Nihon Falcom Corporation ( 日本ファルコム株式会社 ) is a Japanese company that creates video games. It is most famous for developing the Ys, The Legend of Heroes, and Trails series. The company is known for helping create action role-playing and Japanese role-playing game genres. It also played a key role in making personal computers more widely used in Japan for gaming.

History

Nihon Falcom was started by Masayuki Kato in 1981. The company is known for helping to begin the action role-playing and Japanese role-playing game genres. The name Falcom comes from the Millennium Falcon. The letter "n" was changed to an "m" to match naming styles of that time. The word Nihon, which is one of the names for Japan, was added to make the name sound complete.

Falcom’s first role-playing game (RPG) was Panorama Toh, released for the PC-8801 in 1983. The game was created by Yoshio Kiya, who later made the Dragon Slayer and Brandish game series. While the game had limited RPG features, such as no traditional statistics or leveling systems, it included real-time combat with a gun. This made the game similar to the action RPG style Falcom became known for. The game was set on a desert island, with a map shown as a hex grid and a day-night cycle. Players could interact with computer-controlled characters from the island’s culture, such as attacking them, talking to them, or giving them money for items. These characters could also run away with the money. To survive, players had to find and eat rations because every action used health points. The island had traps that required help from computer-controlled characters, and players could be poisoned or paralyzed by snakes, needing medicine or help from characters to recover.

Falcom later created popular game series, including Dragon Slayer, The Legend of Heroes, and Ys. The first Dragon Slayer game set the standard for the action role-playing genre. Dragon Slayer II: Xanadu (1985) sold over 400,000 copies, making it the best-selling PC game at that time.

Most of Falcom’s games have been released on various video game consoles, but the company developed few games for consoles itself. Choosing to focus on PC games made Falcom different from its main competitors, Enix and Square, but it limited the company’s popularity in the Western world and its growth in the 1990s. By the early 2010s, the Ys series was the second-largest Japanese role-playing game franchise, behind the Final Fantasy series, in terms of the number of games released.

In 1991, Falcom started a joint company with Sega called Sega Falcom Inc. Sega owned 55% of the company, and Falcom owned 45%. The company’s goal was to create CD-based games for Sega’s consoles to help Sega compete in the 16-bit console market. A section called "Sega Falcom News" appeared in Beep! MegaDrive magazine from November 1991 to February 1994. Games made by the company included Popful Mail for the Mega-CD and Lord Monarch: Tokoton Sentou Densetsu, Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes, and Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes II for the Mega Drive. In 2007, Toshihiro Kondo became the company’s president, taking over from founder Masayuki Kato.

Falcom was also an early leader in video game music. Early soundtracks were mostly created by chiptune musicians Yuzo Koshiro and Mieko Ishikawa.