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The Sony Playstation was an amazing platform which had hundreds of good games getting released for it during 1994 and 2003. But where are many of them now? Why did Sony stop making Arc the Lad Games …why did we never see a Legend of Dragoon 2, a new Bust A Groove or Alundra 3?  That are questions I simply can not answer..but what I can and want to do is to see the following 20 games or franchises return to former glory or getting a sequel or a remake. The games in the following..kinda sad list are in no peticular order.

1.Crash Bandicoot

This is a no brainer and weeeeeeeeell there is a certain Playstation Event this Weekend which might change something (I wish).

Alongside with it…Crash Team Racing and even Crash Bash should return as well.

2. Alundra.

A great 2D Action Adventure by Working Design which reminded many at The Legend of Zelda ALTTP.

It got a pretty lackluster sequel and well..nothing heard of it since than.

3. Battle Arena Toshinden.

This early Playstation game series was never one of the best fighting games but it developed the potential to get better and become one of the best..

instead the opposite happened with Toshinden 4 and the series never returned. The Wii Toshinden has nothing to do with them.

4. Legend of Dragoon.

A really good JRPG directly developed by Sony. It was no giant top seller in Japan but very liked in the west and was sold over 1 M times.

For some reason, Sony never worked on a sequel while this game had much potential to become their counterpart to Final Fantasy.

5. Bust A Groove.

The first two Bust A Groove (Bust A Move in Japan) games were and are amazing..the third one on the Playstation 2 which got a different name (Dance Submit 2001) and released only in Japan was..boring in comparison.

Why did Square Enix not continue this awesome series I ask myself and I can see Jonathan Holmes from Destructoid crying in tears and shaking his head while reading this.

6. Loaded/Re-loaded.

The company behind it got defunct/was swallowed by a bigger one while a third game was in the works actually.

This gory bird view shooter was pure fun for a good while and had some fun characters like Fwank . Kinda a 32bit version of Smash TV / Total Carnage.

7. Tomba! 1 and 2

These were some of the cutest  platform games not made by Nintendo I ever played..and liked. They were full of nice ideas and sometimes even clever dialogues and character development.

But they were absolutely not commercial successful and the small development team behind it had to close its doors. A damn shame.

8.Fighting Force.

This was one of the first Beat’em ups in 3D and originally meant to be Streets of Rage 4. Developed by Core Design.

But they had differences with Sega and so it became Fighting Force. The game was only a bit better than mediocre but had the potential to become much better. Like with Bust A Groove and Alundra it got worse instead and the 2nd part was almost nothing like the first. There was a third part in development for the Playstation 2 but well..never happend.

9. Soviet Strike..Nuclear Strike

This was one of Electronic Arts funniest game series ever and they did an amazing job of porting the very traditional seeming  series from its old Desert/Jungle/Urban Strike Trilogy to a much more modern looking concept. But it’s buried. Way too long. And hey..where is Road Rash @ EA?

10. Gex / Gex 3D

Where the hell is the talking Gecko? With all his funny and well..sometimes silly one liners but clever 3D Platformer level design which were making jokes of Movies and TV Programmes and sometimes other video games as well. What the Hell happened to Gex?

11. The MediEvil series.

Sir Fortesque in MediEvil and its sequel was one of the funniest European game characters for the Playstation and while he returned in Playstation Allstars Battle the series itself is more or less dead since 15 years now aside from one Playstation Portable Remake /Port.

It could have been Sony’s answer to the Legend of Zelda. Yes..I really think so.

12. Vagrant Story.

This is simply a masterpiece in every regard which pushed the Playstation to its limits.

Thankfully we were able to return to the World of Ivalice in Final Fantasy XII but Vagrant Story 2 should have been a thing a decade ago already.

This was one of Squaresofts most promising and challenging games ever and one of the last highlights on the Playstation.

13. And while we are at Squaresoft /Square Enix. Einhänder.

That company tried out a lot of different game genres on the Playstation but later..especially after the fusion with Enix they focussed themselves almost entirely on Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts and DragonQuest. MEH.

Einhänder was one of the best shoot’em ups during its time..and is still a great game. A shame we never saw “Zweihänder”

14. And again Squaresoft. Tobal No 2

… was one of the best 3D fighting games on the Playstation and THE game which invented the 8 way run a bit before it went more popular through SoulCalibur.

But for some fucking reason ..and I blame Electronic Arts for this too, it was never released in the West and the Tobal series died. There was also Ehrgeiz: God Bless The Ring and it was nice but a completely different thing.

15. B.I.O.F.R.E.A.K.S

Only a few of you might remember this almost obscure fighting game by Saffire, developed for Midway which had their own Mortal Kombat 4 coming up though and it looked like they feared Biofreaks could become a too strong competition for their flagship series.

Biofreaks was a very innovative and creative fighting game and one of the first which used the third dimension for more than just side stepping.

16. Final Fantasy Tactics.

Why Square..just why…did you never continue this? (Lets pretend the gba games never happened..they were not too bad ..but sucked in comparison)

17. Xenogears

Sorry that there are so many Squaresoft games in this list but well..thats how it is..they made a ton great games for the Playstation and abandoned them.

Xenogears never returned with a direct sequel or prequel because different copyright agreements if I am informed right.Yes there are the (also nice) Xenosaga games and there is Xenoblade too..but everyone who played the original Xenogears knows that they are completely different things with only a very few details shared in all of them.

18. Cardinal Syn

Another 3D fighting game with potential, and like Biofreaks also one which used the 3D environments, was innovative and had some interesting characters, it really had the potential to become something bigger on the PS2. This game was developed for Sony and…well..it could have become a real competition for SoulCalibur with a lot work.

19. Cool Boarders. UEP SYSTEMS FTW!

Simply one of the best snowboard games ever..it and its sequel by Uep Systems were super fun but then the development contract was given to Sony’s own studio 989 studio..a team which almost destroyed Twisted Metal and was successful in destroying the fun in Cool Boarders and also developed a horrible third ESPN Xtreme Sports game. Good that we got SSX at least.

20. Street Fighter EX

Yeah..some of you might disagree but I liked the Street Fighter EX games and its characters like Skullomania, Allen Snider, Doctrine Dark and Kairi. A damn shame that Capcom and Arika did not work for more years together. SFEX3 was a Playstation 2 launch game and not bad but also not using the big potential of the PS2.

It could have been much more with more development time. Btw. SFEX was the first fighting game with a challenge/mission training mode which really helped to learn the characters. Would love to see Skullomania etc being in SFV but it won’t happen because Money and big Ego’s.

Instead of 20 games and series, this list would need to be 3 times as big I fear to include really everything like Jet Moto, Arc the Lad, Fear Effect, Motor Toon Grand Prix, Jumping Flash or Rival Schools among others.

I mean even MegaMan Legends and Dino Crisis were mostly a thing on the first Playstation.

..it’s really sad in some cases that series were not continued because copyrights crap or because a company simply was not smart enough to grab a license when it was available to buy. @ Crash Bandicoot. Or a company got bought by another one and the older games and development teams were trashed.

I did not include Spyro the Dragon into this list because unlike how it went with Crash Bandicoot, some of the later titles were pretty good and Spyro is kinda a thing till today. Especially Spyro: A Hero’s Tail from 2004 by Eurocom is a pretty great but often overlooked game in the series and the handheld games were often not as bad either.

I think that Spyro and the Skylanders IP might evolve again into another platformer sooner or later.