Kingdom Hearts IV features characters from a game you can no longer play

Kingdom Hearts IV is already doing the most Kingdom Hearts thing possible: the new trailer features characters from Kingdom Hearts Union X Dark Road, a mobile prequel that was delisted from digital storefronts in 2024. Square Enix has released no official way to catch up on that story, even though it's clearly going to matter in the next mainline entry.

The trailer shows familiar faces like Sora and Luxord alongside characters that only players of the mobile spin-offs will recognize. Union X Dark Road — a combined package of Kingdom Hearts Union X and Kingdom Hearts Dark Road — covered the Keyblade War that kicked off the entire series and told the origin story of series antagonist Xehanort. It's foundational lore, and right now it's just gone from storefronts with no replacement.

There's precedent for Square Enix fixing this kind of accessibility problem. Before Kingdom Hearts III, the company packaged cutscenes from hard-to-reach games as watchable movies inside remaster compilations, and it's reasonable to expect something similar before Kingdom Hearts IV ships. In the meantime, fans have uploaded all the cutscenes to YouTube if you'd rather not wait for an official release.

Kingdom Hearts IV is coming to PC, PS5, Switch 2, and Xbox Series X/S, though no release date has been announced. The series has always insisted every corner of its story counts — it just didn't anticipate that live-service shutdowns and digital delistings would one day make that philosophy genuinely difficult to follow.