Now the beloved franchise is celebrating its 25th anniversary, Disney and Japanese video game publisher Square Enix have given their fans a glimpse of Kingdom Hearts 4. The firms showed an enlarged preview of the game at a Disney fan convention in Anaheim, California, offering more of a preview than clips from the next installment in the long running series of action role-playing games.
It is believed that Kingdom Hearts 4 will release in 2027 and will follow in the footsteps of the previous games, which have accumulated a huge fan base by combining Disney’s characters and worlds of Pixar and Square Enix. The current presentation was a part of a bigger ‘celebration of the series’ and provided additional details about the direction the upcoming title will take.
The teaser had been seen on Friday and the new footage followed up on that. The previous footage clocked in at about 90 seconds, but the new presentation clocked in at about 4 minutes, providing a more in-depth look at the game’s world, characters, and visuals. If you’re a franchise that has a very loyal fan base, some extra minutes of film may spark a lot of interest, as fans have been waiting for more info on the next big release.
Kingdom Hearts 4’s announcement was made several years ago, and there has been little information about its development released. The new preview is thus an important step toward creating some hype leading up to release. The presentation wasn’t just to confirm that the project is still in development, but also to give the fans something more to consider as they continue to grasp the direction of the story and gameplay.
The Kingdom Hearts series is always unique because it’s an odd mix of Disney’s well-known characters and settings, and Square Enix’s original storytelling and game design. In previous titles, players have journeyed through landscapes based on popular Disney and Pixar films and followed a storyline with an array of characters, including Sora, Donald Duck and Goofy. That formula has enabled the franchise to carve out a niche that is not a traditional Disney game or a traditional Japanese role playing game.
If there’s anything that’s particularly interesting, it’s that Pixar’s Coco is one of the characters in Kingdom Hearts 4. World opportunities for gameplay were the reason why Tetsuya Nomura, creator of the franchise, chose Coco, according to him. The move is an important one for the series. For a successful Kingdom Hearts world, it must be more than just a film clone. It also has to offer an environment, characters and ideas that can be easily adapted to make an interactive game.
There are significant opportunities to do that with Coco. The Pixar movie is known for its unique visual presentation and the depiction of the Land of the Dead, a place filled with vibrant architecture, tunes and supernatural elements. Those elements could mean Kingdom Hearts 4 has a setting that’s vastly different from that of the previous titles. Exploration, combat and storytelling might also give the creators the opportunity to reimagine familiar aspects of the film in the format of the game.
The decision of Coco is especially intriguing since Kingdom Hearts has been steadily adding newer Disney and Pixar films to the mix as the two companies’ library grows. Previous games had Disney characters and settings of popular Disney films, but later ones built worlds around the likes of Frozen, Tangled and Toy Story. If the developers were to introduce Coco into Kingdom Hearts 4 then it would take that one step further and provide them with another unique place to work with.
The upcoming clash is also coming at a crucial time for the franchise as well. The 25th anniversary is a moment to give Disney and Square Enix a chance to catch up with their loyal fans, and reintroduce the series to those who might have encountered it in newer titles. Kingdom Hearts has become one of Disney’s more commercially successful video game properties, and is one of a handful of other Disney video game franchises to have sold over $1 billion in retail copies.
It seems like the commercial performance is one of the reasons behind the high expectations for Kingdom Hearts 4. The series has evolved from an oddball cross over experiment to a big entertainment franchise for all the world. The franchise’s appeal lies not just among the standard gaming crowd as Disney characters and worlds draw in fans who aren’t typically into Japanese role-playing games.
Meanwhile, the long hiatus in Kingdom Hearts means the release of the final game will have a lot of expectations to live up to. Over the years, fans have been speculating on the game’s story, characters and worlds that it may contain. Because of the longer development period, it’s possible that Square Enix could end up with a slightly more ambitious experience, but the other side of that is that the final product will be compared against a ton of fan speculation.
