Square Enix has finally ended the Kingdom Hearts 4 news drought and ever so slightly pulled the curtain back with new screenshots.
The Disneyverse-spanning RPG was announced a whopping 1,131 days ago (I've been keeping count) and aside from vague lore drops from director Tetsuya Nomura, publisher Square Enix has been relatively mute about the upcoming game.
That is, until now. Squeenix just dropped a collage of screenshots from the game, showing Sora duking it out with some Heartless in Tokyo while donning a new Keyblade, fresh renders of a brand new character called Strelitzia, a weirdly close shot of a random telephone that, knowing the series, is probably crucial to the plot, and confirmation that we'll once again be able to play as King Mickey Mouse in at least one section.
"We're currently working hard on Kingdom Hearts 4 and will continue pouring ourselves into the game's development," Square Enix writes via a new BlueSky update. "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," it continues. "We are equally excited and can't wait to share more about Kingdom Hearts 4 when the time is right. Until then, we appreciate your patience. Thank you for your continued support."
The update comes hot off the cancellation of Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link, the mobile spin-off that promised to tie in to the next full-fat mainline game, so perhaps the publisher was trying to alleviate fans' concerns about the state of the series.
And it worked! Kingdom Hearts sickos immediately mobilized to dissect every last detail in all of the screenshots. Seriously, some people have already geolocated Sora's whereabouts in Tokyo, meaning the map might be closer to its real-world counterpart than anyone was expecting. Now, can someone actually try to explain what the heck is up with that telephone?