Kingdom Hearts 4 officially shown off, and it looks stunning

Great news! We’ve finally gotten a new look at the latest entry in the Disney and Final Fantasy crossover series Kingdom Hearts IV, in the form of some official screenshots.

Bad news! Square Enix is assumedly only doing this because it just cancelled a different Kingdom Hearts game earlier this morning.

“We’ve seen how excited you are, and we are truly grateful from the bottom of our hearts”, Square Enix announced in a post on Bluesky, alongside the screenshots.

“We are equally excited and can’t wait to share more about Kingdom Hearts IV when the time is right. Until then, we appreciate your patience.⁣ ⁣Thank you for your continued support.”

There’s actually quite a lot to take in here, considering it’s only seven screenshots.

The game's reveal trailer dropped three years ago.

Probably the biggest reveal out of this whole thing is that, finally, we’ll be getting some gameplay segments where you actually control Mickey.

However, another pretty interesting reveal is that (as users over on the r/KingdomHearts subreddit spotted) one of the Japanese words in the first screenshot translates to “BUILD”.

There’s not a whole lot we can surmise from that, but it’s no stretch to assume that this means there will be some kind of building mechanic involved in combat.

Over on the r/KingdomHearts subreddit, fans are thrilled to finally get a look at the next mainline entry in the series… even if it comes paired with the news that Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link has officially been cancelled.

“KH Team… Very well done,” commented user Aizen0ozeXIII. “Couldn’t have been easy getting the approval to do this. Even if this was meant for a trailer, this was the right thing to do for the fans.”

“Very nice that they did this,” replied user PerseusRad. “I'm sure they would've preferred not to release anything for longer still, but perhaps they felt cancelling ML with no other news would just be very discouraging.”

As much as it’s a shame that Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link has been canned, this is a smart play on Square Enix’s behalf.

Even if these screenshots obviously show off a game that’s still a work in progress, it’s nice that they’ve taken the time to reassure the community that the mainline series is unaffected.