Toshihiro Kondo: the fan who became Falcom's president

Toshihiro Kondo (born 1975) came to Falcom as a fan. As a university student he fell for The Legend of Heroes III: The White Witch so completely that he built a fan website devoted to it; applying to Falcom's accounting department in 1998, he found the company already knew the site, and hired him instead, the only applicant who understood the internet, to run its servers and game websites. Playing builds to write those sites turned into feedback, feedback into scenario work, and scenario work into leadership of Falcom's story committee. When founder Masayuki Kato stepped down in July 2007, he named Kondo, at 32, the company's third president.

He has produced every Trails game while running the company, and his public stewardship of the saga is unusually specific: the ending was decided around the first game's release; the story stood at over 60% complete at Cold Steel IV (2018) and roughly 90% by 2024; the final game is planned for announcement in 2031, Falcom's fiftieth year, and release in 2032. He still writes, scenario and production credits run through the modern Ys games as well, and still names The White Witch, the game on his fansite, as the direct reason Trails exists: its detailed, world-first storytelling was the template. The saga's improbable coherence across twenty-two years is not a committee product. It is one reader who got the keys to the library and never left.