New Kingdom Hearts 4 Screenshots Confirm Playable Mickey

After canceling Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link, Square Enix has released some new screenshots of Kingdom Hearts IV to give fans proof of life. The company has been pretty quiet about the fourth entry in its Disney/Final Fantasy crossover RPG series since announcing it in 2022, and if you’ve got to give folks bad news and tell them a game in the franchise has been canceled, it’s probably a good idea to reassure them that the main course is still coming. As such, Square Enix released seven new images from the game, and they…don’t tell us much.

The most notable screenshot here—and yeah, it’s very low-res—is the one in which the player is controlling Mickey Mouse. Fans are split on where the Keyblade-wielding mascot actually is in this image. It doesn’t appear to be a Disney world (though I initially thought it could be Belle’s library in Beauty and the Beast), so it could be one of several original worlds in the series, such as Hallow Bastion or Scala Ad Caelum. Mickey has only been playable in a couple of Kingdom Hearts games, and even then, it was only in specific circumstances like boss fights. That one aside, these are mostly from the section of the game we’ve already seen.

To our Kingdom Hearts community,

We’re currently working hard on Kingdom Hearts IV and will continue pouring ourselves into the game’s development. We’re dedicated to making this an experience that lives up to your expectations!

We’ve seen how excited you are, and we are truly grateful from the bottom of our hearts. We are equally excited and can’t wait to share more about Kingdom Hearts IV when the time is right. Until then, we appreciate your patience.

Thank you for your continued support.

The “when the time is right” in the social post sure makes it sound like we’re a long way away from another trailer. Even so, it’s not like Kingdom Hearts fans have had nothing since Kingdom Hearts III’s launch in 2019. Both Kingdom Hearts Dark Road and Melody of Memory dropped the following year, and KH3 got an extended epilogue DLC about 11 months after the original game was released. The series also finally made its way to Steam last year.