It’s been a rough few years for Kingdom Hearts fans, between being stuck in limbo on the mobile game Kingdom Hearts: Missing Link and quite literally not a single piece of update about Kingdom Hearts 4 outside of that reveal trailer. After multiple rounds of delays and months of no new information, Square Enix has officially canceled Missing Link. While this cancellation might seem shocking, if you’ve paid attention to Square Enix’s mobile efforts, it’s not entirely a surprise. The bigger questions now, unfortunately, has to do with the health of the Kingdom Hearts franchise at large.
Kingdom Hearts: Missing Link was first announced in April 2022, as a geolocation role-playing game that would track users’ location in the real world — along similar lines to Pokémon Go or Monster Hunter Now. It was a bit of an odd idea, but considering this is Kingdom Hearts, it was also going to be heavily story-based with some potentially huge lore and implications for the series at large. We’ve already seen that happen with the other mobile titles like Kingdom Hearts Unchained X and Dark Road.
