The Legend of Heroes series is their biggest franchise. Ys is the most recognizable one, I agree.

"Huge" --> only owns PC stuff released in the West, pfff :P

This is why I was reluctant about creating a thread in the GOG General forum, nerd nitpicking... -_-

Their Legend of Heroes "series" is not even a series, it's a sub-series of Dragon Slayer (same as Xanadu), itself divided into metaseries (Trails in the Sky, Trails of Cold Steel, etc). I wouldn't call it their biggest series, it had been gaining reputation and a cult following outside of Japan in the past few years mostly because, well, it's the most "traditional Japanese" thing Falcom ever made, as it is the closest thing to what we in the West think of when we imagine a JRPG. Everything else Nihon Falcom made is real time, not turn-based, especially Ys and Dragon Slayer, which were created by Falcom as a response to the Western CRPG (Falcom wanted to make computer RPGs that weren't turn-based like Ultima or Wizardry). In fact, Dragon Slayer -- which spawned Xanadu and The Legend of Heroes -- is widely considered to be the very first action RPG, not even "AJRPG". I agree that a lot of people in the West have been crazy about Legend of Heroes games, as of late, but the fact still stands it's far from being Falcom's biggest (as in 'most recognizable') brand. Ys is and probably will remain their flagship franchise for years to come.

As for being a fan and "only owning PC stuff released in the West", what's wrong with that? I'm a person who enjoys playing video games, I'm not a collector for collecting's sake. I see no point in looking for Falcom games on eBay or import stores just to gather dust on a shelf, if I'm not able to play them. I don't understand Japanese, I can't read it or understand most of what's being said, so there's no point in buying Japanese releases of Falcom games. Plus, most of their older games, while indeed released for the PC, were out in the '80s, at a time when incompatibilities between hardware and software were even worse than today, and I don't own any Japanese PC of the time, in order to be able to play them, even if I did understand Japanese. I'm also not big on console gaming, the last console I owned was a Gamecube, and I'm not buying newer consoles just because of one or two games, so I stick to PC gaming, as I do need a PC for work reasons, so I might as well play games on it, as well.

He was joking.

Sorry about that, then.

It's not a sub-series in the way that it became "independent" and started its own whole thing. Considering it dropped the affiliation to the Dragon Slayer series, it is generally considered separated. As for bigger, larger etc. The Legend of Heroes series has been outselling the Ys series for a long time (I follow Japanese sales), therefore it became their biggest franchise. And like I said, when it comes to being recognizable, I did agree with you that Ys still reigns supreme.

Yep, I thought the "pfff" and ":P" would give it away.

UPDATE:

The timer issue on GOG's "Available for download" and Library download sections has been noticed, addressed and fixed. It no longer counts down to June 4, but to the correct April 16 date.

Whether NISA (finally) releases it on PC or not remains to be seen, but at least this particular mixup has been solved.

I don't think NISA can afford another blow to their already laughable credibility, to be honest, and I'm inclined to believe they *will* release Ys VIII tomorrow, despite the state it's in, because they have been dragging Falcom's -- and their own -- name through the mud for months, now, and they'd rather release a sub-par PC port of the game than delay the whole thing yet again for a third time.

Anyway, here's a screenshot of my Ys VIII GOG library item, now showing the correct available for download date.

Well, I just started Tokyo Xanadu, so hopefully, by the time I'm through that, Ys 8's PC port will be in a pretty good state.

Tokyo Xanadu will give you ample time to wait for fixes to Ys VIII. I'm 60 hours in and haven't finished it, yet, and I'm pretty positive I'll do a second playthrough to try different stuff that I missed in this one.

But don't get your hopes up, I doubt NISA will continue working on Lacrimosa of Dana PC after release, I get the feeling they just want to be done with it as soon as possible, and their PC division is a joke, anyway; unless they employ the guy who they outsourced the PC port to and keep him working on the game, there's not much chance they'll work on it themselves and fix the eventual bugs and optimization issues the game might still have. Heck, I don't even know if they *are able* to fix or work on those things, they had to ask an outside person to do it for them, in the first place...

My guess is that they thought "modern consoles are just like PCs, right?, so a straight-up PS4-to-PC port should be easy to do", when they promised Falcom that a joint PC and console release was possible. Well... sucks to be you, NISA.

Falcom likely won't be working with them again, but NISA themselves must be extremely annoyed and aggravated by the whole process, and even if Falcom showed some signs of dementia and tried working with NISA again, hopefully the NISA folks have some sensible people among them and are the ones to refuse another Falcom gig. Their reputation and credibility with PC users got utterly destroyed because of all this disaster.