In a recent interview with Famitsu magazine, Square Enix’s Taro Yoko and Yosuke Saito revealed that they originally planned to bring Nier to the PlayStation Vita. However, the company that was supposed to handle the Vita version ended up working on Dragon Quest X instead, and the Vita version never materialized. Saito said:
We’ve always had the thought of ‘wanting to do something new’ with the Nier IP. At first, we talked about how there are still a lot of people who’ve yet to play Nier, so we thought about making making it for PlayStation Vita and adding some kind of [new] element.
Yoko added:
I had a talk with ILCA president [Takuya] Iwasaki (who was a director at Cavia at the time of Nier’s development) about ‘how I’d like to keep working with Saito on Nier and stuff,’ and it was likewise for Iwasaki. Together with the company Orca, which he’s also the president of, we had a proposal for a PlayStation Vita version of Nier. This was around March of 2011. However, it was decided that Orca would handle work for Dragon Quest X, so we weren’t able to make Nier’s PlayStation Vita version come true.
Saito also revealed that following the release of the first Nier game, he spoke to Assistant Producer Yuki Yokoyama about a sequel, but Yokoyama wasn’t too positive about the idea because the first game didn’t sell much. Saito said that it made him give up on the idea of a sequel at the time.
Announced at E3 2015, Nier New Project is in development for the PlayStation 4.
[Source: Famitsu via Siliconera]
