Will There Be A Kingdom Hearts 4?

The long-awaited Kingdom Hearts 3 finally dropped in January 2019, giving fans their first mainline Kingdom Hearts experience in years and giving Xbox players a chance to experience the franchise for the first time. But now that the release of KH3 has come and gone, people are wondering: will there be a Kingdom Hearts 4?

By all indications, yes, Kingdom Hearts 4 will arrive at some point in the future. But you might have to wait a while.

Tetsuya Nomura — the director of Kingdom Hearts 3 — has addressed the possibility of a fourth mainline game publicly. But he's made it absolutely clear that DLC for the third title is the priority at this stage, and a large portion of that won't be releasing until Winter 2019.

On top of that, Nomura has expressed a desire to tell other stories in the Kingdom Hearts universe before getting to KH4, stating that "there's something that must be written before it, so I'm looking into the possibility of sandwiching it between works."

And that right there should come as a shock to absolutely no one. If you're remotely familiar with the Kingdom Hearts series, you know that KH1, KH2, and KH3 are not the only games bearing that name. There are countless spin-offs and side stories that span both a multitude of platforms and multiple console generations. At this point in time, PlayStation 4 owners can purchase both Kingdom Hearts: The Story So Far and Kingdom Hearts 3 to get the entirety of the story. But that trick doesn't work for those on other consoles, and if the series does indeed add more spin-offs, it'll only become more confusing to keep track of it all.

So you can probably count on there being a Kingdom Hearts 4 someday. There's still very much a story to be told there, and by the sounds of it, Tetsuya Nomura and his team are going to tell it with multiple games. We can't tell you which platforms those titles will appear on, or how long it'll ultimately take for them to come out. But it's probably a safe bet there will be a smaller Kingdom Hearts game or two released to either progress the overarching narrative or fill out the lore of the universe. Then we can begin the Kingdom Hearts 4 countdown.