All the Announcements from Anime Expo 2024

President Kondo and the Power of In-House Staff at Nihon Falcom

Nihon Falcom president Toshihiro Kondo kicked off a busy July 4 weekend at Anime Expo. He and the other Nihon Falcom staff spoke to fans at the various panels and at the NIS America booth as they eagerly playtested the company's signature JRPGs. Originally part of development, President Kondo balances the job of leading the company while continuing to be hands-on in creating every game. Most recently, he worked as a member of the writing team at Ys X Nordics. Currently, Falcom's main internationally promoted franchises are the Ys series and the Trails (or Kiseki) series.

Anime News Network had the opportunity to speak to President Kondo about the latest installment in the Ys franchise as well as the recent release of The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak. Prior to the conversation, I played a short demo of Ys X Nordics, and the upcoming game promises an exciting, reactionary action-based battle system that the IP is known for. Ys X Nordics follows the past adventures of the protagonist, Adol. One of the funniest running gags in the Ys series is Adol's unfortunate predisposition for shipwrecks, which is usually the starting point for his journey in a new land. Stay tuned to find out if President Kondo will join Adol on a boat!

2024 marks Nihon Falcom's 43rd year since it was established. What has made Falcom so successful after all this time?

Kondo: I can only speak to about half of it since I've only been in the company for about 20 years. What I can say is that the types of games that we make are games that resonate with our players, and we have many who are repeat customers. They continually purchase the games we release, and there's a strong, built-up relationship of trust between us.

From a scale perspective, we're a small company in terms of our actual personnel. However, what we can do with that small personnel might not be something like graphics, for example. We make up for that by thinking carefully about how we design our games and how we make our games so they're fun to play. To illustrate what I mentioned before, take the Trails series. While we can't compete on the graphical front against a lot of games, what we can do is compete with the story. Within a group of 20 people, if nobody can write a good story, well then, it's a moot point. We had to make sure that we could write well, and that's why we decided to focus our efforts and energy on making a story that was engaging and fun for players. That's the arena that we chose to battle in when it came to the Trail series.

Fans have always enjoyed The Legend of Heroes worldbuilding, including the growth of the NPCs. How big is the writing team for The Legend of Heroes series? I read in a previous interview that only very few people are responsible for the Ys games.

Kondo: At its largest, it's between six to seven people on the Trails writing staff. Sometimes, there are cases where even fewer writers than that will write other games. And even within that, about three people will specifically work on the main story. The remainder will handle quests and NPC dialogue, and, of course, everything gets scheduled out. In terms of the people writing it, quite a few people do a number of tasks.

In the case of Trails in the Sky, which was the very first three titles in the series, there are only three people who wrote that game.

Compared to large publishers, Falcom is more limited in its resources and has fewer employees. With a game catalog history as old and wide as Falcom's, how do you decide how to allocate focus between existing franchises (Ys, The Legend of Heroes/Trails), new IP, and remakes/remasters?

Kondo: Within Falcom, we don't strictly define people's roles and make them stick to them. It's very typical for an employee to take on different roles. For example, right now, I'm the president. But I'm a scenario writer, a director, and a producer on our games. That's not limited to just my most recent work within the company. When I first started, I wrote scenarios and worked on web design. In the case of Trails in the Sky, I also scripted for the game events.

That's common amongst most of the staff within the company, and oftentimes, no person is the direct person for something like level design. Level design usually comes at the end of the process, so the person who would do level design early on would be doing something else. Even though there are not a lot of people, they're able to take on many different roles, and they're able to take on many different aspects of game creation because they've learned how to do all these tasks.

What we just spoke about isn't just limited to development. Our sound design team also handles the network-related tasks and server-related stuff. The person who oversees sales has also fixed graphics, written scripts, and all these other things. There's nothing Falcom cannot do with who we have in-house. Everything is done in-house by some person or another.

However, in more recent years, game development has become so large that there are certain aspects of game creation that we now feel comfortable enough to outsource. It's things that we could do in-house, but it's also something that can be done out-of-house. We don't have to be concerned about the quality that's delivered, so we leave those tasks to other people. But this is something that's come about in these last few years. We're only able to do it because we're already confident enough in the quality that we have with the staff within, knowing that we can do it and not having to rely on other people beyond just simply creating assets for us.

Given the long history of the Ys and The Legend of Heroes/Trails series, how does Falcom continue to differentiate its games from the number of JRPGs that are now in the market?

Kondo: In terms of competing with AAA companies, graphically and personnel-wise, we can't. Therefore, we must find other locations where we can fight using the specific resources and personnel that are available. To use the two main series as an example of how we specifically go about doing this, the Trail series is a very story-focused franchise. We focus on the story, and then everything comes around the series or the story, whether that be the UI or the gameplay elements, needs to be in service to the story itself. By focusing specifically on the story and letting everything be a natural outgrowth from it, we're able to create something different that separates it from the other games.

On the other hand, when you have a game like Ys, an action-based game, the action comes first rather than the story. The story informs what happens in the action. Making good, satisfying action gameplay and then having everything support it makes the game feel natural and fun to play. That's a different style of doing both things, but the result is the same. The core of focusing on one element and letting it guide development.

A specific creator in Japan whom I respect told me that after he played our games, he felt that Falcom games have a “handmade feel” to them.

Having a small staff means that much of the staff has been working for Falcom for many years. We have a lot of accumulated knowledge within our staff. Oftentimes during development, without even having to specifically direct people or provide instructions, they just know what to do and they do it. This contrasts with having a big team where you might have to look over people's shoulders to constantly manage them. I can trust my team to be able to create because they all know what they're doing.

There are obvious positive and negative ways of doing things. Because we don't employ—for example—a manual writer or someone whose whole job is to do one specific task, there's already this knowledge of what needs to get done. People will do it because they understand that it's part of the process and that they must do it. That ends up having a direct effect on the quality of the games that come out because people care about what they're doing. The result is games whose quality differentiates itself from everything else on the market.

This year is the 20th anniversary of the Trails series. Could you give a ranking of the Trails games so far after Trails Through Daybreak? For example, if a player starts with Trails Through Daybreak, what game should they play after?

Kondo: For Trails, you can't really recommend it based on a particular game because the games are arranged in such a way that we call them arcs in English. There are different arcs for the games. Each of these arcs follows a different main character and a set of surrounding characters. Then, it takes place within a different location inside the same world. If you were going to start, the best place to start after you finished Daybreak would be to go back to the first game in one of those earlier arcs.

You could start with the Sky arc, which would be Trails in the Sky FC, and that takes place in the Liberl Kingdom. Or the Crossbell arc, which is two games that follows Lloyd and takes place inside the city of Crossbell. Then there's the Imperial arc, which takes place in the country of Erebonian and is part of the Cold Steel series. That's four games plus one. You can also start from there; from the first game in that series or any one of those other starting points. Whatever looks interesting to the player would be a great place to jump in.

One of the biggest challenges to international releases is translation and ensuring quality across regions. Has there ever been any concern that Falcom would miss critical windows of marketing if there is a gap between the Japanese and international releases?

Kondo: In the past, there wasn't a lot of clamoring from Western players to hurry up and release the games. But as time has passed and more and more games have come out, there have definitely been 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 that. For example, making contracts earlier with companies that do licensing, like NIS America, to be able to start work on the games earlier.

Alan Costa (NIS America Translator): Then the other side of the equation is the localization itself, which NIS America handles. Speaking as somebody who works on localization for NIS America and the translation for this game, it's important to really state that quality is king. These games are intricate in terms of their story, lore, and characters. If you get something wrong, it's a disgrace to the game and the story. As a company, we want to make sure that we're releasing a game of top quality. We want to make sure that we're giving players in the West as good of an experience as the players in Japan are getting.

We take deep care to make sure we're doing that. That does take some time, and we as staff have been trying to improve. You'll notice the release timing between games that came out in the past where the Japanese release was Fall of a certain year, and then it came out internationally two or three years later. We've been really working hard to cut that down to about a year or even less. I think players will be excited to see that. If you look at the timeline and you look at the gap between when the game comes out in Japan and when we're releasing it, it's getting smaller and smaller. We're still able to maintain the high level of quality that we know fans are expecting.

Would you be willing to get into a boat with Adol?

Kondo: Absolutely not. No, I don't want to get on a boat with Adol at all. When this game was first announced in Japan, a lot of the players were shocked. They said, “Oh my god, can Adol ride a boat?” Because the whole theme of this game is boats. Obviously, players have jokingly said, “Is this going to be okay?” Hopefully, Adol will rise to the occasion to be able to do it. As for me, I'd much rather not ride on a boat with him at all.