Kingdom Hearts IV

About

Kingdom Hearts IV is the upcoming mainline title in the Kingdom Hearts video game series developed by Square Enix. Continuing on with the plot from the previous entries in the series, such as Kingdom Hearts III, the RPG features the main character Sora and a surrounding environment that is more photorealistic than the series' previous cartoonish style. The first trailer was released in mid-April 2022, with a release date TBD sometime between 2023 and 2024.

History

On April 10th, 2022, Square Enix held a press event to celebrate the Kingdom Hearts series being around for over 20 years. During this event, future releases were shown, with two being mobile games and the last being Kingdom Hearts IV, with no word on the release date or consoles it will release on. The story appears to pick back up where it previously left off, which is with Sora in a new world that looks to be a realistic take on Japan. The trailer was uploaded to YouTube via GameSpot's channel^[1] that same day, where it gained over 475,000 views in less than 24 hours (shown below).

Online Presence

Immediately after the trailer's release on April 10th, as with previous Kingdom Hearts media, it generated significant discussion and coverage online full of reactions and speculations. Within the fanbase, there were two major discussions that followed the trailer. The first one had to do with Sora's new style. As with every game in the series, his outfit has slightly changed, but this time his iconic choice of always wearing oversized shoes was absent, with a very basic set of running shoes spotted on the character. This led to a wave of memes memorializing the iconic shoes, such as the one tweeted out by @OtakuRockU^[2] on April 11th, 2022 (shown below).

The next discussion comes from a scene that starts around the 30-second mark of the trailer — the forest environment. While some think that the forest scene may be a different world, as in possibly connected to Final Fantasy XV, many theorized that the specific frame at the 34-second mark actually shows that Star Wars will be making an appearance in the game series. The evidence for this was posted by Twitter users @dallin1016^[3] and @demo_sphere^[4] on April 10th, 2022, with both pointing to the background locations from the forest scene and showing how it relates to Endor from Star Wars (shown below, left and right).

Various Memes

Search Interest

External References