I'm well aware. That's not entirely relevant, since even Ys IV wasn't made by Falcom either. Names mean a lot. When you bring up Falcom's famous Xanadu series (at least, famous in Japan) everyone ever from the Western gaming sphere who posts replies in a thread about it thinks you're talking about Faxanadu.
Similar to how 10 out of 10 people would think of Falcom when Sora no Kiseki Evolution is brought up.
Well it certainly helps that people know about Falcom much more these days. The people behind their games will now get recognition they only could have dreamed of...in English-speaking parts of the world. Over in East Asia, even Chinese fans have done their own investigations and threads like this simply because the games have more influence and success there. Falcom's own policy with crediting hurts individual recognition everywhere, but that hasn't stopped some people.
Both Asteka games were Falcom founder Masayuki Kato's pet projects, and most of the Ys I developers had largely worked on Asteka II: Templo del Sol. Masaya Hashimoto definitely worked on Asteka II, for example. The first game was a weird hybrid of command-line adventuring with a lot more ero content than before or after in a Falcom game; the second takes players adventuring to ruins in the Yucatan Peninsula. We actually got a localized NES port of Asteka II from Compile under the name Tombs & Treasures. They're interesting milestones in Falcom's early history, and Asteka II lucked out and got a remake on one of JVC's Falcom Saturn remake collections, but I'm not sure how good or bad they played relative to competing games.
Love that sorta old school video game monster design. Strange, alien, yet fantastic and to the point (the artwork itself isn't over-designed, like a lot of the stuff you see nowadays). Reminds me of the monster designs for the first two Legend of Zelda games.Member with Maschinen Krieger avatar reporting in. Kow Yokoyama is love <3
For Xanadu, beside cover art and promotional images, Kow also did help with concept illustrations and monster designs.
Also I just found out Makoto Shinkai was former Falcom employee. That's awesome. This studio really recognizes talents :O
I hope recent localization and modernization of Falcom's catalog (god bless XSEED) will get more people playing Falcom games.
Aksys did a commendable job on Tokyo Xanadu. Not as great as an XSEED localization, but leagues above NISA's poor Ys VIII localization. There were some technical errors but the writing overall was pretty good, and they say they've fixed a lot of those errors for the PS4 and PC release.
Well, I didn't say all of their talent left. Wataru Ishibashi was an incredible musician who stuck on board with Falcom, but sadly he died at 39 in 2014 (he was the composer for Silver Will, one of the most iconic songs in Falcom history, from Trails in the Sky.) Takahiro Unisuga is another big talent who's been working on games with them since Xanadu Next and is still making music for their games. Hayato Sonoda worked on Vantage Master back in 1997, and he's still at Falcom making awesome tracks as well. One of their more prolific (and contracted) composers, Mitsuo Singa, is less awesome but he's been improving a lot lately.
It's harder to tell you about the awesome internal artists that are currently working at the company because most of them, whether it be art or music, aren't credited directly for their work. For example, we have no idea who the current lead artist doing the character art for Trails is right now, but we can start to guess. It's easier to talk about the talents and their contributions in the OP because they're no longer at Falcom.
Random example: the artist behind the awesome Baccano! light novel and anime series (and for Star Ocean 4's illustrations), Katsumi Enami, did work on Ys Seven for Falcom, alongside Trails of Zero and Trails of Azure. HACCAN did the promo art for Trails sometimes - the artist that did the Mushihime-sama cover. The thing is, because Enami was credited for certain Falcom titles, there is often confusion about the fact that some of the internal artists follow Enami's style closely or emulate it so people credit that work to Enami mistakenly.
You can see Enami's prowess at character design in one of Adol's best designs in franchise history:
This was more a tribute to Falcom's influence in the industry.
Random example: the artist behind the awesome Baccano! light novel and anime series (and for Star Ocean 4's illustrations), Katsumi Enami, did work on Ys Seven for Falcom, alongside Trails of Zero and Trails of Azure. HACCAN did the promo art for Trails sometimes - the artist that did the Mushihime-sama cover. The thing is, because Enami was credited for certain Falcom titles, there is often confusion about the fact that some of the internal artists follow Enami's style closely or emulate it so people credit that work to Enami mistakenly.
You can see Enami's prowess at character design in one of Adol's best designs in franchise history:
