Kingdom Hearts 4 Surprises Everyone With A New Trailer
Kingdom Hearts 4 was announcced with an accompanying trailer as part of the 20th Anniversary presentation from Square Enix.
Square Enix surprised everyone during their Kingdom Hearts 20th-anniversary Livestream by announcing the fourth mainline Kingdom Hearts game, Kingdom Hearts 4, which is in active development. In addition, the gaming giant dropped a new trailer for the upcoming game, confirming the return of Sora, Donald, and Goofy for an entirely new adventure in the Lost Master Arc. You can check out the video trailer below:
The trailer for Kingdom Hearts 4 opens with Sora waking up in what appears to be the game’s iteration of Tokyo, called Quadratum. According to a report by Polygon, Square Enix refers to it as a realistic world, unlike anything ever seen before in Kingdom Hearts series. Admittedly, the trailer does display a “development footage” notice, meaning that stuff might be subject to change, but judging from what we’ve seen in the trailer, the upcoming game is likely to put the current-gen gaming hardware to sweat.
Unfortunately, apart from the reveal trailer, Square Enix didn’t reveal much detail about the upcoming Kingdom Hearts 4. As a result, we don’t know the game’s stage of development or the game’s release window, let alone a release date. The company hasn’t offered a list of supported platforms either but considering that the series is no longer a PlayStation exclusive, we can expect it to release on all platforms as its predecessor, Kingdom Hearts III — which was released on PlayStation4, Xbox One, PC, and Switch. In fact, Nintendo’s incredibly popular handheld got an entire trilogy.
With that said, Square Enix announced a separate game, Kingdom Hearts Missing Link, which is currently in development for Android and iOS devices, which features a new set of adventures set in Kingdom Hearts III world, called Scala ad Caelum, and the battle against the Heartless. The new and original story of the announced mobile game will, according to Square Enix, most tie into the story of the upcoming Kingdom Hearts 4. The mobile game doesn’t have a release date either but closed-beta testing is scheduled for this year.
Three years have passed since the release of Kingdom Hearts III, a video game that many considered the best and the worst the series has ever offered to its players. Narratively, it provided satisfying answers to some of the biggest question makers of the series, but the introduction of additional gaming elements, like the Gummi Ship mini-games, were not as inspiring to the fans. In fact, while the game was incredibly fun to the franchise’s newcomers, a good portion of the existing fandom outright quit the game at some point during progress.
Hopefully, the upcoming game will manage to win back the series’ lapsed fans and perhaps address some of the lingering incoherence within the franchise’s lore, or at least grant it some amnesty, releasing the fandom from the burden of trying to understand what’s what, and who’s who. However, with so little detail surrounding the upcoming game, we can’t be certain of what the upcoming adventure will be and how it will tie in with the overall Kingdom Hearts narrative. Luckily, Square Enix promised to reveal more when the time is right.
