When Sony’s Next-Generation Portable was revealed in 2011, expectations were high about the types of exciting software it would be receiving throughout its life – with tech demos including Lost Planet, Metal Gear Solid and Yakuza it certainly seemed like console games would be making the jump across. Yet the reality was different as weaker tech than initially anticipated meant a great deal of effort would’ve been needed to port these games, while lacklustre sales meant it wasn’t worth the effort – effectively sealing Vita’s fate.

Despite this, there were a number of occasions throughout Vita’s life where games released on other platforms that would’ve made perfect sense for the handheld, but didn’t materialise – likely due to the reasons mentioned above. These are games I feel that would’ve succeeded in spite of Vita’s lukewarm hardware sales due to either their niche appeal (an area the console excelled in), association with the PlayStation brand or just general brilliance.

So in this article I plan to examine these games – what they are, why they’d have been possible on Vita and why they would’ve worked well on it. I can’t fault the handheld’s library as it’s still full of brilliant and under-rated titles, but having a few more games like these along the way certainly wouldn’t have hurt!

The Awakened Fate Ultimatum/The Guided Fate Paradox

PSP housed one of Nippon Ichi’s most criminally ignored releases of all time, the turn-based rogue-like Z.H.P. Unlosing Ranger vs Darkdeath Evilman (which is available on Vita through backwards-compatibility, just FYI). Despite flying under the radar, the company continued to see a future in these types of titles as they later developed two PS3 entries (which were seen as spiritual successors to Z.H.P) entitled The Guided Fate Paradox and The Awakened Fate Ultimatum between 2013 and 2015.

These types of games are absolutely better played on portables thanks to their grind-focused nature and sea of content that can be chipped away at over time on a handheld – but despite NIS being strong supporters of Vita in its early years, both games releasing during its lifespan and neither being particularly technically taxing, they didn’t target the console for unknown reasons. As it stands, both Guided Fate and Awakened Fate failed to make much of an impact on PS3 and seem to be lost to the annals of time, which is a real shame as they’d make great additions to Vita’s library.

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel/Tales from the Borderlands

I’m sure I’ll receive a lot of flak for saying this, but I was a massive fan of Borderlands 2 on the Vita. It was a bit of a technical mess and it didn’t have all the content from the console releases, but it was still a brilliant and enjoyable title that also provided a completely unique handheld experience – and Nintendo Switch’s success has shown that gamers these days are more willing to accept compromised ports just to have their favourite titles running on a portable.

So it’s a shame that, despite its apparent sales success (likely as a result of being bundled with the new LCD Vita in North America), we never saw Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel land on the handheld which would’ve provided another dose of open-world looting but with a new location and set of characters. It’s also worth mentioning that Tales from the Borderlands was originally planned during the period Telltale Games actually bothered to support the console, which would’ve made a lot of sense thanks to Borderlands 2 already being available and the first two Walking Dead titles introducing handheld gamers to the company’s brand of narrative-focused adventures.

Journey

Thatgamecompany made a name for themselves on the PS3, where their brand of colourful, relaxing adventure games with deeper messages became some of the best-reviewed titles on the platform. Since then, Sony have looked to expand their reach to even more players by porting Flow to PSP, PS4 & Vita and Flower to PS4, Vita and iOS – but for some reason, the team’s most beloved and critically acclaimed title Journey only received a port to PS4 and never to Vita, despite running on their in-house Phyreengine.

Journey places you as a nameless robed figure in the desert and leaves you free to explore and discover as you wish – it heavily promoted a drop-in/drop-out multiplayer experience, which would work well on Vita as you could take the game with you wherever you went and pick up where you left off with a new companion. It seems Thatgamecompany also knew there was a lot of demand for a portable version of Journey, but for whatever reason Sony never saw fit to commission this.

Kingdom Hearts 1.5/2.5 Remix

Square-Enix really didn’t want us playing Kingdom Hearts games on Vita – aside from the fact that Birth By Sleep was never made available on PSN, the HD Collections which were used to re-introduce gamers to the franchise never made their way to Sony’s handheld either, despite being available across both PS3 and PS4. You’d think they’d want to hit the wider audience that handheld consoles offer given the large appeal of both the Disney and Final Fantasy IP’s.

All of the games included originally ran on sub-PS2 level hardware (Vita has shown that it’s more than capable of running PS2 HD Collections) and a sea of improvements were made across both – Kingdom Hearts Final Mix was given full camera control for instance, which would’ve worked on Vita extremely well thanks to its dual-analogue sticks which other action-RPG franchises like Tales and Ys leveraged to their advantage. Perhaps one day down the line we’ll get Kingdom Hearts 3 on Switch, but until that day it would’ve been nice to have all the previous games on Vita.

LittleBigPlanet Karting

There was a time when Sony looked like they would somewhat support Vita with their family-friendly PS3 titles – things like PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, Ratchet & Clank: Q-Force and Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time were making the jump across, so it seemed inevitable that LittleBigPlanet Karting would come too (especially since the Vita-native entry appeared to do well enough and even the series’ sister franchise Modnation Racers had shown up for launch).

Despite talk of it coming down the line and even a listing on the PlayStation Store, the port never materialized despite it being a great fit. On PS3, the game was lost among a sea of arcade racers while on Sony’s handheld it would’ve stood out as one of the few racing games to grace its library, as well as another bastion of support from the console’s manufacturer (which was sadly far less than it should have been, making any titles they did release stand out). At least the Vita version of LittleBigPlanet offered a brilliant level editor that could even create racing games, but it’s really not the same!

Persona 4 Arena/Persona 4 Arena Ultimax

One of the most baffling omissions on this list – Persona 4 Golden is among the most highly-praised and best-selling games on Vita, helping to set the tone for the rest of its life which was populated by copycat ‘social-link’ JRPG’s and other niche Japanese games. Due to the resounding success of the source material the IP has gone from strength to strength in recent years and has seen a variety of spin-offs – including Vita-native games like Persona 4: Dancing All Night – but for some reason the fighting variation developed by Arc System Works never found its way across.

Persona 4 Arena was released for PS3 & Xbox 360 in 2012, well after Vita had established itself in the market and just before Persona 4 Golden was about to be released – while Ultimax landed in 2014 which was the year the console received two revisions. During this whole period Arc System Works were developing their own handheld fighters with the Blazblue series, which ran on the same engine and looked remarkably similar to Persona – there’s no reason these games couldn’t have been ported to Vita, but for whatever reason they weren’t which seems like a bizarre decision and leaving easy money on the table.

Puppeteer

As with both Journey and LittleBigPlanet Karting, there was a period where non-AAA (and often family-friendly) Sony games were making the jump across from PS3 to Vita, but Puppeteer was another one which slipped through the net. A cinematic platform game from Sony’s Japan Studio (who would go on to be Vita’s biggest supporter among Sony’s internal teams), its vibrant use of colour and exaggerated story would’ve looked perfect on the handheld’s gorgeous OLED screen.

As a result of its late 2013 release on the aging PS3, Puppeteer went largely ignored and failed to gain any commercial traction despite solid reviews. While targeting Vita might not have changed its ultimate fate as its quirky mechanics meant it would never appeal to the mainstream, more gamers would’ve been likely to give it a try on their new handhelds where it could fit in with other cult platformers like Rayman Origins and Tearaway, but as it stands it’s another game lost to obscurity on last-generation home consoles.

Tekken Tag Tournament 2

Tekken has a long history with PlayStation hardware – from the release of the first game on the original PS1 right through to Tekken 7 on PS4, there will always be a connection between the series and Sony’s hardware. On PSP, Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection received rave reviews for translating the PS2 original game to a portable console while adding a sea of extras, which also led to extremely positive sales (while the porting team skillfully condensed Tekken 6 down in 2009 too).

Sadly, Bandai-Namco didn’t grace PSP’s successor with a single Tekken title (unless you count the rather ill-conceived Street Fighter x Tekken, which had its combat based on the Street Fighter engine) which seems like a bizarre omission, especially given Tekken Tag Tournament 2 released in late 2012 which is when Vita was fresh on the market. As this was a compilation title featuring years worth of fighters from the franchise’s history in one package it seems like it would’ve been perfect on a PlayStation handheld that excels with legacy games too, but it seemed Bandai-Namco didn’t think the same way and as such we’ve had to make do with the backwards-compatible entries instead.

Transistor

Bringing Bastion to Vita was a monumental task according to porting studio Blitworks, but in taking this on they managed to release one of the handheld’s most compelling titles that felt more at home here than on any of its previous platforms. It made sense that developer Supergiant Games’ next title, Transistor (which was heavily promoted alongside the PS4’s launch) would make the jump across too (especially since the work had already been put in by getting Bastion set up), but as of the time of writing this doesn’t seem at all likely.

Transistor followed the action-RPG template of Bastion but expanded on it in interesting ways – and considering it ran on the same engine and was later ported to mobile phones, despite being a technical challenge I’m sure it could’ve fit onto the Vita’s limited hardware. As a game, it would’ve been perfectly welcome among a sea of similar well-received indie titles, making its omission all the more baffling and disappointing.

Yakuza 1 & 2 HD Edition

The Yakuza franchise has seen a resurgence in the west in recent years thanks to the efforts of Atlus, SEGA and Sony’s Third-Party Productions team, which has led to every recent entry being localized from remakes such as Yakuza Kiwami to the newest game Yakuza 6. Prior to this we’d still seen every mainline entry overseas, but it had been years since the first two games released on PS2 and many fans were now finding themselves lost in the longer-running elements of the story.

While SEGA would later go on to create the Kiwami titles as a way of bringing the earlier games up to scratch, they preceded this with a HD Collection of Yazkua 1 & 2, which released for PS3 and in an incredibly ill-conceived choice, the Wii-U (where it sold less than 2k copies in Japan). It’s difficult to see how this collection wouldn’t have done much better on Vita – the two Japan-only PSP entries both sold pretty well and the franchise has long been associated with the PlayStation ecosystem, meaning reliving its beginnings on a portable machine was bound to bring in plenty of buyers.

Conclusion

Hindsight is a brilliant thing and it’s easy to look back at what could have been and lament decisions made – I’m sure there are many reasons why the games listed here didn’t end up coming to Vita and it’s easy to understand why third-parties didn’t invest in Vita’s ecosystem as much as I’d have liked, but it certainly seems to me that each of them would’ve been a great addition to the handheld’s library that would’ve been an easy enough port and had the potential to appeal to the console’s niche.

Perhaps in an alternate dimension there are people out there playing all these games on their Vita!