After four years of near-silence, Kingdom Hearts IV finally has a release window — and a first Disney world that nobody had on their bingo card. At D23’s Disney Entertainment Showcase, Square Enix and Disney confirmed the game launches in late 2027, and handed Sora a Keyblade shaped like a guitar in the Land of the Dead from Pixar’s Coco.
The trailer went up on Pixar’s own YouTube channel rather than Square Enix’s, which tells you how much Disney wants this crossover front and centre. It is the first Pixar world ever confirmed for a mainline Kingdom Hearts game.
Pixar’s Coco is the first Kingdom Hearts IV world
The roughly 90-second trailer opens inside Coco‘s story rather than beside it. Papá Héctor explains the Final Death — what happens to the dead once the living stop remembering them — before Miguel steps up to a microphone and performs for a crowd. Then the Heartless arrive, and Sora drops in wearing the same calavera face paint as everyone else in the plaza.
That is a meaningful change in how these worlds are built. Kingdom Hearts has spent two decades dropping Sora into Disney films alongside their plots; here he is inside the story beats, in costume, fighting through a sequence the movie’s own characters are living. His Keyblade even reshapes into a skull-fronted guitar to match — the same instrument that drives Coco‘s plot.
Still from Pixar’s official KINGDOM HEARTS IV D23 2026 Showcase trailer.
The other detail worth flagging: neither Donald nor Goofy appears anywhere in the Coco footage. Sora fights alongside Héctor instead, which lines up with where the story left off.
Kingdom Hearts IV release window: late 2027, on almost everything
Square Enix pinned the game to late 2027 across PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC via Steam, the Epic Games Store and Xbox on PC. The Steam store page is already live and wishlistable in Singapore, listing Square Enix as both developer and publisher with a 2027 window.
That platform spread is the real break from series tradition. Kingdom Hearts has been PlayStation-first since 2002, with Nintendo getting the handheld spin-offs and, eventually, cloud versions of the mainline games on Switch. Kingdom Hearts IV is the first numbered entry launching natively on a Nintendo home console on day one — Switch 2 sitting in the same launch bracket as PS5 would have been unthinkable a console generation ago. Square Enix Asia put out its own cut of the platform teaser back in June:
One caveat worth keeping in mind: this franchise has a long record of slipping. A “late 2027” window announced in mid-2026 leaves a lot of runway, and Square Enix has not committed to a date.
Image courtesy of Square Enix.
Donald, Goofy and the search for Sora
The trailer also checked in on the rescue party. King Mickey, Donald and Goofy are still hunting for Sora after the events of Kingdom Hearts III, and the footage shows them in the Underworld putting the question to Hades — who confirms Sora is not among his dead.
Image courtesy of Square Enix.
Strelitzia and Sigurd from Kingdom Hearts Union χ were also confirmed to return, which will matter enormously to anyone who has been tracking the Lost Master arc since the mobile game shut down.
Quadratum, the Tokyo that isn’t
The game’s hub is still Quadratum, the photoreal city Square Enix’s Osaka team modelled on Tokyo — a fictionalised Shibuya and Minami-Aoyama, with Sora keeping an apartment there as an early-game base. It is the most grounded setting the series has ever used, and it is where Sora wakes up after Kingdom Hearts III, unable to get home.
Still from Pixar’s official KINGDOM HEARTS IV D23 2026 Showcase trailer.
Tetsuya Nomura and Tai Yasue are directing, with Yoko Shimomura returning to score. Haley Joel Osment and David Gallagher are back as Sora and Riku.
Image courtesy of Square Enix.
Kingdom Hearts is becoming an animated series too
The second announcement out of D23 was a Kingdom Hearts anime series, greenlit for Disney+ and Disney Channel, made with Nomura and the Square Enix creative team. It will not retell the games — Disney is describing it as a new story inside the same universe, with an original lead rather than Sora.
Speaking in Disney’s announcement, as carried by Nerdist, Disney Kids & Family president Ayo Davis said the show would be “unmistakably ‘Kingdom Hearts'” while giving fans “a whole new way to experience the world they love”. No premiere window, studio or staff beyond Nomura’s involvement has been named.
For Singapore, only half of that distribution matters: Disney Channel no longer exists here. It went dark on local pay-TV in June 2020 and the wider Southeast Asian feed shut down in October 2021, with everything folded into Disney+, which launched in Singapore in February 2021. So when this series arrives, Disney+ is where SG viewers will find it — assuming it carries the same rights into this region, which has not been confirmed either way yet.
The 25th anniversary panel airs Sunday morning, Singapore time
There is more coming almost immediately. D23’s DEEP DIVE into KINGDOM HEARTS panel — an hour marking the series’ 25th anniversary in 2027 — runs at 4.30pm Pacific on 15 August, which is 7.30am on Sunday 16 August in Singapore. Kingdom Hearts IV co-director Tai Yasue is on the panel alongside Osment, Gallagher, Disney & Pixar Games’ Nana Gadd and Disney Character Voices’ Renée Johnson.
It streams on the official Kingdom Hearts and Disney YouTube channels plus The Game Awards’ YouTube and Twitch. The catch, per Square Enix: there is no VOD afterwards. If you want to see it, you are setting an alarm for a Sunday morning.
Catching up before 2027
Late 2027 is a long wait, and the back catalogue is unusually cheap right now. At the time of writing, the Singapore Steam store has Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5+2.5 ReMIX at S$19.23 (down from S$64.10), and both Kingdom Hearts III + Re Mind and HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue at S$24.03 (down from S$80.10) — all 70% off. That is roughly S$67 for the whole run-up to Kingdom Hearts IV, which is a far friendlier entry point than the series’ reputation for convoluted spin-offs suggests.
We will have more as the D23 panel airs. In the meantime, there is plenty more in game news and manga and anime on the blog.