Falcom was a hot computer and video publisher back in the 1980s and early 1990s, with many of its games getting manga adaptations. Here is a look at a handful of them.

The original Xanadu doesn’t have much of a story beyond the same type you’d find in most 80s CRPGs – explore dungeons, beat up enemies, get stronger, and look for a powerful sword. This obviously wasn’t enough for a manga, so in-house Falcom artist Kazuhiko Tsuzuki created his own. Melding elements of fantasy and sci-fi, the main character is Fieg, a soldier from the near-future who’s zapped into the world of Xanadu, where he becomes embroiled in a magical war. He teams up with the beautiful warrior princess Rieru to fight the evil Reichswar. The fabled Dragon Slayer sword is referenced, and a few of the enemies from the game appear, but otherwise there is no real relation to the game. Nonetheless, Falcom used the manga cover art for certain ports of the Xanadu game. This was also adapted into an anime OVA in 1988, which never officially left Japan.

The title of the manga refers to it as “Xanadu 1”, implying there would be more volumes, but only the first one came out. According to a tweet by Tsuzuki, since he created the manga while he was a salaried employee, he wasn’t entitled to any royalties nor any ownership, so it was canceled after this first volume.

Unlike Xanadu, Romancia actually has characters and a simple story, starring prince Fan Freddie as he saves a neighboring kingdom from monsters and rescues the princess Selina. However, the manga still goes its own direction, in a unique way – rather than focusing on Fan Freddie, as in the game, it instead stars Selina, who’s been upgraded from “kidnapped maiden” to “warrior princess”. This was written by Kenji Terada, an extremely prolific writer across many mediums, who wrote the scenarios for the first three Final Fantasy games as well as the Sega CD SRPG Dark Wizard, among many others. It was illustrated by Hidetomo Tsubura, who also worked on the El Hazard manga. It was also adapted into a drama CD.

Sorcerian only has a barely overarching story, and instead focuses on mini-scenarios starring player created characters. For its manga adaptations, each scenario was adapted by different authors, giving each a unique style. Pictured here are The Curse of Medusa by Yuusaku Toyoshima and The Gods in the Heavens by Joji Manabe.

Yuusake Toyoshima was famous among the 1980s doujin scene for his anthro art, though none of them appears in his Sorcerian manga. Joji Manabe is most known about Westerners for the manga Outlanders, as well as other fantasy works like Drakuun, Caravan Kid, and Capricorn. As of 2025, he’s been working on Rise of the Outlaw Tamer and His Wild S-Rank Cat Girl.

Rather than a video game sequel, Popful Mail received a follow-up in a series of drama CDs released by King Records. These feature Megumi Hayashibara in the title role, which she also played in the Mega CD version. A manga was serialized in Monthly Dengeki Comic Gao and compiled into a single volume. Written and illustrated by Yu Aizaki, these continue along the same line as the drama CDs, with plenty of characters that were only in the drama CDs.

The Ys comic series began in 1989, written and illustrated by Show Hagoromo. He didn’t know much of anything about the game, so he took the basic concept and its characters, and created his own fantasy story, resulting in something wildly different from the games it’s purportedly based on. For starters, Adol finds Feena washed up on a shore, and the two join together to hunt for the books of Ys. Plenty of characters have changed from the game like the old woman Jeva, who is now an attractive younger girl, and Reah now has blond hair instead of matching her twin sister’s blue.  There are also plenty of new characters like Maria, a warrior girl from Rance village. Despite not being all that faithful, it was a relatively popular series that originated in Kadokawa Shoten’s Monthly Comptiq magazine (which covered video games, anime, and pretty anime girls) and was compiled into seven volumes.

Hagoromo also did one of the Sorcerian volumes titled The Dark Mage. The characters for these later appeared in the Ys manga, making for a not-entirely-official crossover between Falcom’s series. The character’s adventures continued in another story, The Amazon’s Sword, which is included in the seventh and last volume of the Ys manga. The Dark Mage manga has also been released digitally without the Sorcerian branding.

Illustrated by Hitoshi Okuda (the Tenchi Muyo manga), this is an adaptation of the Super Famicom version Ys IV. The cover credits Kenichi Itoi of Micro Cabin for the story, who was the developer of the game, indicating that this was staying more faithful to its plot compared to Hagoromo’s manga. Obviously the story had to be altered a bit to fit into a single manga volume. There was also an adaptation of Ys V by Akiko Ikegami.

Beyond these, there’s also another Ys manga adaptation by Hidenori Maeda. I haven’t been able to get any copies of these, but all sources point to this also being a much more faithful adaptation of the original two games than Hagoromo’s work.