Trails End: Nihon Falcom Ending the Trails Series Is the Right Call

Think of the present-day videogame landscape. There’s obviously a lot of good out there, but it’s dominated by sequels to AAA games and new series from major publishers that are allowed to exist because they can be spun off into movies and television, not “just” as videogames (and movies and television, well, they certainly love their known quantities, too). It’s an industry terrified of failure, too often terrified of anything besides maximizing the short-term profits for investors, which is where all of the layoffs come from, as well—layoffs that cause long-term damage to studios, to games, to people.

And then there’s Nihon Falcom, which seems content, over 40 years on now, to be as humble about their operations as they’ve ever been. Like anyone else, they’re in the business of staying in business, but look no further than recent interviews about their most successful franchise, Trails, which has helped the studio explode in popularity on an international and multiplatform scale, after decades of being more of a Japanese success story who spent as much of their dev time focusing on personal computers as possible.

Here’s the short of it: Trails is going to come to an end. Toshihiro Kondo, the current president of Falcom, estimates that the subseries, which belongs under the banner of The Legend of Heroes, is “80-90% complete” and that, “though we’re currently celebrating the 20th anniversary of the series, you won’t see a 30th or 40th anniversary.” If you remember your Paste articles about Trails, you’ll recall that the series is “the most ambitious epic in games,” owing to it being 20 years in now, with a story so connected and so expansive that there’s no true right answer for where to begin except for at the beginning. And Falcom is going to put an end to it, even though its popularity has been growing to the point that it sits alongside Ys—Falcom’s longest-running series, as it debuted in 1987 on NEC’s PC-88—as a tentpole franchise. 

Falcom could probably keep making Trails games well beyond the sell-by date for the franchise, like Ubisoft has with Assassin’s Creed. At one time, it seemed like there might actually be a resolution in that series, but it became clear—as it was annualized and multiple teams were put on it and the present-day portions were both pushed to the side and intentionally designed so that basically nothing of true consequence that led to what you’d call a climax happened within them—that they’d make these games forever so long as people are buying them. That’s not what Falcom’s going to do, however. North America just received Trails Through Daybreak in July, its sequel will arrive in “early 2025,” and Falcom has already announced that the third and final game in that specific arc will release in Japan this September. Daybreak received rave reviews, and is a clear step forward for the series not just technologically speaking, but in its gameplay and in its writing—Falcom’s writing has always been great, but it’s taken a real step forward here, especially with regards to characters. So you’d be forgiven for seeing the company maybe change its mind and try to squeeze a few more Trails games out instead of saying they’ve got maybe two or three games left before this thing wraps forever, but that’s not what they’re doing.

And here’s why, per Kondo, via an interview with Gamespot’s Jessica Cogswell:

You see, the Trails series has been going on for 20 years now, and as great a thing as that is, the issue is that that means a lot of folks have been working on that title for many, many years. They want to try new things. They have new ideas. There are new challenges they want to tackle.

Developing a game series like Trails over this great period of time is kind of like developing an online game in that you’re constantly thinking, “What’s the next event or thing that we have to do? What’s the course of the game itself?” And what that causes, a lot of times, is that the younger staff and their development kind of stagnates for a while. But I want them to be able to grow and experience new things that lead to new skills and new ideas.

So, in the background, we allow them to create and work on these new IPs–to talk about the things that they want to do. I believe that that will make them even stronger developers and they’ll have even better ideas that contribute even more to our games.

Kondo has the long-term in mind, which is why Trails, as great as it is, as popular as it’s getting, will come to an end like it was always supposed to. He has faith in his developers, that they’ll figure out what will succeed for Falcom in place of Trails when the time comes. That allowing them to stretch, to push, to think outside of the box that Trails keeps them in, will give the company its next Trails. It’s not like this series has always been there for Falcom. They’ve weathered some significant storms in the past: Dragon Slayer, which The Legend of Heroes was initially an entry in before it spun off into its own thing, was their first major success. Its first of many sequels, Xanadu, was the most successful Japanese-developed PC game for years, as it managed to sell 400,000 copies at a time when the computers it played on weren’t exactly ubiquitous. Dragon Slayer’s creator, Yoshio Kiya, left Falcom in 1993. This occurred just four years after the creators of Ys—Masaya Hashimoto and Tomoyoshi Miyazaki—left Falcom to form Quintet, the developers of ActRaiser, Illusion of Gaia, Soul Blazer, Terranigma, and more. There weren’t any more Dragon Slayer games after Kiya left, although Xanadu and The Legend of Heroes lived on in wildly different forms than in their Dragon Slayer ones. Falcom let other studios develop multiple versions of Ys IV after waiting four years to revive the franchise following the departure of its originators, who had made the first three Ys titles in three years, and then took back the reins for Ys V. They adjusted, is the thing, and it’s now 30 years later past all of that, with the studio as successful as they’ve ever been, if not more so.

The idea is that they’ll adjust once again. That focusing exclusively on money that could be made retreading familiar ground, by keeping Trails alive forever, isn’t worth the stifling of creativity and talent that it would breed. And it’s not like Trails has to outright disappear forever, either: as with Ys, there are remakes and remasters that can be developed to ensure these games stay in circulation forever. But the games that will be remade and re-released will be part of a completed series, not one that’s perpetually releasing new stories solely because people know the name “Trails” and might buy it because of that. That’s such an alien idea for videogames, even if it isn’t for plenty of other media. Book series come to an end. Television shows come to an end. Movie franchises… well, they end for 10 or 20 or 30 years before a studio writes a really big check to an aging star and we have to go through all of this again, but sadder this time. Videogame series should be allowed to end, too, when the time is right, when the story says it’s that moment, and not just because revenue is down. And Trails itself, everything it’s doing narratively, is aided by there being a finale, as well! 

I’d describe myself as a huge fan of the Trails series. But there’s much more to Falcom than Trails—Trails was just how I became a huge fan of Falcom’s work. That might not be an obvious statement to make to people who have really just picked up on them in this era where they’re focusing almost exclusively on Trails and Ys games, but it’s true, and it’s something we should all be looking forward to happening again. There’s a future Falcom that could continue Xanadu with sequels to Tokyo Xanadu or maybe even a return to a Xanadu Next-style title, of course, but there’s also the version of Falcom that would release Brandish, or Popful Mail, or Zwei, or Gurumin, or The Legend of Heroes games that were duologies or trilogies instead of decades-spanning series containing as-of-now four different but connected subseries totaling 13 games at 80-90% completion. That Falcom hasn’t been allowed to exist for a while, but it sounds like it’s going to get its chance when Trails wraps, and for the kinds of reasons that should be encouraging to anyone exhausted by an industry perpetually harming itself and treating its talented developers as disposable, so long as there’s known IP to fall back on.

Marc Normandin covers retro videogames at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Twitter at @Marc_Normandin.