BODY: Retro-revival specialist Hamster has quietly kept one of the more obscure corners of 1990s Japanese arcade history alive — and its latest pick is a deep cut. Starting August 13, the fighting game Toshiden: Angel Eyes (闘姫伝承 ANGEL EYES) is available on Nintendo Switch 2 and PlayStation 5 through the Console Archives series, priced at 1,200 yen.
Originally released to arcades by Technos Japan in 1996, Angel Eyes stood out for its entirely female roster — a rarity for the era's fighting-game boom. Built on 2D sprite work rather than the polygonal push that dominated the mid-'90s, it offered a fast, combo-driven brawler that never crossed over to Western audiences in a big way, making this re-release a genuine curiosity for fans outside Japan.
The Console Archives line is Hamster's higher-end sibling to its long-running Arcade Archives series, aimed specifically at the newer Switch 2 and PS5 hardware. As with its other releases, buyers can expect faithful emulation plus quality-of-life options such as display settings, online leaderboards, and adjustable difficulty.
At 1,200 yen — roughly a few dollars more than a standard Arcade Archives title — the pricing reflects the Console Archives tier while keeping the game an easy impulse purchase for collectors and fighting-game historians alike.
The insider take
Hamster's release strategy is one of the quiet marvels of Tokyo's game industry: a small company methodically clearing the rights to decades of arcade catalog and shipping a new title nearly every week. Angel Eyes is exactly the kind of forgotten Technos property — the studio behind Double Dragon and Kunio-kun — that would otherwise be lost to dead arcade boards. For Japanese preservationists, each of these drops is less a product launch than an archival rescue, and Technos deep cuts like this one tend to spark outsized excitement among the collector crowd here.
Originally reported by GAME Watch (Japanese).