Fans of Nippon Ichi's tactical RPG series Disgaea are no doubt hotly anticipating the fifth mainline installment, coming to PS4 this year. Some of you may also be waiting for the inevitable handheld port, as all four previous titles have wormed their way onto Sony's portables. Don't hold you breath this time, as Disgaea 5 will not be leaping onto PS Vita — not now and possibly not ever.
In an interview with Japan's Dengeki PlayStation magazine, Nippon Ichi president Sohei Niikawa explained that a Vita port would require too many sacrifices, and that if you really want to play Disgaea 5 on a Vita, you will do it via Remote Play:
[W]e are developing the game with PlayStation 4 specs, so to be honest, it's impossible to port the game to the PlayStation Vita. Porting the game without erasing a lot of features and cutting down the amount of assets would be very difficult, and of course, we do not wish to do that. I think there are people waiting for a "Return" version with all of the contents [and DLC] included, but I'm sorry, that will not happen this time. (laughs) If we were to port the game to a portable system, fans would probably have to wait for the next portable system after the Vita, but I haven't heard anything about this [system], so that would be far in the future.
This makes sense, as the four previous games were ported to machines that were comparable in power with the main console: 1 and 2 for PS2 went to PSP, while 3 and 4 for PS3 went to PS Vita. Any port of 5 will obviously have to wait until a new Sony portable comparable to PS4 emerges (although considering the current state of the Vita, I don't see Sony releasing a follow-up).
I still don't get why Disgaea games need so much power. The first game was ported to the orginal DS, and the only thing that was sacrificed was a bunch of voiced dialog due to the limited space on DS game cards. This in not a hardware-intensive series by any stretch. I'm not saying that Disgaea 5 ought to be able to run on, say, an Atari Jaguar, but I'm certain it could be reworked to run on a Vita without any significant degradation.
Anyway, Disgaea 5 lands on PS4 in Fall 2015.
