Falcom held its shareholder meeting yesterday, and the headline landed exactly like we feared: 2026 will ship only one title – Trails in the Sky the 2nd (full remake).
Let me be clear: I’m not mad that Sky is getting love. I’ve waited two decades for this kind of remake. I’ll buy it. I’ll probably replay it twice.
What I can’t shake is what this announcement means – and how Falcom is choosing to explain it.
“We want to bring in new fans” is not a strategy if it’s mostly old fans paying
President Kondo’s comments – both in interviews and in shareholder-meeting summaries – frame the remake pivot as a new-user on-ramp, plus a kind of internal reset: KAI (Trails Beyond the Horizon) is expensive, the team is exhausted after 20 years of Trails like an MMO operation, and remaking Sky helps them return to the origin and re-evaluate the series.
That’s… extremely “anime industry” phrasing. Gentle. Sentimental. “Returning to Shoshin (initial enthusiasm).”
And it’s also kind of terrifying, because you can use the exact same script to justify anything:
- “Let’s release Sky the 3rd remake before KAI II – to bring in new fans.”
- “Let’s do Zero/Ao remakes before KAI II – to bring in new fans.”
- “Let’s do reset before we finish the story we already started – because the team is tired.”
At some point “bringing in new fans” stops being a bridge and becomes a parking lot.
And the brutal reality: the Sky remake’s new-player share being quoted as ~5% or ~15% (depending on where you look in the discourse) still implies the overwhelming majority of buyers are existing fans.
If you’re honest about that math, then the conclusion is obvious:
Falcom’s most urgent problem is not “how do we attract newcomers.”
It’s “how do we deliver a sequel worth the fans we already have.”
The part Falcom keeps sidestepping: “It’s not the platform. It’s the writing.”
In the shareholder-meeting notes, there’s also an attempt to attribute weaker performance to platform shrink – e.g., “PS-only” and the narrowing of the user base.
But… come on. It’s 2026. Kuro II and related titles aren’t stuck on one platform anymore. And fans aren’t confused about what didn’t land.
Falcom’s deeper issue is the one we’ve been yelling about for years: the series increasingly leans on deliberate cliffhangers – the infamous abrupt endings that cut to black (or white) and roll credits like the game ran out of oxygen. In Reddit, people describe this as a “cliffhanger dump.”
This is the part Falcom never truly self-audits. Not in interviews, not in shareholder Q&A – at least not in any way that sounds like genuine accountability.
And without that reflection, “returning to the origin” can easily become code for:
“We’ll keep postponing closure until it’s convenient.”
Two reads of Falcom’s motives: one dark, one ‘optimistic’ – both lead to the same risk
To keep every viewpoint intact, here they are, cleanly:
The darker guess
Kondo and Takeiri aren’t infinitely far from retirement. So the incentive becomes:
keep the company stable year to year, protect the forecast, extend the runway with remakes, and let the future staff solve the hard problem later – “for those who come after.”
It’s not evil. It’s just… managerial survival mode.
The “optimistic” guess (that still scares me)
Even if KAI II is excellent, the entry barrier is objectively high, so Falcom decides it won’t sell well anyway. Therefore, KAI II gets delayed indefinitely – and every other justification is secondary.
And here’s the poison pill: because Sky the 1st performed “successfully,” Sky the 2nd is almost guaranteed to be safer commercially than KAI II.
So 2026 survives. Maybe the numbers even rise. Then what?
Sky the 3rd remake?
Zero/Ao remakes?
Who can guarantee those remake-onboarded players will still be around – years later – ready to buy KAI II?
Even Square Enix can’t avoid remake fatigue forever. Remake momentum trends downward when the “new story” is stuck behind a wall that keeps moving away. And if Falcom uses remakes to “hold the financial line,” it becomes a stronger, more addictive version of the same self-preservation instinct that gave us Kuro II-as-filler. Just… prettier. More respectable, and arguably more dangerous long-term.
The West is already carrying more weight than Falcom wants to admit
Here’s the part that keeps me up at night as a Western Trails fan:
Even with messy publisher execution, North America still shows up.
And yet the Sky the 1st remake rollout outside Japan has been dragged down by publisher-side issues – pricing disputes, marketing fragmentation, and distribution confusion that fans have been loudly documenting.
You can feel the frustration: people are hyped for the remake itself, but exhausted by everything around it.
Falcom also can’t publicly throw its partners under the bus – even if the fans can see the gap – because contracts aren’t one-year napkins. So we get this surreal situation:
- Publisher-side fumbles limit the remake’s ceiling.
- Falcom can’t say that part out loud.
- And yet the West is still one of the most important regions by sheer demand and long-tail sales. 1↗
Which leads to my blunt conclusion:
Western Trails fans’ opinions matter more than Falcom’s PR tone suggests.
Stop treating them like background noise.
Also: if Steam-side storefront handling becomes less fragmented going forward, good. If that’s Falcom/partners quietly learning from this mess, even better. (I’ve seen the community optimism around platform-side cleanup, but we’ll judge by outcomes, not vibes.)
And the saddest punchline of all: Agnes
One of the most painful things about this whole cycle is how it leaves the actual story in a hanging state.
The shareholder meeting can talk about “returning to the origin.”
Fans can argue about “new user acquisition.”
Analysts can model remake ROI.
Meanwhile, somewhere offscreen, Agnes is still suspended in narrative limbo, and the entire fandom is basically yelling:
“Is anyone going to ask how Agnes is doing?”
That’s the tragedy and the joke – because it’s funny, until you realize it’s been turned into a business rhythm.
Where I land, as a 20-year fan
I can accept 2026 being a one-game year. I can even accept choosing the higher-ROI route.
What I can’t accept is the idea that Falcom seems to be diagnosing the wrong illness.
If the internal takeaway is “Trails is tiring, so we need a reset,” fine.
But the external reality is:
- The series trained fans to expect cliffhanger dumps instead of earned closure.
- The barrier to entry is rising faster than the onboarding plan.
- And the company’s most reliable supporters – the long-time fans – are being asked to fund an indefinite postponement.
So yes: buy Sky the 2nd if you love it. I will.
But stop “protecting Falcom” reflexively. If you keep applauding every cut-to-black ending and every delay dressed up as a “fresh start,” you will keep getting more Cold Steel, Cold Steel III, Kuro II, and KAI – with nicer lighting and the same hollow finish.
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