On the small screen

After months of lobbying from rabid fans, Eastasiasoft has announced that its excellent SRPG Rainbow Moon is heading to the PlayStation Vita. The studio was apparently inundated with requests to port the title following the successful release of the PS3 game, giving the developer the incentive it needed to commit to the handheld version.

“The final decision to bring Rainbow Moon to Vita was made because of the game’s success on the PlayStation 3 and really strong user feedback. During the last couple of months we have received hundreds of requests, which ultimately influenced our decision,” Eastasiasoft’s Nils Ngai told IGN.

The Vita release will be a direct port, but the studio is considering taking advantage of features such as cross save.

“Transferring your save between the PS3 and the Vita is an awesome feature and it’s a perfect fit for content heavy games like Rainbow Moon,” he added. “Having said that we just recently started development and at the moment we are only focusing on the game’s port, which is actually a lot more work than most people might assume.”

As such, one thing Rainbow Moon won’t support is cross buy – meaning if you’ve already bought the game, you’re going to have to pay again for the Vita version.

“I know there are a few mainly first party releases that can afford to bundle both games together in one release but unfortunately this won’t be possible for us. Because we aren’t using any third party engine or framework that was already designed to work on both platforms, we estimate that it will take us roughly nine months to port Rainbow Moon to the Vita, which is a very substantial amount of time,” he explained.

“Although we can’t afford to do a completely free download for all buyers of the PS3 game, we are definitively looking into discounted options for customers that wish to purchase both release versions at the same time. We won’t be charging double the price if you want to buy both releases at the same time.”

Still, this is pretty big news, huh? Let us know if you’re excited in the comments section below.

[source au.ign.com]