EVO Japan 2026 Day 1: exA-Arcadia Unveils New Arcade Fighting Games

May is here and so is EVO Japan 2026, which means that we have some arcade news to chew on. As with the past few years of the event, this comes to us from Tokyo-based exA-Arcadia, who have been using it to announce their latest fighting game titles for some time now. Their M.O. with events like this is to spread multiple reveals across the event’s duration, so let’s take a look at what came to the fore on the first day.

EVO Japan 2026 & exA

First, some background in case you are not familiar with either. Since 2018, EVO Japan has been a premier fighting game show for the country, seeing tons of 1v1 tournaments and competitions take place, whilst filling the void that events like Tougeki used to occupy before their demise. Of course, EVO itself started off with more humble beginnings back during the 1990s in the US, but thanks to Japan’s strong arcade culture, it was a natural jump for them to start hosting an officially sponsored event there. For the past few years, exA has used this opportunity to reveal numerous new fighting titles on their booths.

In the event that you are not familiar with exA’s business model, think of the Neo Geo MVS and how that provided a unified platform with multiple game cartridges for arcades to grab in the 1990s. An EXA Board is like that, but modernized, and with much smaller cartridges. For arcade operators, it’s one of the most affordable ways to get new content for their venue, and gives locations in the West games that now rarely see a release in arcades outside of Japan. I myself have three exA cabinets, two of which are in my main venue (another is in a private break room). We have also covered them on the site many times since 2018.

Note that there will be additional games announced beyond what you see below, so stay tuned.

AVATAR LEGENDS: The Fighting Game; King of Fighters ’98

Before the show started, two new fighting games for exA were already promoted and announced; the first one, AVATAR LEGENDS, was unveiled in the US at March’s Amusement Expo International. Check here for our coverage on that. Given the nature of EVO Japan, exA has taken advantage of the event and began testing it in Tokyo yesterday, marking the first time the Japanese public could play the game.

Then on Tuesday, SNK sent out a press release about their own EVO Japan booth, and snuck in the detail amongst other non-arcade announcements that The King of Fighters ’98 would be making a return to arcades via exA-Arcadia. More is still to come soon regarding this one, with lots of information on the game itself not yet officially revealed, but for now, check out the initial coverage of it here.

Onto everything announced today, and unlike previous years, details are a bit scant on everything announced so far, with much of it just being that the game exists, no specific information on changes, modes, and so on. The easy presumption is that all of these will operate at exA’s super fast input speed, so that’s one difference you can mark down. We’ll just have to wait for whenever we’ll get full details though.

Neo Double Dragon

For the first of the new-new announcements, here’s a series that exA have been quietly suggesting would come to their platform for a good while now, but is finally a reality. Neo Double Dragon is based on the 1v1 fighter version that landed on the NeoGeo MVS back in 1995 by Technos Japan, which in itself was based on the 1994 film. We don’t know anything else about it aside from this Twitter/X post:

I’ve always heard mixed things on this one, but given the job that exA has done on their many EXA LABEL releases in providing improved versions of any given title, I would assume that this will fall into that category and this will become the definitive release of the game. It would be good if they remaster the sequences in the attract mode that shows clips from the movie into 4K, like they did with the G.I. Joe opener.

As a note on these remaining games, I have not played any of them either (nor had I heard of or known much about them prior), so there won’t be any specific comments on them, just the news as-is.

Umineko Golden Fantasia Cross exAceed

For anyone else uninitiated, Umineko Golden Fantasia is a tag team fighter that is based upon a visual novel from the late 2000s. The game as found on Steam has nineteen fighters, and had been released on the Xbox 360, but otherwise appears to have been dormant until this new Cross exAceed edition coming from exA. There has been a lot of promotion on this particular game, including from Dengeki Online.

Rising Eclipse: Complete Edition

This one, per the dormant Facebook page, is a “2D fighter in a blighted world”, and a PC/Doujin game that was last updated back in 2017. Now, it’s getting a major upgrade as an arcade release. Unlike the other titles revealed so far, I notice that it has character art on the sides as the game is presented in 4:3 (I would expect that both KOF ’98 and Neo Double Dragon will have these panels with their own characters).

Them’s Fightin’ Herds

Last but not least for today is a fighting game that started out as an indie My Little Pony fangame quite some time ago, then turned into its own thing. This of course means that the characters have that MLP look to them, but it appears to expand into other creature types. Again, we don’t know what differences will be implemented here, so we will have to wait for more information as and when it becomes available.

As mentioned, more games will be unveiled tomorrow, so stay tuned. Hopefully we will find out more than just the existence of these pieces soon, but it is difficult to say. There are still games unveiled from previous EVO Japan events that we have yet to see released, so it’s prudent to give these the “don’t judge them until they’re shipping” disclaimer, just in case one or more don’t. I do imagine that major ones like KOF ’98 and Neo Double Dragon are safe, but I notice that from the photos these appear to be fairly early, so it could be a while. Nonetheless, what do you think of exA-Arcadia’s EVO Japan 2026 announcements so far?

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