STUDIO PROFILE
NIHON FALCOM
How the longest-running Japanese RPG studio continues to blaze its own Trails
BY ALAN WEN
Founded 1981
Employees 60
Key staff Toshihiro Kondo (president/producer/ writer), Takayuki Kusano (director), Hisayoshi Takeiri (Trails Of Cold Steel series writer)
URL
falcom.co.jp
Selected softography
The
Legend
Of
Heroes: Trails Of Cold Steel, The Legend Of Heroes: Trails In The Sky, Ys, Tokyo Xanadu, Brandish, Zwei
Current projects
The Legend Of Heroes: Trails From Zero, The Legend Of Heroes: Trails To Azure, The Legend Of Heroes: Trails Into Reverie, The Legend Of Natuya: Boundless Trails, The Legend of Heroes: Kuro No Kiseki
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.