As some readers might know, the original Solatorobo: Red the Hunter for Nintendo DS launched several years ago – pulling its players into a charming world of animal people and flying mechs. With die-hard fans eager to revisit the game on modern consoles, CyberConnect2 president Hiroshi Matsuyama stepped up to address such requests.

In a new online Q&A, Matsuyama explained some of the possible challenges that porting or remaking Solatorobo would entail today. Some chief concerns include the difficulty of adapting the game’s dual screens into one, and some uncertainty about whether such a remake would perform well today. He doesn’t completely shut down the idea, however.

You can check out his full response below (turn Closed Captions on), or read a brief transcript further down.

“Hi everyone, this is Matsuyama, President of CyberConnect2.

Alright, let’s look at today’s question: Do you think there is a possibility for a remake or porting of Solatorobo in the future?

Of course, the possibility is there. As you know, Solaroboto was a game exclusively released on Nintendo DS. You all remember, right? Nintendo DS had 2 screens. The top screen was the play screen and the bottom one a touch panel. On the operational side of things, it will be quite hard to port the game without a hardware that supports this system.

It is possible to rebuild the touch panel system of Solatorobo, and [integrate] the bottom screen into a single screen, but would call for a complete remake. I feel that this would bring its own set of difficulties.

Solatorobo was released in Japan, the US, Europe and Asia in 2010, published by Bandai Namco, but in terms of sales, it was not extraordinarily high. We sold about 100,000 copies worldwide.

Based on that, if we remastered or remade the game, how many copies can we expect to sell? How much budget should we be allocating to the development for these projected sales? If we just did a simple port and just distributed it as a downloadable version, it would lose quite a bit of the original intended experience.

I personally think that, not only for our title Solatorobo, but also for a lot of other games that were made for the Nintendo DS and 3DS, a lot of us would like to re-release, whether just a downloadable version, an HD remastered version of these games, so that our current customers could play with our past properties, but at this time, I don’t think the industry is aiming for that goal yet. If we were to remake Solatorobo, we would start over from scratch.”

Unfortunately, it sounds like we won’t see such a remake anytime soon. At the very least, fans can still look forward to the upcoming Fuga: Memories of Steel – which takes place in the same universe as Solatorobo.