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- Image of Earthion, Courtesy of Limited Run Games, Inc.

Earthion Launches on PS5 and PS4—A True 16-Bit Shooter Reborn

Originally posted on Total Apex Gaming | By Mollie Dominy | Last updated Sep 17, 2025 12:21 PM ET

Alright folks, someone please call my inner child—because Earthion is about to detonate on PS5 and PS4, and it’s ready to melt your retinas (in the best way possible). If you’ve ever looked at your wall of old Genesis cartridges and thought, “What if someone actually tried to max out what that console could do, but on a modern system?”, Yuzo Koshiro and Makoto Wada heard you. They didn’t just make a retro shooter for nostalgia points—they built the game for actual Sega Genesis hardware, then made sure it survived the jump into 2025 complete with all its chiptune-y, bullet-hell glory.

Let’s talk real talk: this isn’t the “pixel art” marketing schtick. Earthion is the legit 16-bit deal. Koshiro (yeah, the Streets of Rage guy) dug into three decades of wizard brainpower and modern dev tools just to see how far he could push the old hardware. What he and Wada cooked up? It’s an ode to arcade shooters that isn’t just for “old heads”—it’s for literally anyone who thinks a boss fight should fill the entire screen with beautiful chaos.

So What the Heck is Earthion, Anyway?

Think vertical-scrolling shoot ‘em up, but stripped of the soulless nostalgia pandering and lovingly rebuilt with the DNA of the best 80s and 90s shmups. Remember getting annihilated by a swirling ocean of neon projectiles? Earthion remembers. The whole thing started with a simple question: what might the Genesis have done if developers never ran out of weird ideas? Koshiro and Wada decided to find out, then brought all that madness into 2025 just to mess with us.

Here’s the thing: every pixel was drawn for the original Genesis. Every earworm in the soundtrack was forged with the FM sound chip. The prototype popped off so hard, Limited Run Games stepped in to ferry this beast from your attic’s cartridge bin to the modern world. Enter—the Earthion PS5 launch—where this 16-bit experiment gets a brand new lease on life for trophy-hunters and joystick jockeys alike.

Not Just a Straight Port: How to Feel Like You’re in a Dingy Arcade

Image of Earthion, Courtesy of Limited Run Games, Inc.

Earthion isn’t looking to sell you “retro vibes”—it’s slinging the real stuff. Someone on the dev team must’ve spent way too many nights fiddling with old CRT monitors, because the PS5 and PS4 versions let you dial in your own nostalgia settings:

Scanline Filters: You want lines across your screen? Go wild. Make it subtle, crank it to max—your eyeballs, your rules.
CRT Curvature and Filters: Miss the glow, bend, and blur of tube TVs? Flip a switch and you’re back at that sticky arcade cabinet, no quarters required.

Koshiro and Wada wanted the pixel art to look exactly right, down to the last shimmering bullet. No washed-out faux-retro garbage. No detail lost. And yes, if you’re itching for some digital bragging rights: PlayStation Trophies are fully on board. Prove you survived the madness and maybe, just maybe, you’ll claw your way to platinum.

Why Earthion Belongs on PlayStation

It’s wild to think that something hand-crafted for ancient hardware fits right in on PlayStation, but here we are. Sony’s consoles have carried the torch for shooters since disc-based games were a new thing, and Earthion walks (flies, explodes?) in those neon-lit footsteps. If you ever crushed enemies in R-Type, sweated through Ikaruga, or just love a screen so full of lasers you can see the Matrix, you’re in good company.

The Earthion PS5 launch is more than porting old code; it’s about bringing a whole genre’s DNA to a crowd that knows a good challenge when they see one. This is pick-up-and-play hard, eye-watering chaos for veterans and newcomers alike.

Earthion: The Final Verdict

So here’s the deal—Earthion is a passion project, through and through. You feel it in every enemy pattern, every skyscraper-sized boss, every sharp note of that banger soundtrack. Koshiro and Wada didn’t just slap a coat of pixels on a modern shooter and call it retro. They made the real thing, then found a way to time-warp it onto today’s consoles.

September 18th isn’t just launch day. It’s an invitation: crank up your DualSense, try not to blink, and see what happens when two veterans go all-out with a love letter to the golden age of shooters. If you’ve got the guts (and a controller you don’t mind flinging across the room), Earthion is ready. See you on the scoreboard—just, uh, don’t judge my lives counter.

This article first appeared on Total Apex Gaming and was syndicated with permission.

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