Canceled Kingdom Hearts game leak sends fans into a frenzy
Overview & Key Takeaways
An alleged leaked trailer for Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link has fans speculating about how the game would have tied into Kingdom Hearts 4.
Kingdom Hearts never fails to deliver bizarre sights, such as a child in clown shoes battling iconic Final Fantasy 7 villain Sephiroth in the colosseum from Hercules. However, even compared to the series’ general ridiculousness, the allegedly leaked opening cinematic from the canceled mobile game Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link is wild.
In the trailer, scuba divers and/or astronauts with jetpacks and armed with Keyblades battle a Darkside, sacrificing themselves before a lone survivor strikes the Heartless down. Defeating the creature dissipates an ocean-like miasma, leaving the scuba divers in a contemporary city that seems to be Quadratum, the setting of Kingdom Hearts 4. Then a letter travels between researchers in white lab coats to some dude in a tricorne hat. What does it mean? Perhaps even Kingdom Hearts creator Tetsuya Nomura doesn’t know.
All of this said, there isn’t confirmation that the leaked footage is real. The videos and screenshots were first posted on 4chan and have since been shared on social media. While there are understandable concerns that the footage is AI-generated, many series fans believe the trailer has too many small lore details for that to be the case. Regardless, fans have been eagerly debating what the footage means and how it ties into Kingdom Hearts 4's more realistic setting of Quadratum.
Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link was a mobile game announced in 2022 that went through years of beta tests and delays before being canceled last year. The game’s 2024 trailer described it as a “GPS Action RPG.” It was set in Scala ad Caelum, which is the nexus for Kingdom Hearts’ various worlds.
The tricorne hat-wearing characters in the teaser trailer look like the figures who receive the letter in the leaked footage, and both the official teaser and the leaked video end with the same figure in a black fedora looking at a building against a night sky. If the leak is bogus, the faker very much nailed emulating series creator Tetsuya Nomura’s character designs.
The leak comes at a time when Kingdom Hearts fans are quite rabid for news on Kingdom Hearts 4. While the game finally received a new trailer last month alongside the announcement that it will come to the Nintendo Switch 2, it still lacks a release window, despite being revealed in 2022. For now, series enthusiasts will have to settle for whatever can be gleaned from this maybe real mobile tie-in.
