Nihon Falcom

Nihon Falcom Corporation (日本ファルコム株式会社, Nihon Farukom Kabushiki-gaisha) is a Japanese video game developer founded in 1981. It is based in Tachikawa, Japan. The company is a pioneer of the role-playing genre, and is credited with creating some of the earliest action role-playing games with its Ys series. They are also considered pioneers of the Japanese PC software industry in general.

Falcom's best known series are Ys, Dragon Slayer, and The Legend of Heroes, along with its spinoff series Trails.

Why They Rock

 * 1) Unlike many other Japanese developers and publishers like Nintendo or Square, whose games are developed with consoles in mind and whose target audience is primarily on consoles, Falcom's games were designed with PCs in mind; a segment of the video game industry they pioneered thanks to their Ys series.
 * 2) Their franchises, especially Ys and Trails, have very deep and well-thought out settings and lore that make for very engaging stories. While some elements may appear minor or irrelevant, they are still written into the series' setting in order to make it more detailed.
 * 3) While their primary focus is action RPGs, they showed with the Trails series that they are no strangers to turn-based RPGs, either.
 * 4) They always had very innovative and ambitious ideas for their stories, many of which became commonplace in gaming as time went on: these include an action-based battle system with RPG elements (as seen in Ys and Dragon Slayer), a day-night cycle, and advanced NPC interaction for the time (as seen in Panorama Island).
 * 5) Their first game, Panorama Island, could be considered an early example of a modern survival game, and sported many advanced mechanics which, as stated above, would become commonplace in gaming (such as NPC interactions, a day-night cycle, and the need to eat and find resources to survive, all in 1983).
 * 6) They were one of the first companies to include a team specifically made to compose soundtracks for their games (Falcom Music Team jdk). Many of their soundtracks, especially those for the Ys series, are well-known among the gaming community as a whole.
 * 7) * Unlike many companies, they have a YouTube channel dedicated specifically to hosting soundtracks for their games, including the older or less known ones.
 * 8) They showed to care for their franchises, such as when they decided to push for the release of Trails of Cold Steel III on the PlayStation 4 after the success of the first two games in order to appeal to their Western user base, too, (and Ys: Memories of Celceta, released around the same time) or when they licensed NIS America to develop an English localization of Trails from Zero, its sequel Trails of Azure, Trails from Reverie and Nayuta no Kiseki.
 * 9) * They also showed that they care for fan-made content when NIS partnered with the Geofront group (responsible for the fan translations of Trails from Zero, Trails of Azure and Ys vs. Sora no Kiseki) for the official English localization of the aforementioned games.
 * 10) * In addition, they listen to their fans. Such was the case when players complained about Ys VIII's poor translation at launch (a result of Falcom ending its partnership with XSEED and sourcing localizations to NIS America), which prompted them to intervene and issue a patch to fix the issue. The same thing happened later with the game's PC port, which had its fair share of bugs and glitches (as it had been sourced to a third-party company and suffered from the change of publishers, too - it was originally meant to launch alongside the PlayStation Vita version of the game, just like it had been done with Ys VII)
 * 11) They also care for their older games, some of which can be bought on their own website at a discount (they cost upwards of $20), no-questions-asked, and are often discounted. Such is the case with Trails from Zero and Azure, originally released in 2010 and 2011 respectively.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) Since they published few games on non-PC platforms, they remained a relatively unknown company in the West, which resulted in many of their games being exclusive to Japan. One of the worst offenders in the West is the Trails series, which finally was released worldwide only in its fourth arc, Trails of Cold Steel. Thankfully, this started to change in 2010, when they struck a partnership with XSEED Games (of Harvest Moon fame), which assured that their games would be localized in English and published in the West.
 * 2) * Thankfully, many of their untranslated games received unofficial localizations in the west, such as Trails from Zero, its sequel Trails from Azure, and Ys V: Lost Kefin, Kingdom of Sand. A fan translations for Ys vs. Sora no Kiseki is also in development, as of the time of writing.
 * 3) Before striking a partnership with XSEED and later NIS America, they tended to source localizations of their titles to various publishers, with varying results. One of the most infamous consequences of this is the translations of The Legend of Heroes III, IV and V, all handled by Bandai, which were extremely poorly received and discouraged Falcom from attempting the localization of another game in the series until 2014, when XSEED released the PC port of Trails in the Sky and its sequel in the West.
 * 4) Due to their long-running franchises having more developed worlds and stories, new players can find themselves in front of a huge continuity barrier, as each game increasingly relies on knowledge of the previous. This is most evident in the Trails series, due to the very nature of its setting (various story arcs, all sharing a common overarching theme and storyline, developed through the stories of each individual game in each arc). While this is by no means a bad thing, it creates it's own fair share of problems to newcomers; the whole Trails of Cold Steel arc is chock-full of references to and characters from both the Liberl and Crossbell arcs, and Trails from Azure basically reveals the entire plot of Trails of Cold Steel 1, 2 and part of 3, including 2's twist ending (due to the Erebonia arc having been planned much earlier than the Crossbell arc).