It’s time to look at the announcements made on day two of EVO Japan 2025 by exA-Arcadia, following the unveiling of The Rumble Fish 2 Nexus and Spectral Vs. Generation Chaos yesterday. Today, we have four fairly obscure fighters to chew on, ranging from never fully released rarities getting a second chance, to newer efforts being brought to the arcade for the first time. There should be at least one more of the former being unveiled next too, which may well be the most infamous of the bunch… but that will have to wait. For now, here’s more new arcade games to look out for in the near future.
exA-Arcadia @ EVO Japan 2025 – Day 2
Day 2 of the show saw exA-Arcadia run another exALive stream from the Tokyo Big Sight venue to announce their new titles. Also, at the same time as all these reveals, they have been running competitive side events on their existing titles, including Axel City 2 and Chaos Code Nemesis Experiment. Asuka 120% Burning Fest. Exallent (which was covered in Newsbytes last week whilst it was on location test) has also been previewed here, in conjunction with a side event for the original console version. Like yesterday, all the reveal trailers for the titles mentioned below can be found in this stream.
The Fallen Angels Revenge
Kicking things off with at long last, a proper showcase for one of those titles exA has been promising for a good while and has now finally got closer to releasing – The Fallen Angels Revenge. As it has been covered at length on the site before, the quickie on the original game is that it was made by ex-SNK developers at Psikyo in 1998, but never properly released, being made in only very limited quantities (less than 100).
This update to it was one of the earliest major releases announced by exA, but for various reasons, it would go for years at a time without updates. The main issue behind the delays was the enormous amount of work needed on the sprites, with some characters having over 900 frames of animation (all hand-drawn) – which then needed to be recreated/redrawn in HD for this release. After a dry spell, last year’s EVO Japan had a reminder that things were still moving, and now the game is closer than ever before to becoming complete reality – though we still don’t have a release date, other than likely some time this year. Hopefully soon…
Rabbit
While Fallen Angels was no surprise, this one very much was. Like that game, Rabbit was created by its developers Aorn to be a new original arcade fighter, but failed its tests and only was made in limited quantities. It did get a very different release for consoles though, with an odd wrinkle of it all being EA/Electronic Arts’ involvement in publishing the game.
EA are nowhere to be found with this new arcade edition though, as exA are going to be developing and publishing it wholly. Not sure what the rights situation is with it at the moment, but it looks like they’ve managed to get a lot of control over the game, to the point where this is interestingly not even being released with a new subtitle – just simply Rabbit again.
Blazing Strike AC
Bringing our games into the current century and decade now, you might recall a fighter by the name of Blazing Strike that released for consoles and Steam a couple years back. It had a bit of hype at the time, being an all-new, original 2D fighter created by game designer luminaries formerly of Capcom and SNK, but was unfortunately dragged down by some mixed reviews.
Anyone who was disappointed by the game might be pleased to hear that this new exA version will be fixing pretty much all of the points of contention. Among those mentioned, these fixes include changes to the game system and balancing; improved graphics rendering; redone sound; and 3x lower input lag. All that should make for the definitive version of the game.
One interesting note is that this will be on the cheaper end of the scale – not quite in the “budget” range as some exA titles that are sub-$1000, but not far above that, making it affordable (from the operator perspective). That’s always good news in the current climate.
Yotamono Battlers
Finally, here is another new original game from more recent years with a link to the past. Though known on this Japanese release as Yotamono Battlers, this is really Fight’N’ Jokes, originally created in 1997 for the MS-DOS by a small development team of Italian friends, effectively making it one of the first ever Western indie fighters. It has never been one of the most well-known games, but came back to slight prominence last year when Mental Drink (who started out in Italy, but are now New Zealand-based) revived it on Steam.
This recent Steam version forms the basis of exA’s new one, by what we can see. exA will change the name for the Western release, although it’s unknown if that will be Fight’N’Joke or something else. Also, they will make this another of their budget titles, putting it in a similar price tier as Donut Dodo Do! and the like. That plus the style tempts me to make a kids cabinet, just for this game…
This just about wraps it up for exA-Arcadia’s second day at EVO Japan 2025… but likely doesn’t for everything by them from the show, as at least one other possible reveal appears to be on the cards. Once again, if you’d like to see the trailers for all of these new releases by them, simply scroll up to the exALive stream embed at the top of the post or find it here.
Before this is closed out fully, it’s worth saying that tomorrow will see a bit of a news blitz on the site – as well as a EVO Japan 2025 Day 3 post covering all the other arcade-adjacent happenings at the show, there should then be a piece dedicated to that last exA announcement, as well as the start of the AAA Expo coverage. Hang tight for all of that. Until then, what was your favorite new arcade game revealed by exA-Arcadia at the second day of EVO Japan 2025?
