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With the release of Astro Bot last year, the world got a reminder of just how many beloved first-party franchises PlayStation was responsible for in its glory days – and how few of them are still alive today. While Sony itself seems interested in pursuing little beyond a handful of mega-franchises from its biggest studios, it's apparently increasingly willing to license out those series to other publishers: notably Bandai Namco, which announced new Patapon and Everybody's Gold games during the Nintendo Direct for March 2025.
First we saw Patapon 1+2 Replay, a remastered collection of Sony's two beloved PSP rhythm strategy games. Patapon helped form the peak of Japan Studio's reputation for delightfully offbeat games, and it was among the more popular parts of that lineage, spawning not just one, but two sequels. There's little else like it to this day – aside, of course, from designer Hiroyuki Kotani's spiritual successor, Ratatan, which is due to launch in 2025.
Patapon 1+2 Replay is set to launch across PS5, Switch, and PC on July 11 courtesy of Bandai Namco, and that's not the only Sony game the publisher's handling. Bandai Namco also announced Everybody's Golf: Hot Shots today, which also due out on PS5, Switch, and PC sometime this year.
Everybody's Golf was once known as Hot Shots Golf in North America, but whatever title you recognize it by, it's a cute, accessible golf game with roots going all the way back to the PS1. This one is perhaps an even weirder comeback than Patapon – here we have a brand-new entry in a Sony-published series that got a new entry as 2019 with Everybody's Golf VR.
Bandai Namco kicked off this whole thing with the release of Freedom Wars Remastered earlier this year. That Monster Hunter-style action-RPG was once a PS Vita exclusive and yes, a first-party PlayStation game. There hasn't been any formal announcement of a partnership between Sony and Bandai Namco, but clearly the two companies have worked out some mutually beneficial IP agreements.
As much as I'm confused by all this, I'm mostly just happy that other publishers are willing to give us the smaller IP revivals that Sony's unwilling to. There's already some Bloodborne copium in the ether as the result of all this, but what I want are Sony's greatest obscurities. After these years, please: sickos like me are demanding a new Tokyo Jungle. You owe it to the world, Bandai Namco. Let that little Pomeranian stalk the streets once more.
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