of game creation because they have learned how to accomplish all of these tasks.
What we just talked about is not limited to development. Our sound design team also handles network-related tasks and server-related things. The person overseeing sales is also responsible for fixing graphics, writing scripts, and all that other stuff. Falcom can do anything with our in-house people. Everything is done in-house by someone or another.
However, in recent years, game development has grown so large that we can now safely outsource certain aspects of game creation. These are things we can do internally, but we can also do them externally. We don’t have to worry about the quality of the delivery, so we leave those tasks to others. But that’s what happened in the last few years. We’ve been able to do this because we’ve become confident enough in the quality of our people internally to know that we can do this without having to rely on other people to just create the assets for us.
Given the country’s long history Ys and Heroic Legends/Footprints series, how does Falcom continue to differentiate its games from the many JRPGs currently on the market?
Kondo: As far as competing with AAA companies, graphically and personnel-wise, we just can’t do it. Therefore, we must look for other locations where we can fight with the specific resources and personnel available. Let’s use two major series as examples to illustrate exactly how we do this, trace The series is a very story-focused series. We focus on the story, and then everything revolves around the series or the story, whether it’s the user interface or the game elements, it all needs to serve the story itself. By focusing on the story and letting everything be a natural outgrowth of the story, we were able to create something unique that set it apart from other games.
On the other hand, when you play a game like YsAs an action game, action takes precedence over story. Stories tell what happens in action. Making a good, satisfying action game and then having everything to support it makes the game feel natural and fun. It’s a different style of doing these two things, but the result is the same. The core is to focus on one element and let it guide development.
A Japanese creator I respect told me that after playing our game, he felt that Falcom’s games had a “handmade feel.”
The smaller headcount means that most employees have been with Falcom for many years. Our employees have accumulated a wealth of knowledge. Often, people don’t even need to be specifically coached or given instructions during the development process, they just know what to do and do it. This is in contrast to having a large team, where you might have to monitor people to constantly manage them. I can trust my team to create because they all know what they are doing.
There are clearly positive and negative ways of doing things. Because we don’t hire (for example) a manual writer or someone whose entire job is to complete one specific task, we already know what needs to be done. People do it because they understand it’s part of the process and they have to do it. This ultimately has a direct impact on the quality of the game because people care about what they are doing. The result is a game of a quality that stands out from other products on the market.
This year marks the organization’s 20th anniversary Trail series. Can you give me a ranking? Trail game so far road to dawn? For example, if a player starts with road to dawnwhat games should they play next?
Kondo: for Trail, you can’t really recommend it based on a specific game because the games are arranged in what we in English call arcs. The game has different arcs. Each arc follows a different protagonist and a surrounding set of characters. Then, it takes place in a different location in the same world. If you’re going to start, it’s best to start after you’ve finished dawn Going back to the first game in those early arcs.
you can start from Sky arc, this will be Trails in the Sky FC, this happened in the Kingdom of Liber. Or the Crossbell Arc, which are two games after Lloyd that take place within the city of Crossbell. And then there’s the Empire arc, which takes place in the country of Erebonia, which is cold steel series. That’s four games plus one. You can start there too; start with the first game in the series or any other starting point. Anything that interests players will be a good entry point.
One of the biggest challenges with international distribution is translating and ensuring quality across regions. Is there any concern that Falcom will miss out on a critical marketing window if there is a gap between the Japanese and international versions?
Kondo: In the past, there hasn’t been much clamor from Western players for the game to be released quickly. But as time goes on and there are more and more games, there’s definitely going to be more people saying, “Hey, can you hurry up? Let’s get these games out. On the Falcom side, we’re trying to find ways to Do this by signing a contract with the company doing the licensing as early as possible, e.g. USNISto be able to start working on the game earlier.
Alan Costa (USNIS Translator): Then the other side of the equation is the positioning itself, which is USNIS handle. As someone who works in localization USNIS As well as the translation of this game, it’s important to truly state that quality is king. The stories, lore, and characters of these games are complex. If anything goes wrong with you, it’s a disgrace to the game and the story. As a company, we want to make sure we release high-quality games. We want to make sure we give Western players the same great experience as Japanese players.
We take great care to make sure we do this. It does take some time and we as a staff are always working hard to improve. You’ll notice the release timing between games released in the past, where the Japanese release was in the fall of a certain year, followed by an international release two or three years later. We’ve been trying to get that down to about a year or even less. I think players will be excited to see this. If you look at the timeline and the gap between when the game launched in Japan and when we released it, it’s getting smaller and smaller. We’re still able to maintain the high quality our fans have come to expect.
Will you come on board with Adol?
Kondo: Absolutely not. No, I don’t want to be on the ship with Adol at all. When the game was first released in Japan, many players were shocked. They said, “Oh my gosh, can Adul know how to row a boat?” Because the whole theme of the game is boats. Obviously, players were joking and saying, “Is this okay?” Hopefully Adol will step up and be able to do that. As for me, I didn’t want to go on the boat with him at all.
