We’ve learned that NieR and Drakengard creator Taro Yoko was originally planning to port the game to Playstation Vita.

The news comes from an interview with the developer and Famitsu, where they talked up the new game, which is in development for Playstation 4. However, Yoko-san and Square Enix producer Yosuke Saito reminisced over the previous game, and how there were still people who didn’t play the original.

“We always tought about ‘wanting to do something new’ with the NieR IP,” Saito remarked. “We immediately thought about how there’s still a lot of players who haven’t played NieR, so we considered making a Playstation Vita port, while adding something new.”

Yoko talked up the port that never was as well. “I had a conversation with ILCA president [Takuya] Iwasaki (Editor’s note: who was the director of Cavia, NieR’s studio, at the time of the game’s production) on ‘how I’d like to keep working on NieR with Saito,” and I found out Iwasaki felt the same way. Alongside his company, Orca, we proposed a PS Vita version of NieR.”

Sadly, this never came to be. “This was around the time of March, 2011,” Yoko said. “However, Orca was put to the development of Dragon Quest X, so we weren’t able to greenlight the Playstation Vita version of NieR.”

While Saito explained that they were always looking to do something with Platinum Games, he later approached Yoko-san to make a new NieR game, on new consoles.