Though exA-Arcadia had to pull out of Amusement Expo 2025, they have kept on working away behind the scenes at their slate of new arcade games. I had promised an update on them, given that the last was in February when they held another exALive stream, so here’s a rundown of what the company has been preparing for arcades ever since then.
Also, do note that even bigger announcements are still to come from exA at EVO Japan 2025 (May 9th – 11th), where they plan to announce several new fighting games, and then this year’s Shooters Fes the following month (June 14th – 15th), which will feature four or five shooting game title reveals. Anyway, let’s look at what’s new for now:
April exA Releases
First, let’s get into the new releases that the company has in store for this month. I had erroneously at first thought some of these were fully out back in February, but that was just when pre-orders opened for them. After confirming with exA, here are the games that will begin shipping out this month, or already have shipped:
- AIRGALLET EXA LABEL
- Bunny Bomber Blast
- Daemon Bride exAGAIN
Of those, Airgallet is only just about to release on the 15th. exA have also updated on it with a new trailer below, and some specific details on what this EXA Label release brings to the table, including a new opening theme and key visuals by original Toaplan designer Junya Inoue, a new EXA arrangement of music by Keishi Yonao, and 1-frame input processing, making it twice as fast as the original.
It’s worth additionally saying that Asuka 120% Burning Fest. EXALLENT and Chaos Code Nemesis Experiment are supposed to be not too far behind either, alongside the two games mentioned below, so hang tight on those.
Daemon Bride exAgain Tests
While not available as of this writing, the long awaited “ultimate version” of Daemon Bride will be shipping out by the end of the month. In addition to the low input lag and a new opening to the game that has been remastered in HD, exA has this running on the same engine that they used to improve Arcana Heart 3 XTEND, which improves the overall visual quality of the game. This already saw some testing and should be available soon. Here’s some livestreamed footage from one of the recent Japanese test locations, Kohatsu in Osaka:
Cyberblocker R Trailer
If you’ve ever wondered what a brick breaker and a shoot ’em up would be like if they had a baby, then this is your game. It makes something of a new subgenre… a Brick Hell Breaker, perhaps? I had played a super early version of this at Amusement Expo 2024, but what you see here below is entirely different (I don’t recall the game having quite as many shooter elements in it). The completed version also has new artwork by Serial Experiments Lain illustrator Yoshitoshi Abe, voices by the Naruto theme song vocalist Diana Garnet, and now that it can be heard clearer, the FM-heavy soundtrack by former Zuntata member Yasuhisa Watanabe sounds awesome too. This will be the first of several exA trackball games, and it begins testing in Japan on Wednesday.
Jitsu Squad Comparison
Lastly, thanks to exA, I recently got a review copy of Jitsu Squad Featuring Samurai Pizza Cats. The site problems did make some of my progress on additional content for this see a delay, but I’ll have more about it soon enough. I’ve beaten the game on Switch, and played it a little more than that, so I was well prepared for this one going in. The arcade version not only is snappier and flows better, they’ve corrected bugs and some other little things (such as text alignment on certain screens) that even without taking the Samurai Pizza Cats content into consideration, it’s already a better game. With everything unlocked from the get-go, you can enjoy the game right out of the gate, without needing to grind through.
For some other interesting information, “each Character can launch enemies into the air Marvel vs Capcom style, and combo them”. An example of Speedy was given, where by pressing up and attack to kick whomever is in your sights into the air, you can press jump, then attack in the air where you can also use either specials or supers. There are other combo moves that come with the moveset art that will be familiar to fans of fighting games.
I would also note that in person, you can really tell how much better and sharper the arcade version is to Switch. In the video, it can be a little hard to tell… I need to up my video editing game to do those “slider boundary” comparisons so it can be more obvious. The Switch also chokes a lot during gameplay, whereas I have not encountered that in the arcade edition so far. The improvements in performance “pushes the VRAM to the limit”, which also includes the ability for a character to jump in at any time.
Once again, these are not all that exA have in store – fighting and shooting game fans should look forward to what will be revealed at EVO Japan and Shooters Fes in the coming two months. Until then though, what do you think of these latest exA-Arcadia updates?
