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Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link’s Leaked Cinematic May Have Clues For KH4

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Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link’s Leaked Cinematic May Have Clues For KH4

Over the weekend, a cinematic believed to be the opening scene of the now-canceled mobile game Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link started circulating online. Though the game isn’t coming out, Square Enix had positioned it as an important part of Kingdom Hearts’ ongoing saga, with characters from the game set to appear in Kingdom Hearts IV, so it’s very possible the game’s story could be integrated into future Kingdom Hearts lore. And because of its potential importance to the overall story, Kingdom Hearts historians are poring over the clip to try to divine any meaning they can.

Kingdom Hearts’ worldbuilding is complex and scattered across multiple games, but if you go looking, you can typically find a breadcrumb trail to follow indicating that Square Enix may have been setting up something to come. The Missing-Link cinematic has what looks like a squad of astronaut or deepsea diver keyblade wielders fighting a massive Heartless, and fans theorize this getup may be a more sci-fi style of the Keyblade Armor seen in previous games, which has historically looked more like a fantasy knight’s suit instead.

These suits were used to navigate through the “Lanes Between” where people needed extra protection against the passages’ concentrated dark energy. Given we see this squad fighting a Heartless in what seems to be some kind of isolated, dark distortion, it would make sense that they could be a different iteration of the same idea. Missing-Link was meant to follow some of the first expeditioners to enter the Astral Plane from Scala ad Caelum, the origin point of all of Kingdom Hearts’ worlds, so that may be who these Pragmata-looking folks are.

The beginning of the trailer also has what seems to be a callback to the visual motif of characters like Sora and his Nobody Roxas falling through bodies of water into the “Dive to the Heart” at the beginning of Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II, which has fans speculating that Sora himself might have connections to Quadratum, the realistic world based on Tokyo that has been featured heavily in Kingdom Hearts IV’s promotional material, and is seen in the Missing-Link video after the Keyblade wielders defeat the Heartless. Though Sora fell through the water, the divers are shown carefully entering it while tethered to something, so while Sora may have entered this realm more or less by accident and circumstance, these guys seem to be entering it for the sole purpose of fighting the monster inside.

While a lot of the characters we see in the video are in suits and obscured, we do see a couple of folks who appear to be Brain, a character who debuted in Kingdom Hearts Union X, and Sigurd, a more enigmatic character who has been obscured in his appearances in the mobile game. Here is one of the first times we’ve seen his face, and it has more or less confirmed that he is one of the new characters who has appeared in Kingdom Hearts IV’s trailers.

Whatever Missing-Link was ultimately going to be, it would have clearly been building off the Kingdom Hearts mobile games which have, much to the chagrin of more casual fans, become pretty instrumental in understanding the larger Kingdom Hearts universe. Even if the game never sees the light of day, the fact that Sigurd was meant to play a role means that this scrapped story may still play into Kingdom Hearts IV. How Square plans to catch fans up on a game that never was is unclear at this point, but I can’t imagine that series director Tetsuya Nomura was letting a team play around in the meticulously connected universe without a plan. It’s probably safe to assume that Missing-Link’s untold story will come back around in one way or another when Kingdom Hearts IV comes to PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Switch 2.

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