Developer Nihon Falcom has been pumping out JRPG hits in the Trails series for two whole decades, but the studio is now working on new ideas “in the background” to avoid stagnation.
Speaking to Gamespot, studio president Toshihiro Kondo explained that the long-running series is “about 80 to 90% complete” after four different story arcs and 16 games building on top of each other. Keeping interest in one story for so long is a massive feat, but Kondo also delves into the dangers of doing so.
“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,” Kondo said. “They want to try new things. They have new ideas. There are new challenges they want to tackle.”
Kondo continued to say that working on the Trails series for so long was skin to “developing an online game” because the team starts to ask themselves very MMO-ish questions. “What’s the next event or thing that we have to do? What’s the course of the game itself?” The result is that “younger staff and their development kind of stagnates for a while,” which is why Kondo is letting his team tinker with new concepts.
“As for a direct successor to the Trails series, there’s nothing specifically planned–we’re just extremely focused on finishing up Trails. However, in terms of new IPs, there are actually several things that are actively being worked on right now,” Kondo explained. “In the background, we allow [younger staff] 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.”
In between those new projects and the also ongoing Ys series, the studio just released The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak in Europe and North America, with its sequel already in the process of translation and coming worldwide sometime next year.
See our best JRPGs ranking to see where the Trails series ranks there.