New Kingdom Hearts 4 teaser: Information and theories on the lore

Four years. Four extraordinarily long years since the day when, all around the world, Kingdom Hearts fans nearly died of a heart attack. I had to take five (more like twenty) minutes off from work to cry my eyes out and put myself together, since I nearly fainted with the release of the first Kingdom Hearts 4 teaser, the one that only showed us Sora waking up on a mysterious couch, within a mysterious city.

From back then to today, we’ve had very few news; we found out that the mystery city is Quadratum, a world which exists in a reality completely separate from the worlds we’ve gotten to know throughout the saga, and that it’s a replica of the real-life Shibuya, in Japan, but nothing worth mentioning beyond that.

It turned into a social media meme: Every single time there was a panel, showing, GameFest, State of Play, event, Fanfest, every gaming news-related situation you can imagine, there’d be at least one deluded fan categorically stating that “This time they’ll release it for sure!!”. And, during these four years, they never did. There were many people already losing all hope when, all of a sudden, in the middle of what seemed like just a regular Nintendo Direct, without any hopes: A light at the end of the tunnel, and it wasn’t a train, but a trailer.

So, do we have a release date? No. New lore? Also no. Do we have any Disney worlds revealed? Not exactly. Any worlds other than Quadratum revealed? … yeah, technically not. But we do have many mysterious appearances, associations with many aspects of the saga and many, many theories and renewed hope in our hearts.

Characters

On top of our dear protagonist, Sora, a few other characters show up in this teaser, some already familiar to us, some familiar only to those who played all - and I mean all - of the previous games. And other, as it couldn’t not be when it comes to Kingdom Hearts, shrouded in mysteries and black coats. Let’s get to them:

Strelitzia

Lauriam’s younger sister (Lauriam being Marluxia’s Somebody), who showed up for the first time in the mobile title Kingdom Hearts Union Cross and was killed by the Darkness in that same game, isn’t really a new face, since she’d already appeared back in 2022 in the reveal teaser.

Strelitzia is the one who “welcomes” Sora when he wakes up in the Quadratum apartment, and even though nothing has been exactly revealed about her and her presence there just yet, it’s almost certain that she’s there due to Quadratum’s nature, about which we’ll talk about more a few topics below. It’s quite possible that we’ll meet her soon after the beginning of the game.

Sigurd

There’s a whole discussion on the internet about who exactly is this character, since Sigurd’s also from the same mobile game as Strelitzia, in which the graphics are very different and quite simplified, and in it his face and hair aren’t shown to us, being blacked out. He plays an important role in Union Cross, being responsible for welcoming Brain into Scala Ad Caelum and introducing him to the new world, but we still don’t have any idea about what he’s doing there, or even if he’ll be fighting by our side or against us.

But despite the few opposing opinions, the designs are close enough for the overwhelming majority of the fandom to have already bet all of their munny in Sigurd.

Noct- I mean, Yozor- I mean, Vali!

Another live service mobile game that’s already shut off their servers and you can’t play anymore (it was “unified” with Union Cross on the last update, but many still count it as a separate game), and another character from this game showing up on the teaser! This time, from Union Cross - Dark Road, a game which told the story of Xehanort in his youth, and his trajectory studying to become a Keyblade Master. Vali is one of Xehanort’s upperclassmen, has a single line in the entire game and dies at the hands of the antagonist Baldr, alongside nearly everyone else. Apparently, he’s back!

Luxord

Finally, a very familiar face! We already imagined that Luxord would play an important role in Quadratum, since he’s shown up before, as Yozora’s driver in one of the “teasers” for this arc we’ve seen before, the secret cutscene at the ending of KH3’s DLC, but now it’s confirmed! We still don’t know what he’s doing there, but it’s not hard to guess since Luxord was one of the members of Organization XIII (rest in peace) who’s still siding with the Darkness. Will we finally find out his Somebody’s name, before he turned into a Nobody?

Xehanort. Yes, again.

Did you think we weren’t gonna see the villain who names the arc that’s already finished in the KH cycle, and who died for good at the end of KH3? Surprise!

Xehanort makes a brief apparition, which references artwork released by Nomura, in his younger version, appropriately named Young Xehanort, supposedly a version of him from before the Darkness corrupted him. He shows up holding the world’s least efficient umbrella above Sora and doesn’t look, at first, like a threat. As said by Nomura himself, his arc, the Dark Seeker Saga is already over, and the focus now lies somewhere else. It’s not likely that he’ll be one of the big bad guys again, but we never know. After all’s said and done, maybe the real Kingdom Hearts are the Xehanorts we meet along the way.

Darkside

Just an honorable mention here, our favorite gigantic tutorial Heartless makes a new appearance, this time looking even more frightening and monstrous due to the realistic-style graphics. We can barely wait to fight against him to protect the city, doing impossible jumps between cars and buildings, and destroying half of the city in the process, very Marvel super heroes-like.

Story elements

We have nothing officially confirmed, shown in a way that’s beyond doubt on what’s the new game really gonna be about, just the overall theme surrounding death and the few things we’ve known from before, which you can check out in our coverage of the first teaser. But, this time, Nomura was very nice and left us many context clues for us to put the pieces together.

Quadratum

One thing Sora, Strelitzia and Vali have in common is that they’re all dead. In the 2022 teaser, Strelitzia tells Sora that Quadratum is “A world full of life”, but also that it “acts as an ‘afterworld’”, to people like her and Sora. On top of that, in the new teaser, the narrating voice tells us that there was no Darkness in that world, capital D, until the Keyblade Wielders arrived and brought those concepts with the, manifesting its existence in this plane, and likely causing the heartless invasion we see happening.

We also know that Quadratum is a kind of “other side”, a “non-world”, and that at the ending of KH3 Sora died as a result of overusing the Power of Waking. With all that, it’s safe to assume that Quadratum, beyond existing as its own world, is really an afterlife, a kind of “purgatory” where the Square Enix characters who die end up in (Disney ones go to Hades’ underworld). With so many dead characters, especially in the mobile games that look like the main basis for KH4 lore, it opens up a huge roster of possibilities as to whom we might see over there.

Donald and Goofy’s adventures in the Underworld

The only scene that shows our loyal shield-holding sidekick and the canonical strongest mage in history in all Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy games (Editor’s note: remember what Dion from FFXVI had to do to imitate a fraction of his power?), who’s somehow unable to cast a basic heal when Sora has 2HP left, shows them in a very familiar place: The Underworld!

The Olympus Coliseum is a classic, expected by fans in every Kingdom Hearts, so it’s no surprise it made a brief appearance. Hades’ blue flames are already a huge giveaway, but also, James Woods, the VA for the blue guy himself, revealed on his Twitter that he has exclusive insider information on the game, and that it’s gonna be the best one yet. For the second part, it remains to be seen, but this declaration of his direct involvement gives us a lot more certainty of where they ended up going.

Going back to Dark Road again, in it the alive characters are able to communicate with their fallen classmates in the Underworld, where Hades is able to “summon” their spirits somehow, from wherever they are. If we now know that they’re in Quadratum, evidenced by Vali being there, it’s very likely that Donald and Goofy are going there to try and talk to Sora in the same way. We could have, in this possible contact, a starting point for our new story, who knows?

New Worlds

Sadly, the teaser gave us nothing, not even a confirmed glimpse of any worlds beyond Quadratum, the Coliseum, indirectly, and one single scene where the background strongly resembles the supposed leaks of a Star Wars world, on the florest moon of Endor. However, one single detail caught fans’ eyes: A keyblade we’ve never seen before.

We know that each world has its unique keyblade, which Sora gets after completing the world, and this one doesn’t look very “Square Enix-ish” to be from an original world. It was probably altered, not to give us spoilers about the world. The keychain we can see in it is completely unrecognizable, but the shape, colors and elements immediately brought the same Disney animation to thousands of people’s heads: Moana.

On top of being a relatively recent animation, Moana was a huge success, had a second movie, and the Live Action is set to release later this year.

Another detail, the sign on a specific building in Shibuya was altered to look even more alike the same building in another Square franchise, and the image in one of the outdoors that show up in the trailer resembles a lot the style of a character we already know very well: The World Ends With You! Since this franchise had a world in Dream Drop Distance, fans have been begging for the return of Neku and his friends, so maybe our time has come? TWEWY has its entire central themes based around death as well, and we can’t forget about Neku’s last words to Sora: “See you in Shibuya”.

The Foretellers and MoM

The Foretellers and the Master of Masters are also characters from the mobile games, whose story was briefly told in the cutscene movie Kingdom Hearts χ Back Cover, included in the last few package versions of the games. The new saga in the story “cycle” revolves completely around the MoM, and the Foretellers are his apprentices and successors throughout the eras, so it’s safe to say that all of them are gonna play an important role in this game.

Characters wearing the traditional black coats “from Organization XIII” show up on more than one occasion, and something that Kingdom Hearts has always taken into account are silhouettes. Whenever they’re wearing the coats with the hood up, it’s common for the character models to be altered so that all of them have similar silhouettes, hiding the identity of the person underneath when it’s needed, while when they have the hoods down, each has its own unique silhouette in their bodies and shoulders.

In the trailer, many figures show up, each with its own specific silhouette, despite the hooded and hidden faces. Some more dedicated fans swear up and down that they recognize the shoulder posture of Xigbar, or Braig, another important piece in the last steps of the Dark Seeker Saga, which set the terrain for the new story. But, Xigbar or not, considering that there’s different dark coats in the teaser, and in the secret ending for KH3 it’s shown a reunion of almost all of the Foretelles, the chances of it being some of them or some ex-Organization XIIIs underneath the hoods, are huge.

Ava

Continuing the subject of the topic just above, Ava is one of the Foretellers, the only one not accounted for in the secret ending, and in the new teaser we get a possible answer of where she was. The figure we start off the video seeing, and who narrates it to us, is shrouded in a black coat, and some leads point strongly to it being her.

On top of having a small stature and a “feminine” body (comparing the models of every man in Organization XIII with Larxene’s the only woman, it’s possible to see that yes, the Organization coats are shaped differently in feminine bodies), the figure holds their hands over their lap in the same exact way Ava does in Back Cover cutscenes. The name of the VA who narrates the trailer hasn’t been released, but fans compared it to Ava’s japanese VA and the similarities are undeniable.

Could it just be Nomura trying to throw us off? Sure, but everything points for the leader of the Dandelions, Ava, being the mysterious narrator. There’s also a part of the fandom who believes the character to be Skuld, but that theory is more wishful thinking than anything else.

Luxord, again

There’s an interesting detail in his new design, which is a pin on his coat’s lapel. This pin has a design which very much resembles a phoenix, a symbol used frequently in many Square games, but here it could mean something more.

The Foretellers in UnionX were each a leader of a group of Keyblade Wielders, a faction, each represented by an animal. Now that the MoM has more people on his side, new factions could have been created, or we can even get a reveal of (another) secret faction! Or it could also be a symbol assigned to him by the MoM, a way to travel between the world of the “living” and the “dead”, i.e. the other KH worlds and Quadratum. Nobody knows for sure, but symbols rarely mean nothing in these games.

Kingdom Hearts Versus XIII

The oldest among us in the Final Fantasy fandom surely remember all the way back to early 2006, when a project called Final Fantasy Versus XIII was announced, as part of the Fabula Nova Crystallis, a series that would connect with the story from FFXIII and bring a new protagonist, called Noctis. Since then, a lot has changed, Versus XIII turned into Final Fantasy XV with its own separate story and FFXIII had two sequels, but Nomura never stopped dreaming.

When the DLC for KH3 came out, and fans watched the secret ending, the one with Yozora waking up in a car, the parallels were immediately drawn. That cutscene is almost a perfect 1:1 recreation of a part of a Versus XIII trailer, complete with a Noctis to call yours and a driver replaced by Luxord. Since then, comparisons keep showing up.

In addition to Noctis 2.0 and the overall “vibe” of Quadratum, which already resembles the urban fantasy from Versus, we can see some airships in the sky that many fans pointed out as being similar to ones that appear in Final Fantasy XV, attacking the protagonist. The joke among fans that Nomura is using KH4 to finally make the game that was taken away from him all the way back then is more real than ever.

The Missing Link, literally

Square Enix wouldn’t make a direct reference in the trailer to an element that only showed up in one game, which on top of being mobile only existed for a short time during a single closed beta, limited to Japan, Australia and the UK, and then cancelled afterwards, right?

Surprise!

Kingdom Hearts Missing Link was a game I was particularly very much looking forward to playing, but a few lucky people were the only ones who got the chance. Due to it being cancelled, its story was never finished and the little information we have about it is limited to what we can find on YouTube and a few sparse interviews.

Because of all that, we won’t dive deep into story and lore, since, as far as we know, it could be completely integrated into the KH4 story, or simply have a few of its elements reused and repurposed. However, there’s one of those elements that catches our attention in the trailer.

The dark feathers seen in the scene above are very similar to two things. I’m sure that many, the moment they saw the feathers, already started to hear in the back of their heads a low “Ira vehementi, Sephiroth!” but, again, it’s not very likely that this short teaser mentions a character which was never that central to the main story in the games, usually being only a secret boss and a way to move forward the Final Fantasy characters’ storyline.

So, the second one’s more interesting. In Missing Link, there were two characters named after Odin’s ravens in Norse mythology, Huginn and Muninn. They used dark feathers, identical to those in the trailer, to control Keyblade Wielders and bend them to their will. With all of the context we have, and most of all with the mobile games being the basis for KH4 lore, it’s a safe bet to guess that these feathers may be connected to them, or even that they’ll be used to the same end, by someone else.

Art style

One of the things that made many fans angry was the “realistic” art of the trailer. Everyone has less cartoonish faces compared to previous games, characters have access to modern technology such as “normal” phones from our world and clocks, and Sora has normal sized feet.

A radical change in art style, trying to keep up with the new wave of “next-gen realistic graphics” from the last few years? For the joy of many, probably not! Just like in Halloween Town the main trio changes appearances to “scarier” ones, in Pride Rock they’re all animals and in Atlantica Sora gets a dolphin tail and Donald and Goofy turn into those creepy hybrids to fit in with the world inhabitants, in Quadratum where the “art style” is based on our world, in reality, it makes sense for the character’s appearances to also change.

Since we’ve only seen Quadratum so far, there’s no way to tell for sure, but fans are crying out for the return of the size 19 shoes and cartoon faces, and probably once we leave this world, we’ll have all of that back.

One fun fact about Quadratum being “our world” is that, in one of the scenes in the trailer, the two people Sora defends from the Darkside are supposedly homages to two iconic people who are integral parts of the saga: Yoko Shimomura and Kaoru Wada, both musicians who’ve had incredibly important work in Kingdom Hearts. For now, this is just a fan theory based on previous representations of the two of them, but if it’s confirmed, it’ll be a very cool easter egg.

The main trio

The expectation for the course of the story is that, eventually, Sora, Donald and Goofy reunite, sure, but what about at the beginning? Judging by all of the interactions Sora’s had on the materials released so far, by who’s in Quadratum currently and for the series’ tendency of having main trios made up of two guys and a girl, one theory that came up is that, at least for a portion of the game, Sora could join forces and form a power trio with the only two people who don’t seem to have attacked him (yet): Strelitzia and Young Xehanort.

It’d be particularly interesting to watch the dynamics between Sora and a younger version of a villain who almost destroyed all of the worlds and caused the death of all of his friends (and also Sora’s own death, in a way), but, just like about everything else, we’ll have to wait and see.

It was four long years of waiting until we got the confirmation that this game still exists and will still be released, so we shouldn’t count our chickens before they hatch and get excited thinking that new information will follow soon. But nothing can stop us from dreaming and hoping that all of these years in complete silence were put to good use progressing the game… Or that, with the release of the last game in the Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy, our dearest Nomura goes back to focusing on Kingdom Hearts 4.

Meanwhile, leave your theories in the comments too! Thank you for reading and, with a bit of luck, see you soon, Keyblade Wielders!