Toshihiro Kondo – how to go from fan to president

GameCentral speaks to the president of one of the oldest video game developers in the world about the future of Nihon Falcom and JRPGs in general.

Japanese developer Nihon Falcom make some of the best role-playing games you’ve never heard of. And yet despite having been going for 38 years, they’re not really that well known in Japan either. Or at least not amongst more casual gamers. More committed fans of the genre know exactly who they are and we were recently given the chance to talk to company president and Trails Of Cold Steel III producer Toshihiro Kondo about the fascinating history behind Falcom and their surprisingly influential games.



Kondo was there to promote the upcoming game The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III, a distant relation to 1984 game Dragon Slayer – a title most in the West have never heard of but which had a profound influence on the Japanese games industry and has inspired everything from Falcom’s own Ys franchise to Nintendo’s The Legend Of Zelda.

The Ys franchise, including last year’s excellent Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, is an action role-playing series with relatively little story connection between each sequel but Trails Of Cold Steel is part of a much larger narrative that Falcom has been weaving now for decades. Traditionally (and unusually for Japan) most of their games have been primarily PC-based, before moving across to the PSP and PS Vita and only now starting to appear on the PlayStation 4.


Kondo is keenly aware of the changing nature of the games industry, both in Japan and beyond, but interestingly the rise of digital distribution and the prospect of game subscription and streaming services is working out to their benefit, widening their audience and introducing more and more people to games which, despite what you’d imagine, are generally very innovative and forward-thinking …

GC: It’s very good to meet you… have you done this sort of tour before in the UK?

TK: This is my second European tour. I do quite a few in Asia, but Europe not so much.

GC: I wonder, how important is your Western following to you in terms of not only sales but the influence that Western preferences and expectations have on the games you make?

TK: Both are very important to our business. As you know, we’re a Japanese developer, primarily of role-playing games, and originally our market was pretty much limited to Japan and we mainly followed and pursued that market. After that we kind of looked more towards Asia, as there are obvious cultural similarities there. And then within the last five years we’ve had the opportunity to publish, through partners, our titles in North America. And then beyond that more recently into Europe as well.

And so each and every single one of these regions is extremely important to us. And what’s important to us within that is to find the type of players who are interested in our content and share the same values and interests that we have. And so, thinking about all of these regions together, when we create our games, is very important to us and something that we look at as we develop the games that we do.



And to specifically answer your question about how having these new fanbases influences our game production, it’s getting bigger and bigger. At the beginning we made games for Japanese people from a Japanese perspective and obviously that resonated with some people over in the West, so that worked. But, for example two years ago I actually came out here on a tour and I got to talk to a lot of different people. I got to hear a lot of different feedback from people and those actually became hints to us.

And so there’s a game that just came out in Japan, called Ys IX, and it’ll show that we’ve listened to these hints and the voices of our fans abroad and we’ve actually begun to implement some of those ideas. And you’ll notice it’s a pretty good blend of what makes us who we are as a company. It keeps a lot of our traditions alive while at the same time adding new elements from the feedback from Western users.

GC: It must be a very difficult balancing act, appealing not just to casual and hardcore fans but the Japanese and Western variants of both. It must be hard to know what to keep and what not to – I think of something like random encounters going out of fashion – where the risk is you end up losing what was interesting about Japanese role-players in the first place.

TK: As you say, it is extremely difficult to find that balance. And it really depends on the title. So, when you’re looking at something like The Legend Of Heroes: Trails Of Cold Steel, for example, that’s something that is a JRPG and we want to really respect what it is that makes JRPGs so loved and revered.


You know, we are a Japanese company and as such we develop for a Japanese audience primarily and we always will. And I think it really speaks, maybe to the quality of the product that people in the West have accepted that as well. And so we see the Trails series as something which can kind of broaden the appeal of JRPGs overall, which is kind of why we really stick to the fundamentals of the JRPG when we make these games.

On the other hand, you have a series like Ys, which is an action RPG. And when you create the maps for a game like Ys the enemies can’t just pop up randomly. They have to be placed beforehand so that the player can go in and fight them all individually. But the Ys series is one that kind of allows us to be a little bit more experimental and open to ideas from the West.

A good example would be, again, Ys IX. Up until now, generally speaking, whenever a player beat a certain part of the map they would switch screens, there’d be a loading screen and then they would go into another area. But for this new game we decided to kind of take a nod from the open world style of games. And so you’ll notice that there’s a lot less loading and there’s a lot of seamless movement between areas.

And that’s one way we’ve decided to kind of evolve or iterate upon this style of J-action RPG. It becomes kind of a business question too, in that how can we minimise risk and spread risk throughout different things? And so that’s also something that we have to consider as we’re challenging new things with our games.


GC: I think one of the main problems for Westerners getting into Japanese role-players is the tropes and traditions that can seem very alien to us, especially for anyone that’s not into anime. I wonder whether that’s also something you try to address, if only from an attempt to avoid clichés? Because I always feel I lose people the second I have to say in a review that the protagonist has amnesia.

TK: [laughs]

GC: Why is it always amnesia?

TK: [laughs] Yes, we actually do use these tropes. They’re very important. It’s important to respect them and to continue to use them. And some people argue, actually, that within fiction there’s only a certain number of patterns to begin with. And so essentially what everybody does is just kind of rehash the same pattern over and over again. An example would be the chosen hero saves the princess.

GC: I’m familiar with that one.

TK: [laughs] And so within that pattern where we believe our role comes in is maybe we can’t necessarily change what the type of story is but what we can say is, ‘Well, what kind of person is the princess? What’s her personality like? What does she do? How does the hero go about rescuing her?’ These are areas that we can have direct control of and can make a difference to what’s come before. And these are the areas that we like to focus on when we create our games.

What we aim for is, even though it might be the hero saves the princess story, it’s a story that still resonates with people and produces in them an emotional response. And that’s always what we’re trying to do. And you know, we hope we succeed at that.

GC: One of the interesting things about Trails Of Cold Steel is how you get into the whole backstory of the industrial revolution style situation you’ve set-up and how that affects ordinary people – which is not a typical plot point for a JRPG. In general, does the story always have priority in the games or is it more of a 50/50 focus with the gameplay?

TK: When it comes to the Trails Of series it’s pretty much the most important thing for us. The world creation, the story, the lore, that comes first and then informs all other aspects of gameplay, including things like what kind of battle system are we using or what kind of character growth opportunities that are. It shows us the direction we want to take even when we’re designing towns and things like that. And because the main driver is the story the gameplay always comes secondary and is complimentary to that.

On the other hand you have a game like Ys, which we develop in the opposite manner. We think about what we want to do from a gameplay and systems perspective and go from there. For example, when we were making Ys IX, we thought about Ys VIII, we thought about how it was kind of a large-scale 3D action game and we thought, well where can we go from here? How can we progress?

And from there it’s like, well, okay, if we do this then maybe we can have characters like this and you know, from that gameplay perspective and what we want to accomplish from a gameplay perspective, that informs how we think about the characters and the story that appears within the game.

Now, the one thing I do really want to emphasise is that whatever type of game that we do we don’t ever compromise on the creation of the story. In either case, it’s still a very important part and no matter what we do, we make sure that all of it is good and that we focus a lot on it too.

GC: I’m curious as to what, if anything, has changed in your approach now you’re developing purely for the PlayStation 4? Especially as that puts you in direct competition with big budget games like The Witcher 3 and Skyrim. What do you think when you see Western role-playing games like that?

TK: [laughs] I mean, honestly speaking, I’m a little bit jealous of what they’re able to do. That said games like The Witcher and Mass Effect are very based on reality and, specifically from a graphical point of view, are very realistic in how they portray everything. And honestly speaking, I kind of feel that that’s a bit of a detriment, in that it can sometimes limit the creativity within it, because you’re so beholden to that. You lose originality, right?

Whereas with many Japanese games you can see from first glance that it’s obviously outlandish. It’s obviously wild, it’s obviously different, and that adds a completely different flavour and you can only do things through that medium that you couldn’t do through something else. I personally think that the games industry is richer because we do have two different styles. If it was only limited to one style, that wouldn’t be fun. And so it’s great that we do have differing ways of being able to create games. I’m glad that we’re here.

GC: Considering Japan’s huge influence on the games industry, even during the darker days of the last generation, do you feel there’s something in the Japanese psyche or skillset that makes them naturally talented at making video games?

TK: I don’t know if I can necessarily say that we’re better at making them, but I can say that we love them. And that contributes to successes and failures. You mentioned how at one point in time the games industry in Japan had kind of reached a really negative low place. I don’t have any pinpoint reason as to why this is.

But one thing that I personally think it could be is that maybe developers in Japan were chasing the West too much and you have so many games, even from the biggest game creators, making games that essentially ended up being inferior versions of what had already come out in the West. And I think that’s what led, perhaps, to our decline.

But by the same token, when we turned things around and started thinking about what makes our games unique, and making those games that only we can make as Japanese people, that’s when things began to turn around. But I don’t necessarily know that we as Japanese people have some kind of special, you know, ability to make games.

Both: [laughs]

TK: But I do know that when we create games that we want to create from the heart, and when we don’t try to follow and imitate other people, we do end up creating good games.

GC: Definitely. That kind of segues into what I was going to start with, which was to ask about how you got started in games. I understand you were initially just a fan of Falcom and were contacted by the company?

TK: Yes, you’re right, I was originally a big fan of Falcom products. And when I was in university I made a website devoted to one Falcom game specifically, which was called Prophecy Of The Moonlight Witch. At the time the Internet in Japan was still in its infancy and pretty much the only people using the Internet were students and researchers. However, this site got so much attention that it became very, very well known in the fan community of Falcom games. So much so that it was brought to the attention of Falcom themselves. And they actually called me and said, ‘Why don’t you come down to the office and see what it is we do?’ And so I went there. [laughs]

And when I went I was thinking, ‘I don’t know what I can offer these guys’. I don’t have any background or any skills that are immediately applicable to gaming. I don’t program, really. I don’t know how to do graphics. I don’t know any of these things. So I went there, but the interesting thing about Falcom, specifically at that time, is that it was very common for them to take people like that and to actually turn them into game creators.

And in my case specifically, Mr Kato, who is the founder of Falcom, his personality was such that if he saw somebody who seemed like they could do it, and they had the desire to do it, he gave them that kind of opportunity. And that was my case, I… you know, I didn’t come from a background or a family had that had anything to do with games and I didn’t have any opportunity to really learn about them.

But I had a strong desire to work on games and to create games and Mr Kato saw that and he gave me the opportunity. And in that situation you can only do your best because you’re given that chance. And so I went out and I studied as hard as I could to be able to learn, in that case it was scenario writing, but, you know, giving you that kind of chance really allows people to bloom.

And there’s an even better example from the company than me in terms of this, and that’s the person named Makoto Shinkai, who you probably know, the famous Japanese anime creator. When I joined he was there. He had been in the company before me and when he joined he didn’t know how to animate, he didn’t know how to make movies. He didn’t even really draw. He could pretty much only do copy and pasting in Photoshop. That was the extent of his knowledge.

But because he was given that opportunity and he tried, he was able to create movies for Falcom which were then put into games. And obviously his ambitions are much bigger than just making movies for Falcom and so he obviously has a bigger career beyond that now. But I think that really speaks well to the type of culture we have at Falcom, to be able to allow people these opportunities.

GC: That sounds extremely admirable. And I assume this is still a policy that goes on today?

TK: Yes, I believe it does still exist. Mr Kato is fond of saying, ‘Make the people who can do it, do it and don’t let the people who can’t do it do it’. [laughs] That kind of skill is something that Mr Kato had that I still need to learn from. And that’s kind of my job going forward, to learn how to effectively choose people and to put them in those kinds of positions. But it is something that I want to keep alive within our company.

GC: I’m curious as to how unusual a company Falcom is perceived to be in Japan. Is Falcom well known amongst ordinary gamers or are you even quite niche in Japan?

TK: [laughs] I’d have to say, even in Japan, no, we’re not the kind of company that your average gamer would know. We are pretty niche, you could say, within Japan but one of the really interesting things about us is that if you go to any game company, I guarantee you there’s one or two people, at least, who love Falcom games. So that’s the kind of company we are, in that we create fans that are that hardcore.

And you know, these people that I’m talking about in these companies, they’re probably people who have been playing for decades at this point. People who started playing when they were young and still play today. And that’s the kind of fans that I believe we cultivate, is people who are kind of in it for the long term.

We don’t make products that have the same universality of something like One Piece, for example. What we make isn’t going to be accepted by everybody, like something like that. But by the same token, the people that it does resonate with, it resonates with very, very deeply. And those are the kind of people who are with us for the long term.

GC: Obviously you want your company to be as successful as possible but how do you see it expanding in the future? Are you intentionally trying to keep things small scale or is there some gradual plan for expansion?

TK: So, the answer is yes. But I need to explain a little bit about who we are as Falcom first. Who we are, are people who love to make video games. And what that means to us is that we want to make the type of games that we want to make and will only make the type of games that we believe in. On the other hand, we also want to bring products to consumers that they like as well and to bring products of value to them as well.

And so we want to have the number of people appropriate to be able to do that. I would be lying to say I didn’t want us to grow and to get more and more fans and more and more people, but it needs to be in service to this idea of making good games.

The thing about game development right now is that it seems to necessarily require more people than it used to. In the past we could get away with making a game with maybe four or five people, but those days are over. And so now we need more people, but we’re not going to grow the company just to be able to do that because what happens when you do that is rather than making games, suddenly you’re managing people. And I don’t want to manage people. I want to make games.

And so the company will grow in accordance with what it takes to be able to make the type of games that we want. And that’s what we want to do going forward.

GC: I wonder how much the rise of digital distribution helps your position nowadays? Especially as you are so used to working on the PC. Do you envisage things like Game Pass and Stadia being able to open up your games to an even wider audience?

TK: Yes! Digital distribution represents a tremendous opportunity. Let me give you an example from Steam. We had several of our titles on Steam and, by and large, even titles that we’ve released through normal means end up doing a lot better on Steam over time.

One specific example would be a game we made called Ys Origin. In Japan that did about 100,000 copies, but on Steam it did 400,000 copies. Now, the thing to note is that Steam is different in that there’s sales and there’s many things that you do for pricing that makes it different from normal. But the effect of that is that many more people are trying our games and it’s not uncommon to have people say, ‘Oh, I started with that one because it was on sale or whatever’. So yes, it’s a tremendous opportunity for us.

GC: What does seem to be a problem though, and is for any long-running franchise, is that your two main franchises at the moment are so old that it can be very intimidating to people having the number eight or even just four at the end of a game’s name. How important will new franchises be in the future?

TK: That’s actually a really salient point. And I agree, having a limited number of IPs isn’t the best. And to that, we actually do create new IPs. A more recent example would be Tokyo Xanadu, which is an action RPG set in modern day Tokyo. That said, there’s still opportunities to be able to grow and to get new users when it comes to franchise series as well.

Let me talk a little bit about the Trails series overall. So originally the Trails series started on PC and it featured one small area that was kind of a very traditional looking JRPG. When we moved onto PSP we actually changed things up a bit. We made it… the appearance felt a little bit more modern in terms of the architecture and the buildings and things like that.

And even the characters themselves were wearing clothing that was much more modern. And it could been because we put it on PSP, but we actually had a lot of young people start playing from that point. One of the interesting things about the Trails series in general is that there’s lots of different age groups that play the series, that started all at different places because of these reasons. Even something like a Trails Of Cold Steel, even III, I think there’s an opportunity for people to jump in there because we always try to think of ways that people who maybe haven’t played before can start and still feel comfortable and want to continue.

So it’s not uncommon for people to start at a certain point within a series, but then become interested and go back and to play them too. So, yes, new IP is important. We do want to continue to make IP and we still will challenge that. And at the same time, we’ll also continue to work on the franchise items as well, while at the same time giving them twists and making them accessible to people who maybe hadn’t played the games before.

GC: So even though Trails Of Cold Steel IV has the word ‘end’ in its subtitle I assume it’s not really the end. What is the future for that franchise in particular?

TK: [laughs] It is the end… of the Trails Of Cold Steel part of the story. The thing is that this overall series takes place in a world called Zemuria. So at the end of Trails Of Cold Steel IV that pretty much wraps up the story that we’ve been telling to this point. And so not just the Cold Steel games, but you also have the three Trails In The Sky games, the two games called the Crossbell games in the middle, and this.

And with IV, it pretty much wraps up the story that we’ve been trying to tell for this part of the world. But again, because we are creating a world, there are more stories to tell and now our focus will shift as we go on. Or rather the plan is for the focus to shift as we go on to a different part of the world with different characters – new main characters – to tell their story as well.

GC: How far out do you plan these games, In terms of general plotlines and individual titles?

TK: It’s easier to start from the opposite side of this, talking about titles that are not related to the Trails series and for those the plan is actually pretty much whenever we want to make a new game, we decide to make it. So there is no overarching plan for Ys XI or XII or anything like that.

Now on the other hand, the Trails series is very special in that we actually did have a plan from the beginning. So this is the 15th anniversary of the series and, like I said, we already knew the world we wanted to create and kind of the overall story we wanted to tell as we go country by country through each one of these arcs.

The thing is… I basically know how we want this to end and what more we want to tell. I just don’t know how long that will take. So it could be 10 more years and that’s something that I’m kind of challenging the staff with right now and putting them through… is to figure out how exactly we’re going to get to this end goal when it comes to the Trails series.

I’ve recently come to a place on a personal level in that actually sitting down and laying out the story we want to tell going forward… I realise even by the time I reach the age of 60 I won’t be finished. [laughs] And so I’m trying hard to figure out how to arrange this, specifically when it comes to having people who can take on the mantle after me and raising those people to be able to create these games too. That’s what what’s bothering me these days.

GC: Okay. That’s good, that was fascinating. It’s been great to see how much you actually enjoy your job.

TK: [in English] Thank you.

The Legend Of Heroes: Trails Of Cold Steel III will be released on PlayStation 4 in Europe on 22 October.

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