The First New Kingdom Hearts Game in Five Years Has Been Canceled
An unfortunate development.
It’s been a rough few years for Kingdom Hearts fans, between being stuck in limbo on the mobile game Kingdom Hearts: Missing Link and quite literally not a single piece of update about Kingdom Hearts 4 outside of that reveal trailer. After multiple rounds of delays and months of no new information, Square Enix has officially canceled Missing Link. While this cancellation might seem shocking, if you’ve paid attention to Square Enix’s mobile efforts, it’s not entirely a surprise. The bigger questions now, unfortunately, has to do with the health of the Kingdom Hearts franchise at large.
Kingdom Hearts: Missing Link was first announced in April 2022, as a geolocation role-playing game that would track users’ location in the real world — along similar lines to Pokémon Go or Monster Hunter Now. It was a bit of an odd idea, but considering this is Kingdom Hearts, it was also going to be heavily story-based with some potentially huge lore and implications for the series at large. We’ve already seen that happen with the other mobile titles like Kingdom Hearts Unchained X and Dark Road.
Ironically, Missing Link was billed as the “lost” story of the franchise — something that’s painfully true now. The first trailer even says, “The story of the blank era, one that will eventually be forgotten.”
While details were scant, it was going to revolve around the mysterious city of Scala Ad Caelum, where the finale of Kingdom Hearts 3 takes place. This is the city where both Xehanort and Eraqus grew up, and was once a bastion of civilization and Keyblade wielders. Players would wield a new Keyblade and navigate conflict between the different “societies” of Scala ad Caelum, while traveling to a realm known as the Astral Plane to battle Heartless.
For all intents and purposes, this looked like the game that was going to link together the stories of the different Kingdom Hearts mobile games — while revealing crucial parts of lore about what happened to Scala ad Caelum. Missing Link was originally supposed to release in 2024, before being delayed to Summer 2025. While early test versions did happen in early 2025, the game was again delayed indefinitely.
Missing Link’s GPS elements seemed fascinating, especially when put into a story-based game.
Because of early betas, we do have some early footage of the game, including cutscenes, and there’s a massive thread on Kingdom Hearts Insider discussing potential story implications. It’s genuinely a shame we won’t ever see Missing Link as it looked incredibly unique, and had a vibrant Victorian-inspired art style. On top of that, series composer Yoko Shimomura said she was looking forward to the release after having played the game herself, as well as saying, “I hope the songs written for this project will someday reach your ears again.”
But this cancellation is indicative of the difficult place Square Enix is in right now. During Square Enix’s most recent financial results, the company released a timeline of its three-year goals, the biggest of which was a shift from quantity of game releases to more quality.
Despite its prominence in Kingdom Hearts 3, we still know very little about the city of Scala ad Caelum.
You can perfectly see how Square’s quantity approach wasn’t exactly working in the mobile space. In the past five years alone, we’ve seen the cancellation or end of service to multiple mobile games, including Star Ocean Anamnesis, Echoes of Mana, Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier, Final Fantasy: Record Keeper, Final Fantasy Brave Exvius: War of the Visions, NieR Reincarnation, and more. There were just too many games spread too thin, and Missing Link is simply the latest casualty.
The larger problem here is that it’s been five years since we’ve had a Kingdom Hearts game, the biggest gap the series has ever seen since it started — and still not even the remotest idea of when we might see Kingdom Hearts 4. It’s hard to look at that fact in any way and not feel like the series is in a rough place, and how the future of it likely hinges on Kingdom Hearts 4 being a success.
Missing Link was supposed to be an action-RPG with collectible elements that let you summon characters in battle.
Considering how much Tetsuya Nomura loves absurdly complex lore in Kingdom Hearts games, it’s hard to imagine elements of Missing Link not being integrated into something in the future. But at the very least, it’s a rough time to be a Kingdom Hearts fan, as there’s now very little in sight for the foreseeable future.
