The PSP remasters Sony launched last year are, like the Vita, a promising idea to solve one of the biggest issue faced by Japanese developers: Japanese players like their game portables, whereas in the West, home console games sell much better than their DS or PSP counterpart. In the last 10 months, some, although not much, of the biggest PSP hits have already been remastered (The two God of War, Metal Gear Peace Walker, Monster Hunter 3rd) and the next logical step would be to extend this idea to Square Enix PSP blockbusters: Crisis Core and Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep.
In the meantime, one of the PSP biggest hit is still being silently localized: Final Fantasy Type-0. With no information about it at E3 (Square is starting to be very secretive about everything…), I suspect that the reason why we don't hear about Type-0 is because it's going to be released in the West as a HD title.
Let me explain why this is not (only) wishful thinking.
First, PSP remasters (like HD remasters in general) are not that expensive to make. Sony even provided a software for developers to automatize most of the process. Of course, one can expect a few legal issues if Square intends to have a 360 version but, when you look at Final Fantasy sales on all HD platforms (especially the last title, XIII-2, sales) it is not clear if this is worth the tedium.
Second, while HD remasters have never sold in very impressive numbers, I'm pretty sure this is only due to the fact that older titles benefit from less hype (just like all ports). As you may know, I've been analyzing JRPGs sales data for a while now : the hype of a fresh, new HD Final Fantasy is still hard to beat sales-wise especially if you consider how much of Final Fantasy sales are Day one sales. What I mean is that the rumored Crisis Core remaster, while probably as expensive to make as the Type-0 remaster (or not way less expensive), would without any doubt in my mind sell less than 25% of a Type-0 remaster.
The only risk for Square is to have some of the PSP version (if this one is going west) cannibalized by the HD version, but if you take a title like Dissidia, 60% of the PSP sales are already in Japan/Asia (whereas for Final Fantasy XIII it's only 28% if I remember correctly) . As I see it, I'd expect a PSP only version of Type-0 to sell about as much as Dissidia in the West (a little less than a million copies), maybe more since it's a true RPG, but a HD version could easily double that (and charge a little more – not too much thought). My prediction (I'm playing Michael Patcher here,we'll see if I'm right) is that the PSP sales would not suffer more than 50% of the sales, making the HD-ification a "must" in business terms – and not much of a gamble anyway. Plus, Japanese love their international versions: give 'em an international HD version!
Finally, Square doesn't have any big HD announcement for the West in 2012 from their Japan studios. Versus XIII may be shown at TGS, we still have no news of the X remake. Type-0 HD could "fit" in their big name release for the fiscal year.