Kingdom Hearts 4 Hits Late 2027 - Donald and Goofy Playable
Kingdom Hearts 4 finally has a release window, and Square Enix backed it up with a proper gameplay trailer, a Pixar world and three new playable characters.
The reveal happened at D23, Disney's big fan convention, and it landed with more substance than the teasers we have been fed since 2022. Kingdom Hearts 4 is out in late 2027 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC. That is eight years after Kingdom Hearts III, right around the series' 25th anniversary in the West.
Sora goes to the Land of the Dead
The first brand new Disney world comes from Pixar's Coco. The trailer opens in the Land of the Dead, where Héctor explains the Final Death, the one that catches up with anyone the living have stopped remembering. Sora shows up in skull face paint for Día de los Muertos, picks up a Coco-themed Keyblade and fights off a wave of Heartless alongside Miguel and Héctor. He also has a phone now, which I did not have on my list.
Donald, Goofy and a papercraft Mickey
Here is the part that made me sit up. For the first time in a mainline entry, Donald and Goofy are playable, so healing finally becomes my problem instead of the AI's hobby. In the footage they go looking for Sora on their own, first among the dead, then around Quadratum, the realistic Tokyo-like city where the new arc is set.
King Mickey gets something else entirely. He jumps into a book, lands in a paper world and starts folding origami copies of himself. Co-director Tai Yasue says "you could create paper-thin Mickeys, giant Mickeys, a tiny Mickey, box Mickeys", with the thin one slipping through cracks in walls and a thrown Mickey turning into a paper plane. He calls the puzzle design "very different from Sora's adventure". Paper Mario in a Kingdom Hearts game? Sold.
No delay, plus an anime
Yasue was blunt about the date. Development is smooth and 2027 is "not like an 80 percent thing [or] 90 percent, it's a 100 percent thing". Tetsuya Nomura went further, saying he had seen people online predicting a slip and wanted to "set the record straight, that is not happening". Two years out, that is a bold thing to say into a microphone.
Disney also announced an animated Kingdom Hearts series for Disney+ and Disney Channel, telling an original story rather than retelling the games, with Nomura and Square Enix involved in the writing. No cast, no episode count, no date yet.
Two years is plenty of time to catch up. The last game still holds up, and without it half of what happens in Quadratum will fly straight past you.
Do you buy late 2027, or are you already pencilling in a delay? Let us know in the comments.