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Aside from an occasional Astro Bot cameo, it's starting to feel like Sony's content to leave many of the franchises that built the PlayStation brand in the dustbin of history. Luckily, other publishers are picking up the slack with fresh revivals of PlayStation icons, and the latest is the fighting game series that helped usher in the PS1 era: Battle Arena Toshinden.
Publisher Edia plans to bring the first three Battle Arena Toshinden games to modern platforms somewhere between its 2026 and 2027 fiscal years, according to a Japanese press release (via Gematsu).
Edia has so far specialized in bringing other cult titles, like the action-platformer series Valis and the RPG series Cosmic Fantasy, to Switch. The company says it's building on that experience for Toshinden, and it plans to do more than release bare-bones ports – though what new features will be included remains to be seen.
Battle Arena Toshinden's original Japanese publisher Takara, now merged with toy manufacturer Tomy, licensed the games to Edia for this release. But the original game had a different name on the label when it launched alongside the PS1 outside of Japan in 1995: Sony Computer Entertainment.
Yes, folks, the original Toshinden – while developed by a third-party company – was a first-party published PlayStation game outside of Japan, similar to something like Stellar Blade or Death Stranding 2 today. Toshinden's 3D graphics are fairly primitive even by PS1 standards, but they felt revolutionary in 1995, which is why the game became such an icon of the console's launch.
Sony kept up publishing duties for the PS1 versions of Toshinden 2 and 3 in the EU, but a wide array of other publishers would handle other ports in other regions – an arcade port under the Capcom banner here, a Saturn port from Sega there. But there's no doubt the series is best remembered these days for helping show what the PS1 era would be about, and Sony saw the value of it then.
While Sony is happy to sell you expensive photo books and grey PS5 Pros in celebration of its 30-year legacy, it's been a lot less willing to actually touch any classic video games. Instead, third-party publishers are doing the work. Bandai Namco alone has brought back Hot Shots Golf, Patapon, and Freedom Wars, and now with Edia on board, it seems like a bonafide trend. Again, though, I ask: who do I need to talk to about a Tokyo Jungle revival?
