It’s been a long road for Kingdom Hearts fans these last few years, desperately awaiting every single scrap of information that could hint at something, anything. Unfortunately, yesterday didn’t hold anything good as Square Enix announced the cancellation of the mobile game Kingdom Hearts: Missing Link. But less than twelve hours later, the company released a batch of new screenshots for Kingdom Hearts 4, reminding fans that the development team is “hard at work” on it. While the whole thing does reek of desperation to not lose face with fans, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some interesting details to uncover — especially in a series as rife with lore and secrets as Kingdom Hearts.
How Square Enix released these screenshots is a bit odd, bundling them all into one big collage instead of posting each separately. It’s a strange choice that could have been either rushed or intentional. And despite these ostensibly not showing a lot of new information, you can dig a bit deeper for some gold.
The first and most obvious detail should be the prominent shot of a playable King Mickey. That’s massive in and of itself, as Mickey has only been playable a handful of times in the series — namely in Kingdom Hearts 2 if you lost certain boss battles, and in Kingdom Hearts 3 ReMind.
We obviously don’t know how big Mickey’s role is in the game, but the fact that he’s playable is huge. On top of that, he also appears to be in some kind of library environment that looks drastically different from the locations we’ve seen in Kingdom Hearts 4 so far. It looks far more Disney-esque, and even somewhat similar to the library featured in Hollow Bastion and Radiant Garden.
The other big point to hit is how the art style, in general, has been changed and refined. While Kingdom Hearts 4 is still going for the iconic semi-realistic look, these shots look far sleeker than the trailer that we’ve seen. Interestingly, it also looks quite similar to early footage we saw of Final Fantasy Versus XIII — the canceled Tetsuya Nomura project that would eventually turn into Final Fantasy XV.
It seems more and more likely that Kingdom Hearts 4 is taking heavy inspiration from Versus XIII, and we have precedent for that. Kingdom Hearts 3’s Yozora feels heavily reminiscent of Noctis, and the secret ending of the game’s ReMind DLC is infamously a nearly shot-for-shot recreation of Versus XIII’s trailer. Users on X have even pointed out that bottom-left screenshot has framing nearly identical to some from Versus XIII, which might seem innocuous until you know about those pre-existing connections.
The other twist here is that this style is only what we’ve seen in the “real world” of Quadratum, and it might not be the game’s overall style (especially based on that Mickey shot). Kingdom Hearts has long used different graphical styles for different worlds, so it’s possible everything we’ve seen is just a Red Herring, and the style used in Quadratum.
But there are some other fascinating details. If you look at that top action screenshot, we clearly see Sora is wielding Kingdom Key, but there seems to be some kind of new ability that uses the actual keychain. Sora is grinding on what appears to be the keychain itself, indicating that not only will Keyblades have different abilities, but their keychains could as well. You’ll notice the last option on the command menu is “Build,” which we also don’t currently know about.
If you look even closer at that picture, Sora is wearing what appears to be a smartwatch on his wrist. Again, a subtle detail, but one that might implicate some kind of new gameplay mechanic or menu option for Kingdom Hearts 4. The more realistic setting of Quadratum could give him unique ways to use the watch. But it’s also worth noting that the bulkiness of the watch looks similar to the Magic Bands that are now used in Disney Theme Parks. Considering past games have used theme park attractions as combat abilities, there could be something there.
In the bottom-left screenshot, we see two lights heading toward a Heartless enemy, a shot that was used in the reveal trailer. The yellow one is clearly one of Sora’s attacks as seen in combat, but that blue color has typically corresponded to Riku — as sort of the opposite of Sora. We haven’t seen confirmation Riku will be in KH4 yet, but there’s clearly someone else helping Sora here.
The final detail, and perhaps most interesting, has to do with the random picture of a telephone in the middle of the collage. It bizarrely stands out from everything else, and the fact that it’s a rotary phone feels extremely important.
In 2010, in Japan, a garden designer named Itaru Sasaki introduced the idea of the “wind phone.” These were disconnected rotary phones that allowed people to talk with their deceased relatives — a kind of ephemeral existential idea that allowed people to grapple with grief and passed loved ones. This idea could be central to the plot of Kingdom Hearts 4, and lines up with the reveal trailer, where Strelitzia introduces Quadrutum to Sora as a kind of “afterworld.”
At the end of Kingdom Hearts 3, Sora essentially sacrifices himself to save Kairi, using the Power of Waking to bring her back — at the cost of his own body fading out of existence. While we still don’t know exactly what happened, a prevailing theory is that Quadratum is a sort of afterlife that Sora has arrived at. The phone featured in the screenshots could be a way of connecting Sora to his friends back in the “real world,” a crucial connector in a series that has always been about the “bonds” or “links” between us.
This idea could be further supported by the bottom middle screenshot, which has Sora in an underpass superimposed with what appears to be a kind of galaxy or outer space. This could be the boundaries between the real world and the afterlife thinning (or if you really want to reach it could be a hint at a Star Wars world), but it’s pure speculation right now. This is by far the screenshot that feels the most mysterious.
While these screenshots are just a small, tantalizing taste, in true Kingdom Hearts fashion, it’s easy to dissect every single detail and frame. If history has shown anything about this series, it’s that Nomura’s stories can be utterly unpredictable in where they go. But there’s a clear theme of the afterlife going on both here and in that initial reveal trailer.
Hopefully, we won’t need to wait another three years for our next look at the game.
