Upcoming Kingdom Hearts mobile game Missing Link will have connections to Kingdom Hearts 4

Kingdom Hearts: Missing Link screenshot
(Image credit: Square Enix)

Kingdom Hearts director Tetsuya Nomura has said that the upcoming mobile game Missing Link will have links to Kingdom Hearts 4.

In an interview with Game Informer, Nomura spoke about the upcoming mobile game Kingdom Hearts: Missing Link and said: "Compared to our past mobile releases, it's a lot closer to the series and also connected in many ways to Kingdom Hearts 4." If you didn’t know, Missing Link was announced during the Kingdom Hearts 20th-anniversary celebration in April and will apparently be launching as a closed beta later this year.  

"The easiest way to get more new information and hints about Kingdom Hearts 4 would be first to play Missing Link," Nomura revealed in the same interview. "I know that not everybody is really into smartphone games, so some fans might not be really excited for it, but we are making it so that it's something that anyone can jump right into."

Previous Kingdom Hearts games such as Kingdom Hearts X (aka 'Unchained X' or 'Dark Road') provided a lot of context for Kingdom Hearts 3. These smaller titles did appear to overcomplicate an already complex story, especially if you didn’t dip your toes into the spin-off stories at all before playing Kingdom Hearts 3, so it’s good to hear that Nomura is considering newer fans this time around with Missing Link. 

It doesn’t look like Nomura is leaving Kingdom Hearts X out of Kingdom Hearts 4 though, as in the reveal trailer we can see that Strelitzia makes an appearance in the sequel after mostly only appearing in Kingdom Hearts X. So it's probably wise at least familiarise yourself with all of Nomura’s past Kingdom Hearts efforts before the release of Kingdom Hearts 4.

Elsewhere in the interview, Nomura gave an insight into the future of Final Fantasy in Kingdom Hearts 4. 

Hope Bellingham
News Writer

After studying Film Studies and Creative Writing at university, I was lucky enough to land a job as an intern at Player Two PR where I helped to release a number of indie titles. I then got even luckier when I became a Trainee News Writer at GamesRadar+ before being promoted to a fully-fledged News Writer after a year and a half of training.  My expertise lies in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, cozy indies, and The Last of Us, but especially in the Kingdom Hearts series. I'm also known to write about the odd Korean drama for the Entertainment team every now and then.