It’s been four long years since Kingdom Hearts 4 was announced during the franchise’s 20th anniversary livestream with a gameplay trailer. While Square Enix’s other epic RPG Final Fantasy 7 Revelation stole the show at Summer Game Fest last week and Kingdom Hearts was totally absent, one of the biggest surprises to come out of Tuesday’s Nintendo Direct livestream was a new KH4 gameplay trailer.
Like the 2022 trailer, the new footage mostly focuses on Sora’s battle with a giant Darkside Heartless inside the realistic-looking world of Quadratum that seems to be modeled after Shibuya. As it opens, a hooded female figure wearing Organization 13 robes stands atop a building, offering narration about the nature of this world, which exists totally separate from other worlds in the series.
“The structure of this world is incredibly complex,” she says. “At first, there were no manifestations of what we know as Light and Darkness. But our arrival here brought those concepts with us — the Darkness given physical form only after we defined it.”
The trailer mostly focuses on Sora’s cinematic battle against the Darkside, as he leaps off cars and buildings using some kind of new chain-like ability associated with his Keyblade. Unsurprisingly, his goal is to protect civilians in danger. Then we see flashes of various characters, new and returning, including an interesting moment where Young Xehanort appears to shield Sora from the rain with an umbrella (which seems to have a connection to a cryptic teaser image posted to X in March).
Then we see Sora in actual combat during both the day and night, fighting against new types of enemies that seem to be Heartless. In one epic moment, Sora is able to use his Keyblade to open a doorway that summons a swarm of golden Keyblades that he rides to damage enemies. There are also glimpses of in-game combat against the Darkside, rather than cutscene moments. In the final shot, Sora deflects a direct blow from the enemy to protect a pair of civilians directly in its path.
While the trailer offers no hints about a potential release date, it does confirm that KH4 will arrive across all platforms at launch, including the Nintendo Switch 2. Compared to the previous footage shown, the graphics seem vastly improved and far less cartoonish than what the series has previously been known for.
