A new Kingdom Hearts 4 rumor has surfaced online with supposed information about the KH4 release date. Kingdom Hearts IV — as it is officially designated — was announced back on April 10, 2022. Since then, it has been over two years of crickets. At the time of its announcement, Square Enix noted the game was early in development, so perhaps this silence should not come as a surprise. What should also perhaps not come as a surprise is the game is supposedly still far away.
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According to a new rumor, Kingdom Hearts 4 is not going to release in 2025. In fact, it sounds like a 2026 release date may even be unlikely. The new rumor claims the game was rebooted in the middle of development in early 2023 at the behest of Disney.
What Disney wanted changed, the rumor does not say. What it does say is that Kingdom Hearts 4 is now aiming to release sometime between the end of 2026 and early 2027. That said, this rumor raises a few red flags that should be taken into consideration.
First of all, while Disney is no doubt involved with the game’s development, is it heavily enough involved to force Square Enix to reboot it? It is not financing the game’s development so it is hard to imagine it would have this much influence.
The second red flag is if the game rebooted development in early 2023, a late 2026 or early 2027 seems a little too quick of a turnaround. Kingdom Hearts games notoriously take a while in development, so if anything a late 2027 or early 2028 release date seems more likely.
The third and final red flag — which is also the biggest — is the fact the rumor comes from an anonymous source on 4chan. In the past, 4chan has provided some of the biggest leaks. However, more often than rumors originating from the forum or nothing more than hogwash and fan fiction. In other words, take this new information with a grain of salt.
At the moment of publishing, Square Enix has not commented on this rumor nor the speculation it has created. Typically, it does not comment on rumors so we do not suspect this situation to change. If it does though, we will update the story accordingly.
