Square Enix shared a huge update for Kingdom Hearts 4.
They shared this message on their official Kingdom Hearts Twitter account:
To our Kingdom Hearts community,
We’re currently working hard on Kingdom Hearts IV and will continue pouring ourselves into the game’s development. We’re dedicated to making this an experience that lives up to your expectations!
We’ve seen how excited you are, and we are truly grateful from the bottom of our hearts. 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.
Alongside this, they shared new pictures from the game in progress. One particular screenshot is definitely grabbing a lot of attention, because it shows that Mickey Mouse himself will finally be playable.
While Mickey’s position in the franchise has been the source of speculation for years, the developers did share the elements of the story in interviews. For those who don’t know, Square Enix did want Mickey Mouse to become the main character for Kingdom Hearts, while Disney was pushing to make it Donald Duck. Designer Tetsuya Nomura proposed Sora, an original human character, to be the protagonist on his own, and all parties accepted this as a compromise.
Mickey has been playable in subsequent Kingdom Hearts games, but mostly in a limited role. The fact that none of these screenshots show Donald or Goofy hint that they may be taking a backseat to Mickey playing a bigger role in this game. For those who don’t know, in this franchise Mickey is the king of Disney Castle and a Keyblade Wielder, just like Sora. In this role, he has been fighting to protect the worlds from the Heartless, but for most of the franchise he has been a supporting character, driving the plot, but whose story was out of the player’s purview.
Square Enix definitely needed to share this update. While Kingdom Hearts 4 started development in 2020, and they took too long to share updates on the franchise in favor of other games. Square Enix also just cancelled mobile augmented reality game Kingdom Hearts Missing Link, so fans would understandably be agitated about where the game was going.
Disney is apparently taking a more direct role in Kingdom Hearts, who surprisingly turned out to be the full owners of the IP. Rumors of a Kingdom Hearts movie has been going around for some time now, and it does seem like Disney could use some new IP for their film and animation business. The game’s delay may be related to production of this rumored movie, but it remains to be seen if this will turn out to be true, and if Disney and Square Enix made the right choices for these projects.
