Nihon Falcom President Toshihiro Kondo talks Ys X, Trails through Daybreak 2, and Falcom’s plans for the future

Ahead of the western release of Ys X, NISA Europe gave us the opportunity to talk with Falcom President Toshihiro Kondo about their upcoming titles.

While the focus was naturally on Ys X and Trails through Daybreak 2, Kondo also gave some details on how Falcom handles its consistent release schedule — there’s even some insight into the development behind Tokyo Xanadu!

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Rice Digital: Did you have any main goals when developing Ys X compared to previous titles?

Toshihiro Kondo: Because this was the 10th game in the series, and it was an important title, it doesn’t mean they wanted it to end, they wanted the series to continue. And one of the goals for this game in particular was also to put it on the Switch.

And because, generally speaking, the user base of the Switch is younger than PlayStation and PC, and because there’s more ladies, I thought, well, what can we do to appeal to this potential new group of fans of the series?

And so one of the things within that was rather than to continue with Adol being an older person, we wanted to kind of rewind time and look back at Adol when he was younger again to kind of meet this potential new fanbase.

And so through this game, they’re able to kind of create this group of people around him that are his own age. So you have this new kind of rapport that can be built with them. All of these things together were something that we really wanted to do to kind of reach and find this new audience that was on the Switch.

And so hopefully, this will be an opportunity to onboard a lot of people who have never played an Ys game up to this point. So those were the main goals, and that’s how we began development with those things in mind for Ys X.

And on the gameplay side of things, you know, the whole theme and point of Ys is adventure. So how can we do more adventure? Well, we thought “maybe we could use the sea as a setting.” That would be a great opportunity, allowing players to have the ability to use the ship, which you are able to travel on yourself and to venture to different places.

Also, a big difference in the gameplay would be the switch from the party system, which was used previously with up to six characters. Players may or may not necessarily have actually made use of all of those six characters, so we to wanted to turn that into only two playable characters, or something entirely different too.

So from the gameplay perspective as well, Ys X gave us the opportunity to try things that we had never done before in the series. Again, allowing for a fresh start compared to what had come before and what had been done for the past few games.

RD: Regarding trying to do something new and reaching out to new audiences with the Switch — Was the Switch to a more open, multiple island setting a deliberate choice to contrast the game with Ys IX?

TK: Everything in the Ys series is in contract to what came before. For example, you mentioned Ys IX. Ys IX is set in a city, which is more in contrast to Ys VIII’s uninhabited island. And from a gameplay perspective, for the action that takes place in Ys VIII, a lot of what you’re doing is mostly on a flat plane.

And again, in contrast, you’ve got Ys IX, which is in a city, uses verticality quite a bit for its gameplay. And then it also has this other gameplay hook, if you will, of the Monstrum, which gives you access to these various abilities that you can use which drastically alter gameplay as well. And so within that, now you have a contrast that can be created between Ys IX and Ys X.

I really love Ys IX, by the way, so it’s a great game. But when making Ys X, again, in contrast with IX, okay, well, like you said, it’s in a city, it’s in a semi-open world. So what can we do now to, in contrast to that, make it bigger? We won’t put it in the same place, we’ll make one town.

We’ll allow people to have more latitude to be able to explore a bit more. The main thing that they’re going for with the Ys games, and for Ys X in particular, is for people just to start from any point and discover and enjoy what the Ys series is about.

And so by contrasting it with what came before, and also looking at, for example, because this is set so early in Adol’s Adventures, contrasting it with 1 and 2 — which a lot of the things, given the age of these games, we were unable to do at that period in time — we can now do all of these great things with Ys X, which sets it in contrast from the other games in the Ys series, and really brings it back to its roots of adventure.

And so hopefully people when they pick it up are able to see the greatness of this series, that kind of has a through line of the greatness of adventure, although it ends up being different title per title.

One of the things that’s most important in what we make an Ys game is whether or not Adol, the character himself, will be excited to go on this adventure.

RD: Heading back to your comments on the Switch and your audience, were there any difficulties developing for this new target platform, versus PlayStation 4 or PlayStation 5?

TK: Absolutely there are things spec wise that the Switch is unable to do in contrast to PlayStation and other platforms. However, rather than the team becoming disappointed or upset with this, it become an opportunity to look at what we can do with the limitations of this system.

That’s actually where the idea for the Duo system of Adol and Karja came from. So without the change in target platform, we wouldn’t have been able to challenge ourselves and think of something new to bring to the table.

We ended up thinking around the limitations of what the platform offers, and it gave us the opportunity to reevaluate what we wanted to do with the game. At the end of the day, it was a good experience

RD: Would you say focusing on just two characters gives you enough time to actually have Karja almost feel like the main character compared to Adol, compared to having to split time between six characters in Ys 7-9?

TK: Yeah, absolutely. If you have a party of six, you naturally have six party members’s backstories and things to think about, but you don’t have this in Ys X. You’re able to take all those people’s time and care that you can put into making their stories, and plug that into Karja instead, which creates a lot more backstory and a lot more focus that can be given to her.

Within that as well, there’s also the story element that the two of them are joined by what’s called Mana Cuffs. Because they can’t actually get away from each other, that means even more focus needs to be placed upon the relationship of Adol and Karja. Rather than making it a simple love story, we wanted it to be something closer to more of a story about friendship and the bonds of friendship.

That’s why you have what they call in the game Shield Siblings. And so they become Shield Siblings, and this allowed us to portray something that we wouldn’t have been able to do necessarily had they had more party members and things like that.

Again, this change of circumstance allowed us to challenge and try something entirely new, which gave a result of having a lot more focus placed upon Karja, as you said, essentially another one of the main characters, and to really flesh out not only her, but her relationship with Adol as well.

The difficult thing though, that then came out from this, was making sure that the player base actually liked Karja. Because if the player base didn’t like Kaja, we kind of end things where they were. So we spent a lot of time and worry, worrying about creating this character and making sure that she was likeable and that she was the one that the player base would actually latch onto and appreciate as a character.

Up until now particularly in the series, a lot of the heroines have been more of these quiet demure type ladies, whereas Karja’s the exact opposite of that, which is very boisterous, she’s very rambunctious, she can be a little bit violent, and so said even up until right when the game was released, we were worried about whether or not this character would actually be liked and accepted by the Japanese player base.

RD: Did you have the western player base in mind when creating Karja? Or was it more “hopefully if the Japanese side likes her, then the Western side will too”?

TK: I figured the foreign fans would like her just fine, so I wasn’t too worried. On the other hand I actually kind of created her with the foreign base in mind. Therefore it was more, once she had been created, was reigning her in to make sure that she was still more acceptable to the Japanese player base, because again, figuring the foreign side is like…

This kind of goes back to the very beginning of the conversation [regarding Karja]. I was watching the Vikings television show on Netflix, and said “okay there’s strong female characters that come out in these series, and it’s not only limited to that, but also a lot of other Western media”, so I knew that this would be a character that would essentially be accepted by the West. And because even now in Anime as well, there are strong female characters that possess a lot of the same characteristics as Karja, I figured it would end up being okay.

RD: Switching over to Trails through Daybreak 2, we go from the two main characters of Ys X to a lot more in Trails. Has it been hard making sure all the new characters from the Daybreak arc get their time in the spotlight, while also bringing back existing characters and letting them have their time again?

TK: Yeah, it’s incredibly difficult. So much so that it’s a topic of conversation within the development staff themselves. Like, is this character’s spotlight not being taken by these other older characters? Is this main character so strong that it’s kind of taking over other main characters roles?

However, within that though, there’s a lot of effort that goes into making sure that because this is particularly a new arc in the series that’s set in the Republic of Calvard, you have this whole brand new cast of characters. I feel that we have done a good job of making sure that they have been given their time to shine.

However, when the older characters from the previous games come out, they definitely feel like “god, these characters have a very strong presence” and they have a tendency to get a lot of the attention and the focus. So we does feel that at the end of the day, the Calvard crew, as it were, have been given ample time to be on the spotlight and to have them come out as characters.

RD: Would you say some of this is also maybe guided by what the fan base is wanting? Because players will obviously want or expect certain characters, especially the main characters of previous arcs, to appear again. So does fan feedback play into it at all? Maybe even with like characters from Daybreak that weren’t there that much?

TK: The truth of the matter is that the setting for the games is done well in advance, and the characters and their roles and place in the story are already defined. And so therefore when it comes time to make and develop the game, we follow the plans we have made from the beginning to make sure that those characters are given what they were originally intended to be given. So that’s how it starts.

However, fans expectations and perhaps fans needs and desires are taken into account as well. To what degree it depends, but the point is that when we do bring a character from the past and have them come out in a new game, they have to be cognizant of the new players who maybe are starting from Daybreak and have never played the older games.

So how can these past characters be put in a situation where they are supposed to be there and it makes sense for them to be there, and it’s not like they’re just plopped in there out of nowhere.

A great example would be a character like Renne, who comes out in a really big role in both Daybreak 1 and 2, and so making sure that she as a character is not just there simply for the purpose of fanservice, but also there with a very specific purpose to be in Calvard, to come out in the game, and to have that well explained so that players know, okay, she’s there for a reason.

Still, every now and again there will be a character who comes out of a kind of like, “hey, it’s a little bit of a fanservice”, or might not have that deep of an explanation for their presence.

RD: Speaking of general writing for Trails through Daybreak 2, Daybreak 1 went with a more “darker” or mature sort of tone compared to earlier entries. Van was not an anti-hero, but more “morally gray”, which in itself ties into the whole alignment system. Is that something that continues on into Daybreak 2 as well?

TK: So Van, as a character, is created as an outgrowth of where he exists within the world, which is in the Republic of Calvard. And because the Republic of Calvard is a very complex place that is not only controlled by good people, there’s lots of bad organizations.

You’ve got the Almata, and other mafias. You’ve got the Heiyue that have come out in previous games like in Crossbell, and then you have the Ouroboros organization there as well. All of these negative influences and organizations are there. And Van had to be a character, which was able to access each and every one of them, which kind of obviously necessitates him being a little bit of a darker character, as you mentioned.

And so because Daybreak 2 is also set with Van as the main character, and is also set within the Republic of Calvard, you can expect to see that kind of same darker tenor being carried over into that game as well.

RD: Tying into the darker theme and Van having choices between picking morally grey or law or chaos, is it difficult trying to balance having these choices versus having one set storyline? Such as players maybe thinking they missed out if they pick one choice over the other? For example, Daybreak 1 had content near the end that depended on your alignments. Do you want players to replay the game multiple times with different alignments, or is it just sort of “pick what you think is best and go with that”?

TK: The main reason to have this system wasn’t necessarily to have players replay the game to see new things. It was more for players to experience the reality of living in the Republic of Calvard. As so again, talking Calvard itself having such a difficult society and having all these different organisations in power, the thought was “how would Van end up these situations”?

The difficulty actually had more to do with the fact that, because up until now, all of the main characters had been what you’d call allies of justice, we had never really written “darker” story lines. For example, where before it’s like, you captured this guy, and maybe in their previous games, the main characters would forgive them, and turn over a new leaf and go back on your merry way.

It was more like, now we need to have a line where it’s like, we don’t forgive this guy, and we just throw him into the police, and we turn him in. Because this was not something that the team had worked on in 20 years of writing these games, it was difficult for us to come up with these more, I guess, darker story lines. That was the more difficult aspect, rather than trying to think of a way to make players want to play it over and over.

RD: Would you say reception to this new style has been positive in Japan, and maybe the West as well? You mentioned earlier with Karja that her being a more outgoing, or energetic female protagonist, you weren’t 100% sure how it would be received in Japan. Is Van in a similar spot, being quite different from previous protagonists? Like you say it’s not completely new to the Japanese side of media, but was this still something that maybe some players were hesitant about?

TK: For the Japanese fan base, they could definitely feel that this was something that had never really been portrayed before, and this was a challenge that the team put upon itself to present something new, to show these kind of darker things, and overall it feels like reception was good, and that the fan base accepted it.

RD: Speaking of changes, Trails Through Daybreak brought a few gameplay changes to combat specifically. You could switch between action and turn based freely, and even the turn based side was slightly different. Was there anything you wanted to tweak or change or add upon for Daybreak 2, such as fan requests or just things the team wanted to maybe fix or improve upon?

TK: Even though the team, once they had completed Daybreak 1, felt satisfied with what we had done, as time passes, you naturally have this feeling that, “well, maybe we could have done things a little bit differently.” So yes, in Daybreak 2, there are things where we felt like they have been more refined.

To talk about the combat system to begin with, why we decided to have an action combat system kind of married to a turn based combat system is because there’s this whole idea of speediness in combat, and how to make combat more enjoyable and kind of quicker for players. That’s where that originally came from.

And to make it even better in Daybreak 2, you’ll find that there’s a couple new systems. There’s the Cross Change system, where if you press the button at the right time, you’ll do a dodge and your partner will come in and do an attack, which then you can chain into what’s called the EX Chain, which allows you to really blow through enemies quickly to create even more sense of speed and better tempo within battle overall as well. These are things that we reflected into the gameplay to make it fun and to improve upon what we had originally done in Daybreak 1.

RD: This next question ties more into Falcom’s modern output in general. You’ve got Daybreak and Daybreak 2 that take action elements that are almost from Ys. But then later Ys titles have also been getting longer stories, along with the party systems. Even Tokyo Xanadu was sort of in-between the two series — it has action and a story focus, but not quite to the same degree as either. Is that a deliberate decision, sort of pushing Ys and Trails closer together, or is it just something that sort of naturally happened over time?

TK: We weren’t trying to necessarily replicate what was done in Ys in Daybreak. But, it is true that the action system has some referential elements to Ys. In that when playing Ys, the response is great, and it feels really good to play. Obviously trying to replicate that playability to a degree means that the action combat in Daybreak does take after Ys. however, that ended up being more of a natural outgrowth of the desire to create something new, like you mentioned before, and to create a new style of fun combat that’s speedy for players. It was more of a naturalistic thing.

In the case of Xanadu specifically, the idea for that came from the field actions which were first introduced in Cold Steel, particularly 3 and 4. When I was playing it myself, I was like, “you know, we could probably make an entire game kind of based around the system.” That actually came to be the case, and from that outgrowth we made Tokyo Xanadu. Originally they were thinking of calling it “Trails to something or other”, but we ended up going with Tokyo Xanadu instead.

This is a little bit of an off topic from what you originally asked, but talking again about Tokyo Xanadu, this was a game that was originally made within 10 months.

As the president of Nihon Falcom, it’s my job to be sure of revenue and take care of all the business aspects and things. But I thought “there’s got to be a way that we can fit this into this time span” because obviously the main titles are the Ys and Trails games.

So finding a way to slot this game into development to have it be able to come out, it necessitated kind of borrowing quite a bit of Cold Steel assets and things like that. So that’s why you’ll find that a lot really does feel very much like an outgrowth of Cold Steel when it comes to Tokyo Xanadu.

RD: With Trails and Ys being Falcom’s only output for the past like 10 years, outside of Tokyo Xanadu, has there ever been any interest in perhaps smaller titles or new IPs? Is it difficult when you’re releasing an Ys or Trails game yearly?

TK: Yeah, I think about new IPs 24 hours a day! It would need to be something of a smaller project, like Tokyo Xanadu, but we do already have plans underway for these types of things. You should here about this in the future.

Over the years working on the same two series, can be honestly rather tiring. And in some ways it ends up feeling like you’re managing an online game or something like that.

And so obviously in order to combat that fatigue, we want to do something else. There’s also the truth that there’s a lot of younger staff that are in the company too. These younger staff members have great ideas, and I want to make sure there’s an opportunity and a place for them to get these new ideas out into the world.

In the case of the older staff members, some of them have been working on these titles up to 20 to 30 years. So it’s very important for the company to make sure that they do have this opportunity to create new IP that lets folks flex their muscles in different ways beyond the two main series that they have.

RD: When you’re saying you want to have younger staff members work on projects, did Ys X’s aim of finding a new audience tie into this at all? Such as newer staff members giving a different perspective on the series?

TK: Ys X was absolutely a title where the young staff was able to really show their stuff. Up until now, as the writer of the Ys games, often times I would write the story and create a framework that actually applied to the gameplay as well. I would hand it to the staff and say “here’s the blueprint, follow this, make the game!”

This is a game where rather than that, I wrote the story like normal and then gave it to them and said “Do what you want to do. Come up with what you can and what you want.”

It was great because in contrast to something like the Trails games, where all of the characters in those games that are combat characters, they have to have their craft animations and things like that. It becomes almost a problem of finding a way to fit making all of these things into the schedule.

With Ys X because they only had two playable characters that freed up time to allow the young staff to really think about what kind of cool things we can do within this game instead.

One example specifically is where at the end of every boss fight, there are finishing animations that were 100% developed by the staff. I didn’t give any directions like “you need to make these.” That was all of their own idea and their own ingenuity, to be able to have different really cool animations per boss fight.

I was really gratified and pleased to see just how much they took that opportunity to not necessarily have to follow a strict set of rules and blueprints and to be able to do what they wanted to do. I was really happy to see the end result with Ys X.

This was all really appreciated by the fans and they liked it. A lot of what makes Ys X different, a lot of it will make it stand out and maybe feel a bit different from the previous Falcom titles, is specifically because of the young staff and all of their work and all of their ideas that they put into the game.

RD: Ys and Trails have been on the go for around 20 years, with Falcom itself celebrating its 40th anniversary not too long ago. Would you say the Japanese gaming market now, compared to maybe back when you started, is noticeably different?

TK: One of the big things is that the Japanese market overall is kind of in a slump. It doesn’t really have a lot of the same vibrancy that it would have had 20 years ago. You could probably attribute this to a lot of things.

For one thing, obviously, you didn’t have smart phones back then, and that obviously has a really big impact on the types of games that are created. But even 20 years ago, there were a bunch of different JRPG types and things that you would see in all different manners, and nowadays that’s drastically decreased. And even though the number of consoles that are available for folks to play on, whether that be PlayStation or Switch or PC or mobile, you don’t see the types of games that you used to 20 years ago.

So, what does that mean for Falcom specifically? Well, our role in this is to continue because specifically we’re good at making JRPGs, and to think about how can we contribute to this JRPG market and maybe breathe a little bit of life back into it.

And so not only to create these very long running series like the Trail Series, but also to try new titles, maybe ones that are kind of more one-offs that not only are interesting to typical JRPG fans, but actually might be an opportunity to bring people in who have never played JRPGs before into the market. Hopefully maybe give a little boost to right now what is honestly speaking, particularly the console market, the console space, in a very weak, rough place.

Would you say then with console potentially being a shrinking market in Japan, PC is sort of an area that Falcom might be looking into more now?

TK: Yeah, the PC market does seem to be increasing. Particularly from the pandemic on, I’ve definitely felt like there’s been an increase of it. From my own personal experience, when I interviews young folks who want to join the company, I’ll ask them, “so what have you been playing?” A lot of them will say they’ve been playing on Steam, which is a PC, of course.

I have two boys, and both those boys, even though they have a PlayStation in the house and other consoles, they don’t touch the PlayStation. They play all the games on PC. While it’s certainly not at the level of the west, where it’s a very large market, it’s very true that the market for PC games is increasing in Japan, and so it is something that we have to keep in mind in the future as a potential outlet for releasing games on again and developing for.

RD: Speaking of PC, do you think the rise in portable PCs, like the Steam Deck, is something that would be pretty good for Japanese games in general, alongside the growth in the PC market?

TK: Honestly, the truth is with the Japanese PC market, there’s not really been a lot of Steam Decks or handheld PC devices sold. And so, generally speaking, it seems like most players who are playing on PC in Japan are still doing it on a desktop. However, they do offer something really great to the market, particularly within the idea that there will be games that are Steam Deck verified, so you know that a game that you purchase is going to be able to run well on Deck, and so he hopes that it is something that is explored further by the Japanese market developers.

One headache that we encountered quite frequently when we developed for PC back in the past, was that everybody’s specs are different. Everybody’s computer environment would be different, so depending on your graphics card, that’d be different. You’d have people with different amounts of memory, so people are using old magnetic hard disks, and now they’d be using SSD.

Because all of these things were different, it was really difficult, which also creates a barrier to people who want to get into that play space. When you have a device like the Steam Deck, that has very specific specs, that lowers the barrier to entry for people. That would allow them to purchase it and then know again that the games they purchased will run on the system that they have. Hopefully that contributes to maybe this growing in the future.

Of course, in the same way, the PlayStation 5 specs are set, meaning that if you purchase a game that’s a PlayStation 5 software, it’s going to run on the system, and that’s something that should be really marketed better overall — if you buy a game, it’s going to work on your system.

The thing about Sony in Japan is that they’re not really doing a good job of marketing themselves and letting people know about the PS5 and about, you know, like, “hey, buying the game is going to work!” Overall, that’s one area that Sony also needs to work on… maybe Sony will get mad at me if they read this interview! [laughs]

RD: That’s actually a good point about the PS5 specifically. Daybreak 2 came out on PlayStation 5 as well in Japan (also as a free upgrade to the PS4 version.) With the PlayStation 5 getting a price increase in Japan, the PlayStation 5 Pro being announced, and Sony maybe not marketing the console properly, do you think that might have an impact on PlayStation 5 sales? Potentially a smaller user base than what you would have expected?

TK: Absolutely. For the kind of like, your general average player base of people who just want to enjoy playing games simply, this certainly does become a hurdle on a barrier to entry to and could potentially contribute to a smaller player base.

So, on the other hand, you have obviously a non-insignificant member of the player base who wants to play on a very high spec machine, with players who will spend the equivalent of, you know, thousands of Pounds to build a gaming PC.

The interesting thing was is that the initial opinion of the PlayStation 5 Pro from these sorts of players changed when they saw Monster Hunter Wilds. Because the topic then became, well, wait a minute, if you buy a PlayStation 5 Pro, you’ll be able to play a really high-spec level version of the game without having to spend, tons of money to build a gaming PC. So maybe we should rethink what we feel about this machine overall.

What this actually creates, though, is that suddenly this becomes a very polarized environment of the high-spec people over here and then kind of the people who are just kind of casual gamers over here. It is a little bit of a difficult, interesting environment right now.

So the biggest headache for Japanese developers right now then as a consequence of all this, this conversation we’ve had, is, well, what platforms should we develop our games for and release them on?

RD: Right, and this also ties into Ys X, which got a Switch release day one in Japan alongside PlayStation 4. But for Daybreak 2, it was PlayStation 4 and 5 instead with no Switch. Is it based it on the audiences for each console, such as younger Switch and Ys X versus potentially an older audience for Daybreak 2?

TK: For both of those two titles specifically, you’ve got Trails games where fans tend to be more “hardcore” gamers, so they expect a certain level of framerate and graphical fidelity. So this is why these released mainly on PlayStation platforms first.

On the other hand for Ys X, many of the people who bought it on Switch were going to buy it anyway — essentially Ys fans. However, they talked the game up really highly. So a lot of people who own Switches are like “oh, this game is getting a good word of mouth, I should pick it up too” and they liked it.

So in a way that was the plan for releasing those two games as they did on the platforms that were selected originally. In a way, it was part of the plan overall on the sales side.

Obviously this creates this dillema of… well, these are things that we now must think carefully about whenever we release a game, which makes it a big headache for the company.

For Trails in particular, it’s such a great RPG series, and it’s got so much for fans who either are fans of JRPGs or could become fans of RPGs. And so we definitely want to be able to find a way to get it to the Switch in a way that people on Switch are going to enjoy so they can enjoy those games too. But again, it’s a difficult thing to realize sometimes.

RD: From Daybreak onwards, Falcom switched to a new engine for both Ys and Trails. It naturally isn’t an easy or cheap decision to work on a new engine after all this time. Was this part of the decision of deciding whether to release on PlayStation 5 or Switch first?

Does having a unified engine perhaps make it easier to switch between development for both franchises and platforms?

TK: Originally we had been using a PlayStation engine for a while, but from Ys X the idea was to have the game available day one on the Switch. And yes, this engine does allow us to essentially move back and forth between series.

However, the difficulty when making, for example, a game that’s more on the PlayStation side of things, it’s the specs, because the specs are so much higher. It’s finding a way to pare those down for the Switch. But, again, to answer your question more directly, having that engine does allow us to move more easily between those two.

RD: Trying things back into our previous conversation about higher specs and new IPs. Modern projects keep requiring more money, more resources, more developers put into it. Does that it more difficult to release new IPs when there’s this higher required return on investment?

TK: Rather than the difficulty with a new IP being getting the money back that you put in, it’s actually more an issue of time and resources. One of the things with Ys for example is that a lot of the old staff might just retire if that franchise is put on hold for a while. [laughs]

So, what we’re doing now is that, as you mentioned before, we do have a new IP on the works. But the way it’s working is that you’ve got folks who are on the Ys team, and folks that are on the Trails team, and they kind of come together almost like a school club, and they talk about what specifically they’d like to do.

When they finally come up with something that I feel can be greenlit, the goal will then become obviously creating an official team to work on these, and then finding a way to weave that in between the releases of the Ys games and the Trails games.

It’s incredibly important to find a way to give the newer and younger staff the opportunity to use their creativity and to flex their muscles, and to create something brand new IP-wise. And of course, that would need to sell, but again, it’s more finding a way to work that into the schedule overall, to bring them out. Because as a company, it is necessary for us to continue, for example, to release the Trails games on a regular schedule. It’s a really difficult problem that I have to think about constantly.

RD: Since there’s time to squeeze in a final question, Falcom has licensed out certain IPs like Ys and Trails to different companies. For example there’s Pinbox for pins and other types of merchandise, and then there’s also the novelization of Ys VIII. Are things like this something that Falcom is interested in continuing going forward?

TK: What you said is very true. We have publishing and licensing divisions, but there are two sides to the licensing side. There’s the game licensing division, and then there’s the goods and merchandise licensing division.

Because we’re a small company, there’s a lot that we can’t really cover on that side of things, because we have to focus on game development specifically, which is why you see a lot of things, like Pinbox for example, to allow this.

So this is a really great thing for us, because being a small company, we don’t have the time and resources to develop a lot of merch, and to follow those pursuits ourselves. And so whenever a company comes to us, have a strong pitch for something, and is interested in working with them to make merchandise and kind of spread the Falcom word out, we’re very happy to work with those people. That’s definitely something that you will hopefully continue to see in the future, as people try to spread the gospel of Falcom as well.

The important thing, obviously, is that no one’s going to buy the merch if the games are fun. And so the important thing for us is to make sure that the games are fun and interesting, so that there is merch to have that people will actually want to buy because they love the games so much.

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