The PlayStation Vita, Ten Years Later

The PlayStation Vita launched in Japan ten years ago today! To celebrate the milestone, we’re looking back at Sony’s fan-favorite handheld. Share your Vita memories with us in the comments!

Let’s kick things off with a tragedy!

I loved the PlayStation Vita and, because I did, I went for the biggest memory card you could get around 2015. That’s right. I imported the 64GB bad boy. Which doesn’t sound probably too impressive, until you remember that the Vita had proprietary memory cards. So it wasn’t as simple as sticking a microSD in the slot.

I used it like crazy, as well as the 32GB backup. Because games are pretty big!

Until it died in 2018. I couldn’t play games. Data was gone. There was nothing I could do. Thought it would be fine, because I had the 32GB card. Except that died in 2019.

Long story short, proprietary memory cards suck and I’m extremely thankful for physical PlayStation Vita cartridges! — Jenni

The Vita eventually became a haven for the niche, with a bounty of JRPGs and such. That… wasn’t really the case at launch! There was a lot of skepticism about the handheld, and it was warranted.

But hey, I’ll play whatever. I love launches.

Though even I wasn’t particularly psyched, so I didn’t pre-order a handheld and only decided to stop at a Best Buy midnight launch because it was on the way home from my second-shift job and we’d wrapped early that evening.

I rolled up at 11:53, and… yep, I was the only one there. A local Sony rep was there to document the “first Vita sold in the area,” and probably expected an excited super-fan. Instead? There’s a photo somewhere on PlayStation’s marketing servers of an exhausted newspaper employee halfheartedly accepting a Vita with a commemorative sleeve case.

Hot Shots Golf: World Invitational was pretty good, though. Shout out to Marta. — Graham

Vita means life! To this day my two overriding PS Vita memories are of staying up all night clearing Danganronpa for the first time, eventually having to find someplace to plug the thing in so I could keep playing without running out of charge.

The second was applying the Persona 4 Golden skin to my console. It’s still one of the best-looking portable machines ever designed, in my estimation, and I’ll always be a little sad it’s (commercially) gone now. — Josh

As Graham mentioned, the PS Vita was a big haven for niche Japanese games. It’s also where I got to play the PSP gems I missed before thanks to backward compatibility. The Vita having twin sticks helped a lot in improving the controls for many PSP games.

I also remember the Vita era for the influx of Monster Hunter-inspired titles like Freedom Wars, God Eater, and Toukiden. As I mostly play single-player, I found myself liking these games more since they had NPC companions with proper character developments. — Kite

The PlayStation Vita launched just a few months before I graduated from college and moved to Japan, so it does evoke some of those more freeing memories. Rather than using the console for more new and creative titles, though? I originally picked it up for hits of classic PlayStation nostalgia. Touch my Katamari was an addiction, as I had racked up over 600 hours in the original Katamari Damacy.

In retrospect, this was a waste, given the more advanced capabilities of the system! But hey, I like rolling up unsuspecting ducks and schoolgirls. — Carley

What is your favorite PlayStation Vita memory? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter! And read our other handy roundtables for more thoughts from the Siliconera team.