Nihon Falcom’s Toshihiro Kondo on expanding beyond Japan and PlayStation

The three years since we previously talked with Nihon Falcom president Toshihiro Kondo, for E362’s Studio Profile, have been busy ones for the veteran Japanese RPG developer. On home turf, it has just released The Legend Of Heroes: Kai No Kiseki, the 13th instalment in its long-running Trails saga. But perhaps more notable is Falcom’s western release schedule, which in 2024 has brought us both Ys X: Nordics and Trails Through Daybreak, while the sequel to the latter is set to arrive in the US and Europe early next year. It’s a major shift for a company that for a long time lagged behind its competitors when it came to reaching players beyond Japan’s borders.

“Back when we were developing Trails Of Cold Steel, we never really thought about the foreign market,” Kondo says of the 2013 PS3 game that began the saga’s third story arc. As we catch up with him shortly after the western launch of Trails Through Daybreak, the beginning of its fourth and possibly final arc, things have changed. Rather than waiting to complete its games before thinking about localisation, he tells us, Falcom has now begun working with NIS America during development – and this is just one of the ways the developer has changed in recent years.