Mickey Mouse is now capable of folding himself flat like a sheet of paper.
No, that isn’t a joke. At the Kingdom Hearts D23 panel, co-director Tai Yasue said Mickey is getting an entire world to himself, one constructed around what he described as a “puzzle-based game design,” in which players shift an origami Mickey between large, small and paper-thin forms. Anyone who has wandered the exploration stretches of a Paper Mario title will recognize the template immediately.
Details like that tend to surface only once a studio moves past teasing and starts actually explaining. And this panel was the deepest look at Kingdom Hearts 4 we’ve had.
Four minutes of trailer instead of the usual drip
Its main attraction was a four-minute extended version of the trailer that had premiered the day before. The longer cut lingered on cutscenes set in Coco’s world and on Sora’s clash with the new take on the Heartless in Quadratum, and it added a stretch of gameplay.
Tetsuya Nomura opened the panel alongside Yasue, a small surprise in itself given that his appearance hadn’t been confirmed in advance. The pair took questions on the franchise’s history and, more usefully, on how the team decides which Disney movies to adapt.
Sora won’t always be the one you control
The extended footage hints at segments where someone other than Sora is in your hands. Donald and Goofy travel to Coco’s world and take on enemies by themselves. Mickey handles the platforming inside his origami world.
Sora is still playable, and the fights retain the action-RPG combat the series built its name on. His party, though, has grown. One brief moment in the trailer puts Hector and Miguel from Coco at his side rather than the usual duo. The same footage also shows off new traversal actions he’s picked up.
Nomura dangled one more thing without ever naming it: Kingdom Hearts 4 realizes a still-unrevealed idea the team has held since Kingdom Hearts 3 was in development. He left it at that.
Osment and Gallagher performed the Kingdom Hearts 2 scene live
Haley Joel Osment (Sora) and David Gallagher (Riku) came on stage to talk about voicing the franchise. Miyu Irino, Sora’s Japanese voice actor, shared his own memories in a video.
The two then performed the final scene from Kingdom Hearts 2 together — the first time they’ve voiced a Kingdom Hearts scene together in person.
A 2027 window, reaffirmed out loud
Square Enix first teased Kingdom Hearts 4 back in 2022, then said close to nothing until earlier this year. The game closed out June’s Nintendo Direct before becoming the gaming centerpiece of Disney’s D23 showcase on Friday night, where both the 2027 release window and the Coco world surfaced.
It’s headed to Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows PC and Xbox Series X sometime in late 2027. Yasue and Nomura reaffirmed that window during the panel and committed to it, which is a sentence worth reading twice if you’ve followed this series for any length of time.
A Kingdom Hearts anime is also in the works for Disney Plus. No release window. Just the fact of it, sitting there.