What do we know about Kingdom Hearts IV?
Kingdom Hearts IV was announced at the 20th anniversary event on April 10, 2022, with a trailer that reset the series’ visual terms: Sora wakes in Quadratum, a realistic city modeled on Tokyo’s Shibuya and Minami-Aoyama districts, where he has been living for a week in an apartment that serves as his base. Quadratum is the game’s hub, a world its inhabitants consider real and Sora’s world a fiction, and the story it opens is a new saga, the Lost Master arc. Strelitzia, a wielder from the Union χ era, appears at Sora’s door; Donald and Goofy, in the trailer’s coda, search for him from somewhere much darker.
The production facts are few and firm. The reveal trailer was rendered in Unreal Engine 4; full production moved to Unreal Engine 5, as Nomura confirmed at the announcement. Sora’s realistic redesign is Quadratum-only, by Nomura’s own explanation: elsewhere, he keeps his established look. No platforms and no release window have ever been announced.
The record since is a study in patience. After three silent years and the cancellation of Missing-Link, Square Enix published a collage of new screenshots on May 14–15, 2025, with a message saying the team is “working hard on Kingdom Hearts IV” and will share more “when the time is right.” The screenshots repay study: Sora fighting Heartless in Quadratum’s streets, a playable King Mickey segment in a Scala ad Caelum library, command menus that change design from world to world, and a “Build” command in Sora’s menu, the visible edge of the “Scrap and Build” system. Nomura has since said development is progressing on schedule. The trailer’s sharpest detail remains its smallest: in a forest shot, a mechanical foot that looks unmistakably like an AT-ST, the closest the series has come to acknowledging a galaxy far, far away.
