Nihon Falcom

History

Nihon Falcom was founded in March 1981 by Masayuki Kato in Tachikawa, a city on Tokyo's western edge, at the moment Japan's personal-computer boom was beginning. Like Henk Rogers's The Black Onyx, its early work was aimed not at consoles but at NEC's PC-8801 and the other Japanese computers of the day. Its first role-playing game, Panorama Toh, appeared in 1983.

The breakthrough came from Yoshio Kiya. His Dragon Slayer (1984) dropped the menus of Western computer RPGs in favor of real-time action in an overhead maze, and, alongside T&E Soft's Hydlide of the same year, it set the template for the Japanese Action RPGs & Hack-and-Slash. Kiya's sequel, Xanadu (1985), sold more than 400,000 copies, an enormous number for a computer game in Japan, and the Dragon Slayer name stretched into a loose series that included the modular adventure Sorcerian (1987) and Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes (1989).

In June 1987 Falcom released Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished for the PC-8801. Designed by Masaya Hashimoto and Tomoyoshi Miyazaki, it made the action RPG faster and friendlier: the red-haired swordsman Adol Christin fights by "bumping" into enemies, with glancing, off-center blows safer than head-on collisions. The soundtrack, by Yuzo Koshiro and Mieko Ishikawa, was as celebrated as the play; Falcom's composers helped establish game music as something players collected. Ported widely, Ys reached Western players most memorably in the CD-ROM version of Ys I & II for NEC's TurboGrafx-CD, with CD audio, voice acting and animated scenes.

Through the 1990s Kiya's Brandish (1991) and a steady stream of Ys and Legend of Heroes games kept the company going as the Japanese computer market faded. Falcom became a listed company on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and in 2007 Toshihiro Kondo succeeded Shinji Yamazaki as president. Under Kondo, Falcom shifted its new releases from Windows PCs to consoles, while licensing its catalog for ports and remakes.

Notable work

Falcom's three great lines are Dragon Slayer, Ys and Trails. Ys has followed Adol through nearly four decades of travelogue adventures, among them the seafaring Ys X: Nordics (2023). The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, released for Windows on June 24, 2004, began a connected saga set on the continent of Zemuria; the series has grown to thirteen main games across four story arcs and had sold nine million copies by 2025. Trails beyond the Horizon appeared in Japan in September 2024, and a 3D remake, Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter, followed on September 19, 2025.

Legacy

Falcom is a remarkable survivor: a studio of only about 65 people in 2024 that has outlived most of its 1980s rivals while staying independent. Its early games gave the Japanese RPGs (JRPG) a real-time branch: Dragon Slayer and Ys, together with Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda, point straight to the modern Action RPGs & Hack-and-Slash, and its music helped make game soundtracks an art in their own right. The Trails saga, with its interlocking casts and decades-long plotting, is the Japanese Line: Console RPGs's nearest equivalent to a multi-volume fantasy epic — a series read, as much as played, by a devoted audience.