Earlier this year, Falcom released a new entry in the Trails series, but Trails of Nayuta didn’t play exactly like The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. Trails of Nayuta felt more like a Ys game, but has the story depth of a Trails title. Toshihiro Kondo, President of Falcom, explained to Siliconera the game concept started with two concepts in mind: boss battles and pleasing fans.
How did development on Trails of Nayuta begin? It’s quite different from the other Trails titles since it’s action oriented like the Ys games, but has story depth like say Trails in the Sky.
Toshihiro Kondo, President of Falcom: We wanted to mix the best elements of the Ys and Trails series. We get feedback from fans of the Trails series that they really love the story, but the battles take a very long time. In order to address that and please the fans, we wanted to make more of an action based battle system.
Since we’ve been working on PSP hardware for a long time, we feel that we have a firm grasp on it and we have very good technology on that hardware. We wanted to blend everything that we’ve learned from working on past PSP titles into this one project to show the best of what Falcom can develop on the PSP.
Can you tell us how the different action gimmicks and boss battles were designed for Trails of Nayuta?
On the technical side, since we have been working on PSP hardware for such a long time now, we were able to make much better use of memory to give us better performance. Also, the lead game designer wanted to focus on boss battles from the very beginning. The basic game started by focusing on boss battles and we flushed out the story from there. Even the game map was designed with boss battles in mind from the start.
We wanted to mix in story elements in the boss battles. For example, there is this boss where you get eaten and you fight on the inside to fight your way out. We tried to mix in story elements like that. There was a lot of tech involved in terms of the modeling, motions, and animations. All of that from the development process was used to make the final boss even better.
Has Trails of Nayuta sold to your expectations or beyond?
Yes, it has fully met our expectations on the sales side.
Are you planning to grow the story heavy and action oriented Trails of Nayuta into its own series or product line?
Yes, that is definitely something we are planning for the future.
I think if my readers were here they would ask, will Trails of Nayuta be localized?
We would definitely like to see that at some point in the future too. We’ll see if some of my meetings from TGS will prove fruitful so we can make that happen.
