Big Trailer for Kingdom Hearts 4 Reveals Coco World

One of the expected highlights for D23 last weekend was a new trailer for Kingdom Hearts 4, and we got it — and then some. Disney topped that trailer with some news fans have wanted to hear for decades, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

The trailer shown to D23 audiences was shortened, it turns out…an extended three-minute trailer appeared online the following day straight from Square, which shows and reveals more. The first confirmed world for Kingdom Hearts 4 is the Land of the Dead from Pixar’s Coco. The trailer starts with scenes from the movie playing out as normal, but then as Miguel is performing, Heartless start popping out of the ground to attack him. That’s when Sora leaps into action.

We get gameplay video of not just Sora, but Donald and Goofy, who became separated from him at the end of KH3. How they’ll make it back to each other is an unanswered question, but Sora MAY be seeing their ghosts….or something. (The trailer doesn’t explain, they just appear as ghosts in front of Sora at one point.) The duck and the dog will go on their own adventure this time, and there will be a third path…where you control Mickey.

The most unexpected part of the trailer happens when Mickey Mouse is sucked into a book and then runs around in a partial-2D paper environment, at one point becoming paper himself. According to Kingdom Hearts 4 co-director Tai Yasue, there will be segments throughout the game where you play as Mickey and have to solve puzzles in this world, sometimes by folding origami clones of himself.

“Mickey in this paper world recreates origami paper copies of himself, and you could create paper-thin Mickeys, giant Mickeys, a tiny Mickey, box Mickeys,” Yasue explains. “When you’re a paper thin Mickey, [you can] go through the cracks on the walls, for example. If you throw him he becomes a paper airplane [and] you fly around. And by utilizing these special abilities of these copies of origami Mickeys, you can solve puzzles.”

Kingdom Hearts 4 is being promised for late 2027 on all modern devices, but that’s not all. Here’s what we alluded to earlier…Disney is finally working on a Kingdom Hearts TV series. Whether it will appear before or after the game isn’t currently known, but it will star an original character. The series will debut on Disney Channel and Disney+.