The fashion king of Square Enix, Tetsuya Nomura seems to be at it again: Kingdom Hearts 4 was announced at a special event celebrating the series' 20th anniversary.
For those not in the know, Kingdom Hearts is a long-running JRPG series which (in)famously crosses over the worlds of Disney and Final Fantasy, while also building out its own setting and lore. The series was created by Tetsuya Nomura, character designer on several classic Final Fantasy games and director of the excellent Final Fantasy 7 Remake.
The trailer for Kingdom Hearts 4 shows series protagonist Sora waking up in a minimalist apartment in a modern city. He seems to be trapped in this world of "Quadratum" and proceeds to do battle with a shadowy giant monster. The trailer ends with Donald Duck and Goofy searching for Sora in a lightless abyss, before getting accosted by an unseen foe.
The trailer did not include a release date, and it's hard to gauge how far along in development Kingdom Hearts 4 is. The series' third entry got a similar announcement trailer in 2013 and was not released for another six years, so Kingdom Hearts fans could be in for a bit of a wait.
It's also unclear how Square Enix will handle this entry's PC release. Kingdom Hearts has been a PlayStation-centric series and Kingdom Hearts 3 did not see a PC port until just last year, releasing on the Epic Store alongside the vexingly-named series compilation Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue.
Square Enix has been pursuing more PC ports of its games in recent years, but the results have been uneven. The Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins arrived on PC in a sorry state, both suffering from limited graphics options and frustrating performance issues, and a significant stuttering issue in NieR: Automata was left unaddressed for four years after the game's release. One can hope that Kingdom Hearts 4 gets a better-performing, more timely PC port than what we've seen in the past.
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