Mickey Mouse can now fold himself into a sheet of paper.
That’s not a bit. During the Kingdom Hearts D23 panel, co-director Tai Yasue explained that Mickey gets a world of his own built around what he called a “puzzle-based game design,” where players transform into large, small and paper-thin versions of an origami Mickey. If you’ve played the exploratory stretches of a Paper Mario game, you already know the shape of this.
It’s the kind of detail that only shows up when a studio stops teasing and starts explaining. And the panel was the most extensive look at Kingdom Hearts 4 we’ve gotten.
Four minutes of trailer instead of the usual drip
The centerpiece was a four-minute extended cut of the trailer that debuted the day before. It ran longer on the cutscenes from Coco’s world and on Sora’s fight against the new version of the Heartless in Quadratum, plus a stretch of gameplay.
Tetsuya Nomura opened the panel alongside Yasue, which counts as its own small surprise since his appearance wasn’t confirmed beforehand. The two fielded questions about the history of the franchise and, more usefully, how the team decides which Disney movies to adapt.
You won’t always be playing as Sora
The extended trailer teases segments where Sora isn’t the one in your hands. Donald and Goofy visit Coco’s world and fight enemies on their own. Mickey handles the platforming in his origami world.
Sora is still playable, and the fights keep the action-RPG combat the series built its name on. But his party has widened. The trailer briefly shows him fighting alongside Hector and Miguel from Coco rather than the usual duo. He’s picked up new traversal actions too, shown off in the same footage.
Nomura also dangled something he wouldn’t name: Kingdom Hearts 4 realizes a still-unrevealed idea the team has had since Kingdom Hearts 3 was in development. He left it there.
Osment and Gallagher did the Kingdom Hearts 2 scene live
Haley Joel Osment (Sora) and David Gallagher (Riku) came on stage to talk about voicing the franchise. Sora’s Japanese voice actor, Miyu Irino, shared his own memories in a video.
Then Osment and Gallagher performed the final scene from Kingdom Hearts 2 together. It was 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 and then said close to nothing until earlier this year. The game closed out June’s Nintendo Direct and became the gaming centerpiece of Disney’s D23 showcase on Friday night, which is where the 2027 release window and the Coco world both surfaced.
It’s coming 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.
There’s also a Kingdom Hearts anime in the works for Disney Plus. No release window. Just the fact of it, sitting there.
