Kingdom Hearts 4 fans wished for rain and got a flood at this weekend's D23 event with a release window trailer, the announcement of a Disney Plus anime, and now, new details about the game's playable King Mickey sections that heavily echo Paper Mario. Oh, and we'll also get to control Donald Duck and Goofy for the first time ever in a mainline game.
People who exist in the venn diagram centre of Disney movie fanatic and JRPG connoisseur will be pleased to know that publisher Square Enix released an extended trailer last night, showing off more from Kingdom Heart 4's Coco world and beyond. Sora has a phone now. City guards who resemble Final Fantasy 15's are here for some reason. Mickey's trying to solve a mystery while exploring the pages of a magical book. And 13 games later, we can finally force Donald to heal, damn it, by playing as him and Goofy directly.
In a deep dive panel, Kingdom Hearts 4 co-director Tai Yasue elaborated on Mickey's sections a little further. We see the Disney icon transform into a 2D paper cut out and a hulking origami to move around, and Yasue says the developers employed a "sort of puzzle-based game design that's very different from Sora's adventure, and I think it's really refreshing and interesting."
"So in this world you get to play with Mickey and you jump into a book [that's] like a paper world," Yasue explains. "And so 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. 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."
Contorting yourself into different papery forms definitely reminds me of the type of puzzles present in Nintendo's Paper Mario games, but it oddly seems to fit Kingdom Hearts' whole vibe too - the first game was, at least partially, inspired by Super Mario 64, after all.
Kingdom Hearts 4 is set to come out late 2027 for PC, PS5, Switch 2, and Xbox Series X|S.
