Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Gaming
  3. News

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

You aren’t dreaming, Kingdom Hearts 4 is actually happening

Add as a preferred source on Google

The Kingdom Hearts 20th Anniversary Showcase aired on April 10 and included announcements for three new games in the franchise. Two mobile games, Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link and Kingdom Hearts Dark Road were revealed, along with the next mainline entry in the franchise, Kingdom Hearts 4.

Kingdom Hearts 4 Reveal Trailer

As should be expected of anything Kingdom Hearts, Kingdom Hearts 4‘s trailer is incredibly vague. Players will still fill the now-normal-sized shoes of Sora, the franchise’s longtime protagonist, as he continues his fight against Organization XIII. The trailer itself shows off Quadratum, one of the game’s worlds. Unlike other worlds players have visited throughout the franchise though, Quadratum is a photorealistic modern-day city filled with humans instead of Disney characters.

Recommended Videos

Disney’s characters will still show up in the game though, with Sora’s sidekicks, Donald and Goofy, being shown at the end of the trailer.

In the trailer itself, Sora fights what appears to be a Darkside, a massive Heartless that has appeared throughout the franchise. Along with some fancy movement techniques that let him run up walls and fling himself off poles, Sora will also seemingly have some kind of grappling hook in Kingdom Hearts 4.

Alongside Kingdom Hearts 4, Square Enix showed off Kingdom Hearts Dark Road and Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link. The former, set to launch in August, is similar to other mobile games in the franchise, sporting card-based battles and a cartoon aesthetic. Missing-Link is a departure from that norm, featuring 3D environments and fights against heartless, complete with assists from Donald and Goofy. It’s not clear who this game’s main character is or where it fits into the franchise’s overarching story, but players will be able to find out during a closed beta test that’s set to launch sometime this year.

A release window for Kingdom Hearts 4 was not sevealed.

Otto Kratky
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Otto Kratky is a freelance writer with many homes. You can find his work at Digital Trends, GameSpot, and Gamepur. If he's…
One of my favorite exploration games is coming to iPhone. Even an iPhone 11 can run it
No Man’s Sky might be the game that finally makes me take iPhone gaming seriously
no man's sky

There are games I play to finish, and there are games I play simply because I want to disappear somewhere else for a while, and No Man’s Sky comes in this second category. Despite its disastrous launch, Hello Games' continued support turned the game around, making it one of gaming's biggest comebacks.

Now, ten years of updates have turned Hello Games' space sandbox into one of my favorite games for pure exploration and depth. Soon, this enormous universe is going to live on something as mundane as the phone in your pocket. Hello Games is bringing No Man’s Sky to iPhone and iPad on October 28, and the hardware requirements are surprisingly forgiving. You'll need an iPhone 11 or newer, or a third-generation iPad Air or newer.

Read more
A PS5 homebrew update gives old PS2 discs a reason to leave the shelf
The new disc feature requires a jailbroken console, and testing is still limited
Advertisement, Poster, Machine

Old PS2 discs can now launch games on a jailbroken PS5 through a new homebrew feature. Developer Sword has added disc autoplay to PS5SX2, a PS2 emulator that copies an inserted game to storage before running it on the newer console.

The feature arrived in version 2.01 as a beta. At release, disc autoplay had been tested on just one original-model PS5. There’s a working starting point here, but results across other setups remain uncertain.

Read more
Google’s older Pixels may have just become far better retro gaming machines
Google Pixel 11 Pro Review Zenless Zone Zero

I've spent enough time trying to turn Android phones into game consoles to know that raw horsepower only gets you so far. On the Red Magic 11S Pro, I've tested console emulation alongside Android games and eventually pushed things much further by getting the PC version of Ghost of Tsushima running locally through GameHub.

While all of this was possible thanks to powerful Snapdragon hardware, there's another reason Qualcomm-equipped Android devices have traditionally been particularly attractive to emulator enthusiasts. Adreno, the GPU that powers these devices, have access to custom graphics drivers such as Turnip. So phones using ARM's Mali GPUs haven't had the same advantage. But now, ARMSX2 2.8.3 is finally changing that.

Read more