/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.6083324]

So how did Falcom manage to create so many genre defining games like Ys, Dragon Slayer, Brandish, etc. with a ton of talented people who were behind them and yet somehow never became a big force in the gaming industry and is now basically today producing games that are a shadow of what they have produced in the past? I would think that Falcom would've managed at least to be something like Squaresoft or Enix before they merged during the "golden era" of JRPGs but it seems they never got to that point at least in the west.
So I am asking this question here because I assume that the answers/reasoning to this happened during the retro period of the company. It seemed unlikely it would happen during the "modern" middle PC era where they made games for Windows in the 90s-00s and obviously not in the modern era, which is out of scope of this board. I would get no response if I were to ask the regular boards/threads so that is why I am asking here.
Is anyone knowledgeable enough about the history of the company and industry in Japan and what happened? Thanks for any response.

[Anonymous No.6083331]

Simple, because most people who have spent any time playing those games realize that they are actually fucking shit. Next thread.

[Anonymous No.6083335]

>>6083331
You haven’t played a single one of those games. Shut up.

[Anonymous No.6083340]

>>6083331
OP here, that's not really a satisfactory answer and seems very subjective. Objectively speaking, the games seem to at sold well enough for the company to exist today, you can't get by making "fucking shit" games in all aspects for 30+ years, the company would be defunct by now and they would've lost funding ages ago.
I would think at the very least you would need to be able to produce mediocre games once in a while and have side businesses which is how Acclaim Entertainment was kept alive until the turn of the millennium. But Falcom didn't have those businesses and is alive today so yeah. Question still remains.

[Anonymous No.6083348]

>>6083340
The games sold well because for a long time they were one of the few japanese companies which bothered making domestic nonporn pc games, if you lived in japan in the 80s it was either this, porn, unaffordable x68000 arcade ports, or toilet devs like system sacom which made falcom look good by comparison

[Anonymous No.6083351]

>>6083348
Have to sleep in a bit so will look tomorrow for a response, but wasn't Japan mostly console based? Where was their PC nearly strong enough to support Falcom? Unless their games were that good to make getting PCs of that era worth it like PC-88/PC-98 which were probably like in the West expensive at the time, I don't see how they could've garnered those sales, to the level you claimed as "well". Can you elaborate more if you know about this?

[Anonymous No.6083353]

>>6083324
Because their best guys went away very early. That's why they are stuck with doing shitty remakes and lackluster sequels.

[Anonymous No.6083358]

>>6083353
The Brandish 1 PSP remake is legitimately great. Still prefer 2 on SNES, but was pleasantly surprised.

[Anonymous No.6083367]

>Loyal niche audience
>Regularly provide product for them to buy
>They buy it
>Profit

[Anonymous No.6083394]

>>6083353
Xanadu Next and Tokyo Xanadu are both great games.

[Anonymous No.6083403]

>>6083324
That's probably what would have happened if they didn't fuck up so hard with Ys 3.

[Anonymous No.6083417]

>>6083348
So you're just going to ignore the entire NEC history, is that it?

[Anonymous No.6083418]

>>6083394
I would really like another TX. I am beyond burned out on trails shit.

[Anonymous No.6083419]

>>6083417
He said ONE OF not ONLY you shit head.

[Anonymous No.6083423]

>>6083324
They started off making games for Japanese kids and realized the weebs who like them were a bigger market so now make game for zoomer weeb casual nu-males.

[Anonymous No.6083459]

>>6083419
Are you retarded?

[Anonymous No.6083470]

>>6083324
They were always a second tier developer and still are. Always will be.

[Anonymous No.6083529]

>>6083348
t. doesn't know Japanese, there are hundreds of great Japanese PC classics

[Anonymous No.6083539]

>>6083324
Their founder and ex-President Kato is a complete jackass, that's why.

His first blunder came in 1985 when he invited Richard Garriott and other members of Origin Systems to try and form a cross-publishing deal where Falcom would localize future Ultima games into Japanese and Origin would publish Xanadu in English. Only one small problem - Xanadu plagiarized a bunch of Ultima III's manual art and used digitized versions of it for its shopkeeper sprites. Garriot and company saw this and weren't amused. They threatened to sue the shit out of Falcom and forced them to pay a large fee as a settlement. This stifled the fuck out of Falcom's international presence and probably lost them a ton of money.

Then came 1989 - this is where the exciting (-ly bad) stuff happens. First, Kato forced an unrelated sidescroller to turn into an Ys spinoff, then rebranded it as a mainline Ys title against the developers' will. Kato also refused to let Falcom's developers work on consoles because he wanted to remain in NEC's PC bubble. Senior developers demanded raises in salaries as compensation for this move, but Kato refused that too. At that point, a lot of Falcom's developers had enough of Kato's bullshit and quit the company. Virtually of all Falcom's senior programmers and artists were gone by 1989. Falcom never really recovered from this mass exodus of staff. They continued to decline after it and eventually became an irrelevant Windows developer by the late 90s.

[Anonymous No.6084670]

>>6083539
I heard about the first story but I didn't know that dashed Falcom's early international presence. Makes complete sense though, no one would want to deal with you in that age when relations were everything in the gaming industry.
The second story, that was about Ys III: Wanderers from Ys, right? Everything sounds plausible but any sources on that? Would like to read more, but that explains a lot. But that is kind of disastrous and a massive fuckup no matter how you look at it. Having your game studio basically go from a leading studio to imploding in the golden age of video games and within the first decade of its existence.

[Anonymous No.6084991]

>>6083418
Xanadu - 1985
Kaze no Densetsu Xanadu - 1995
Xanadu Next - 2005
Tokyo Xanadu - 2015

See a pattern here?

[Anonymous No.6085008]

>>6083539
What led to the mid-00s resurgence? Were the good games made by the few remaining long-time staff members, or a new group of kids growing up and signing onboard with their favorite developer?

[Anonymous No.6085609]

>Everything sounds plausible but any sources on that?
There's an interview with Hiromasa Iwasaki, one of the main programmers and directors on the PCE CD version of Ys I & II, that goes into this stuff. I'll post some passages from it separately.

>>6085008
The mid-00s weren't really a resurgence for Falcom. If anything, despite their games getting better, the 00s were a period of continued financial decline for them. Falcom's stock value went down considerably as the decade went on and so did the sales of their games. Zwei 2, in particular, sold so poorly that Falcom's physical PC game distributor dropped them without notice. Falcom had to spend the next four years or so scraping by as a PSP developer. It wasn't until Trails of Cold Steel's successful release that the company's business situation improved.

[Anonymous No.6085613]

>>6083539
>>6085609
Here are some excerpts from the Iwasaki interview:
>HI: You need to understand that Falcom's Ys series was one of the biggest games in Japan, while Hudson's version of Ys for PC Engine was regarded as one of best conversions. So obviously Hudson wanted to make a new Ys, and... <laughs> So Hudson kind of ordered Falcom "Make another Ys title!", but Falcom didn't have the needed resources for development. As I said, almost all the programmers and artists had quit, because the company's president was not good. As a result they could not develop a proper story or all the concept art, and other required elements. So instead they supplied Hudson with some of the material.
>JS: I spoke to Kouji Yokota, who worked on Ys III, and he said Ys III did not start as an Ys game, and they only put Ys III on it to sell more.
>HI: Yes, that's right! I heard the exact same thing from Mr Yamane. He told me that Ys III is not Ys III. Yamane also told me, perhaps Miyazaki and Hashimoto think that Ys III is not Ys III, it's just perhaps Wanderers from Ys. It's outside the story...
>JS: You mean a gaiden, or side-story?
>HI: Yes, that's right! He thinks perhaps that scenario was for a gaiden, but maybe Falcom's president, Mr Kato, forced them to change the title from a gaiden to Ys III.
>JS: You mentioned lots of people left Falcom because the president was not doing such a good job. Can I print this?
>HI: Yes, that's right. Kato. <laughs> No problem. I think Kato was a good president for the company; however, I think Kato is not a good president for staff. I heard about this because Kato kept their salaries too low. Apparently, the staff made really big hits, however Kato did not provide any kickback from these hits towards their salaries, so lots of staff complained. And Kato was not a good president for maintaining staff motivation, to create games at Falcom. So almost all the old staff left Falcom. Almost all of Falcom's first, really good creators left.

[Anonymous No.6085626]

>>6085613
And this is a quote from an HG101 book:
>A mass exodus of Falcom staff happened around 1989, after Ys III for computers was done. To give some context to the significance of this event: As reported by both Kouji Yokota (Vol.1) and Yoshio Kiya (Vol.3), one source of frustration for staff at Falcom was the president refusing to allow them to work on console games, instead (usually) delegating console development to outsource companies. When Miyazaki and Hashimoto broke off to form Quintet, they developed ActRaiser as a way of fulfilling their desire to make a console-based side-scrolling action game similar to Ys III. Their statement about wanting to make games such as Ys on PCE adds to the evidence of growing staff frustration at Falcom.

[Father Electronics Couture No.6085629]

They just never engraved the 90s cinematic trend and have continued making the same exact type of games they've always made. I wouldn't say Tokyo Xanadu is a "shadow" at all. It's just a modernization of the same type of formula from the 80s. That's why Falcom continues to exist, is that there are gamers who want those type of games - the same type of gamers who wanted them back in the day and God bless them for not alienating those players while trying to make their games appeal to ever wider audiences.

[Anonymous No.6085637]

>>6085629
I don't agree with that notion at all. Their games have changed considerably in appeal over the last 20 years. Hell, look back as late as the last decade. Can you imagine Falcom putting out something like Xanadu Next or Zwei 2 in their current market? I sure as hell don't. Switching gears to cater to the gen Z otaku crowd has shifted the priorities of their game design and creative process pretty heavily.

[Father Electronics Couture No.6085673]

>>6085637
Not as heavily as Squeenix, their games would be unrecognizable to a time traveler.

[Anonymous No.6085730]

>>6083324
Why did T&E far off even worse?

[Anonymous No.6085735]

>>6085637
Could they make a sequel to Joshi Daisei Private?

[Anonymous No.6085752]

>>6083348
Holy shit how retarded can you be? If you don't want to actually respond to the thread just don't open it. This is not how the Japanese domestic market was in the slightest.

To answer OPs question, Falcom were very aggressive with scouting and hiring young enthusiastic talent, and protecting the ones that performed well very fiercely, that's why you won't see individual musicians listed, but rather Falcom JDK, and not sharing artist names, they did not want competition to poach their employees.

[Anonymous No.6085839]

>>6085735
One of their most recent games had two characters be borderline ass-naked in unlockable New Game+ "outfits". Does that count?

[Anonymous No.6085914]

>>6085839
Needs to be a Rubik cube or shifting puzzle.

[Anonymous No.6086154]

>>6085752
That was a common practice, for the time, with all japanese companies.

[Anonymous No.6086208]

>>6085609
>>6085613
>>6085626

Thanks for the information. So basically, Falcom got screwed by the person who made the company and because they didn't pay well despite making great hits, they were basically a dead man walking by the time all the good games series got released, and the company limped along making games like they used to but unable to have great success unfortunately until it almost collapsed in the 00s and then they repivoted and we got modern Falcom. I feel like that explains a lot.
I do feel like though Falcom could've maybe never had to repivot if they lasted longer and caught the whole digital distribution wave but that may have been asking too much. What is more confounding is how some of the good games like Oath in Felghana and Origins didn't put them back on the map but meh, what's done has been done.

>>6085752
>>6086154
That seems like more like space limitations in TLoZ but it does seem true that Falcom JDK was kind of fiercely protected, lot of the time, the OST tracks on the Falcom Music Channel have ?s or multiple artists because apparently, people can't track who did which track.

[Anonymous No.6086262]

>>6086208
>I do feel like though Falcom could've maybe never had to repivot if they lasted longer and caught the whole digital distribution wave but that may have been asking too much.
Barring the mobile F2P market, digital distribution has always been massive shitshow in Japan. There was nothing akin to Steam in Japan back then, and even if there was, I doubt it would've been very profitable. See below.
>What is more confounding is how some of the good games like Oath in Felghana and Origins didn't put them back on the map
I mean, how could they? The Japanese PC gaming scene in the mid 00s was tiny and unprofitable, with most of its catalog consisting of eroges and indies physically distributed at conventions. The fact that Falcom managed to stay in it until 2008 is already kind of impressive. They were pretty smart to jump ship to handhelds. It meant not having to scale up their production budget for a while and taking part in a growing market.

[Anonymous No.6086328]

>>6086262
The real kicker was the botched internationalization deal early in their history, if they didn't screw up their chances of going international, they would've found an audience outside of Japan in English speaking countries much sooner and they never got to that point until they made their pivot and then worked with Xseed that they had an overseas English market that was viable for them. But that was much smaller compared to what happened with exporting their games to China and how now China basically is driving a good portion of Falcom's revenue now besides the West.
I'm not going to say that they weren't smart in jumping ship from a business standpoint, but it is unfortunate it happened because it changed their whole gamemaking philosophy and who the the games they made appealed to, and they won't really go out and innovate again if they don't have to, if you see the recent announcements they made. With the exception of them wanting to make an inhouse engine, everything seems in line with what they have been doing since 2008.

[Anonymous No.6086370]

>>6083539
>tfw fuckup #3 is on the way with the jdk band shit
it probably won't have as big of an effect on the company itself, but it's still disheartening
>>6085637
their modern games are definitely very 'anime' (though the same could be said of many older jrpgs as well, just that it wasn't as obvious as it is with something like TX), but they're still very distinctly japanese. squaresoft on the other hand went through a major tonal shift in the 00s, which got to the point that a lot of their games no longer had that square 'magic' and just resembled your generic AAA release.

[Anonymous No.6087339]

>>6086370
>it probably won't have as big of an effect on the company itself, but it's still disheartening
It already happened, anon. Kondo cut ties with Chara-Ani and almost the entire JDK band quit. They now play SaGa music, I think.

[Anonymous No.6087342]

>>6086370
>it probably won't have as big of an effect on the company itself, but it's still disheartening
It already happened, anon. Kato cut ties with Chara-Ani and almost the entire JDK band quit. They now play SaGa music, I think.

[Anonymous No.6087986]

>>6086208
>That seems like more like space limitations in TLoZ
those are pseudonyms dumbass

[Anonymous No.6087993]

>>6084991
well see you in 2025

[Anonymous No.6090062]

>>6085752
Love how tranny weebs on /vr/ think they know more about the japanese game scene and culture than someone who was actually there

[Anonymous No.6090415]

>>6090062
Love how LARPers call everyone trannies. Is that because it's the ultimate LARP you hope to achieve some day?