After years of near-silence, Kingdom Hearts 4 finally has a release window. Square Enix and Disney used D23 2026 to lock it in for late 2027, and to spring something the numbered games have never done: Donald and Goofy, playable on their own, right there in the main story.
It landed in two waves. A trailer at the Disney Entertainment Showcase on August 14 closed on a plain “Late 2027” card, and the next day’s “Deep Dive into Kingdom Hearts” panel backed it up with an extended four-minute cut that handed the controller to Donald, Goofy, and King Mickey. The same run of announcements named Disney and Pixar’s Coco as the game’s first Disney world and revealed a Kingdom Hearts anime bound for Disney Channel and Disney+.
There’s still no exact date, but late 2027 is the firmest timing the game’s had since it was announced back in April 2022, and it pushes the gap between mainline entries to nearly nine years. Kingdom Hearts 3 arrived in early 2019. That 2022 reveal did flash a quick look at Sora in a fight, but the game went dark soon after. Square Enix broke the quiet with a run of screenshots in May 2025, and a proper gameplay trailer didn’t turn up until 2026.
Every platform, including Switch 2
KH4 is coming to Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC across Steam, the Epic Games Store, and the Microsoft Store (Xbox on PC). Switch 2 is the line worth underlining: a mainline Kingdom Hearts on a Nintendo home console day one is something the series, long a PlayStation staple, just hasn’t done.
Donald and Goofy get the controller
For every numbered game so far, Donald and Goofy have been the AI over Sora’s shoulder, handy in a fight but never yours to actually steer through the story. (They were technically playable once, but only in the Mission Mode of the 2009 DS game 358/2 Days, never in a main campaign.) That’s what changes here. The extended trailer showed both of them playable in their own stretches, off hunting for a missing Sora while he’s stranded elsewhere.
Going by the footage, Goofy swings his shield and Donald leans on magic, and the two can chain abilities together mid-fight, one combo having Donald fire off spells from atop Goofy’s shield. How deep it runs is still a question mark: no word yet on whether they’ll get customizable skills or a fixed loadout.
Mickey’s storybook segment is the real wrinkle
Mickey’s playable too. He’s been controllable before, in those brief revival moments in Kingdom Hearts 2 and in that same 358/2 Days Mission Mode, but KH4 does something genuinely new with him. The trailer showed him picking his way through a book-like world tucked inside Scala ad Caelum, working out how to save Sora, in a dedicated exploration segment built around puzzles rather than a quick combat cameo. And the extended cut saved one last tease for the end: a glimpse of Riku.
Coco leads the Disney worlds, and an anime’s on the way
Coco is the first confirmed Disney world in Kingdom Hearts 4. Beyond the game itself, Square Enix and Disney announced a Kingdom Hearts anime for Disney Channel and Disney+, though there’s no date on it and it’s listed only as coming soon.
Will it actually hit 2027?
Tetsuya Nomura showed up as a surprise guest, and the team used the moment to hammer home how sure they are of the schedule. Nomura took the delay chatter head-on, telling fans a slip past the window simply isn’t happening, while co-director Tai Yasue said he could “confidently say and promise” the game lands in 2027.
It’s worth keeping some perspective, though. Kingdom Hearts 3 sailed past its original 2018 date before finally showing up in 2019, so the series’ record on release promises is spotty. Even so, after years of fans squinting at cryptic teases, a late-2027 window is the clearest sign yet that this one’s nearly here.