Kingdom Hearts fans have been very lenient with Square Enix over its almost 25-year history. They’ve purchased multiple consoles to play each important instalment, waited a literal decade and more for another numbered entry, and an important narrative entry in the franchise, Missing Link, has been cancelled. As a Kingdom Hearts fan, my patience is wearing thin.

It’s been four years. Four years since Kingdom Hearts IV was announced with a reveal trailer, and no other video or even a release window has been provided. Since Missing Link was cancelled in May 2025, we’ve got only small, vague screenshots of how KH4 is shaping up, but it’s been maddening to get nothing since.

My frustration with Square Enix and Disney began when Kingdom Hearts III was released and the marketing ahead of it. Every single world (even the final world) was spoiled, and too much of the plot was shown off in trailers before release. That emotional scene of Sora crying in sadness and pain was spoiled as his friends were taken out.

They even showed Scala ad Caelum as the final world we explore in the game. It’s crazy. Nothing was left to surprise us. You could say you could avoid the trailers, but everyone posted GIFs and talked about it on social media. You couldn’t avoid the discussion.

Additionally, when the game finally came out, it was disappointing to play. It was far too easy, the plot felt like a jumbled mess getting rushed into the last four or so hours, and the overall conclusion has left me in a somewhat depressed state about the series in general. One of my favourite characters in all of media, Sora, is dead. Call me childish, but having a character I looked up to and grew up with die is downright depressing for seven years and counting.

While the graphics are absolutely incredible and Yoko Shimomura impresses with a stellar soundtrack, Kingdom Hearts III is a general disappointment that I haven’t beaten more than once. Some of the worlds were an absolute delight, such as the Toy Box and Olympus, but later worlds felt undercooked, like San Fransokyo and Arendelle.

The DLC ReMind helped a lot, making the story make more sense, but it used a horrible crutch, time travel, to fill in the plot holes. It is also repetitive to fight the same battles after finishing the main storyline, as well, despite it being cool to play as other characters in the series. The data boss battles were a nice extra; however, referring to a better time as a Kingdom Hearts fan. The newly added Critical Mode did add a more intense difficulty, sure, but it went way too far in the opposite direction, making the game miserable to play through.

If you’re not a fan of mobile games, you’re also suffering. Now that portable consoles like the PSP and 3DS don’t exist anymore, the development of smaller entries in the series is stuck on phones (and aren’t even playable anymore). They relied on micro-transactions that felt predatory. The gameplay was very basic and required many hours just to get an inkling of the story. This lore from the mobile games is also extremely important for the future of the series, making it frustrating for fans like me who don’t want to grind monotonous gameplay sessions or watch dull compilations of the text-based cutscenes on YouTube.

Four years is way too damn long to keep Kingdom Hearts fans waiting for a new KH4 trailer. It’s worrying. Hopefully, we get some news soon because I’m going to be honest, I’m losing hope in the series I once “Dearly Beloved.”