Kingdom Heart 4 Announced!

                                            

    The first trailer for Kingdom Hearts 4 just came out a week ago, and I could not be more excited!

    We know some things now that we did not know when the trailer dropped. For one, it has been announced that Kingdom Hearts 4 will be made with the Unreal Engine 5 game engine, as opposed to the Unreal Engine 4 that KH 3 was built on, giving huge potential for graphics and physics upgrades from previous Kingdom Hearts games. And it indeed looks like this game in particular will be a departure from Kingdom Hearts usual cartoony, colorful art style, into a more photo-realistic style that we see with many of Square Enix's Final Fantasy titles. 

    It took 6 years from the time Kingdom Hearts 3 was annouced back in 2013 to it release in 2019, due in part because it was originally being produced on Square Enix's in-house game engine, and they later made the switch to Unreal Engine 4. You know what they say, "Don't switch your horse in the middle of the river", or however that phrase goes? I don't think we could expect the same long period of development. I would expect the release of this newest game around late 2024. I'm also surprised that the announcement of KH4 comes just 3 years after the release of KH3 in January of 2019. Though, I'm sure most people agree the last few years have been a blur.

    The trailer showed us some amazing graphics and sneak peeks at upcoming features. Best of all, the scene in the trailer of Sora fighing the Omega Darkside or whatever that big monster was, was actual rendered gameplay, NOT a cutscene. With that knowledge, I retroactively loved that there was no indicitive shimmer on the different ledges, walls, and lamp posts that Sora could jump to like we saw in Kingdom Hearts and Dream Drop Distance's "Flow Motion". I also cannot wait to see the further uses we can finally get out of the Keyblade's Keychain, like we saw Sora use it to grapple higher up. Let me use it like Ichigo's big Zangetsu from the first arc in Bleach, and spin the Keyblade for an attack by the keychain!

    We also saw Streletzia, the sister of Lauriam (Marluxia) come to the door of the apartment where Sora wakes up. She tells Sora that this city called Quadratum is in something akin to an afterlife, which makes sense considering Streletzia died during the events of the Kingdom Hearts Unchained Key mobile game. I'll be very interested to see what that means for Sora, since Quadratum seems to be very much like the "real" world with cars and people on their phones. There's also lots of speculation that this game could finally include newer Disney properties like Star Wars and Marvel, especially considering the graphics change. For now, it's just rumor and things like that come up every time a major Kingdom Hearts game gets announced.

    Tetsuya Nomura, the director for Kingdom Hearts, has also said that they are incorporating old favorite features like the Reaction Commands from KH2. That's what we see when Sora creates that barrier of light block the Darkside's punch. 

    The last big detail that stood out to me, was the logo change. Every Kingdom Hearts game up to this point has had the same font for the logo. The logo for Kingdom Hearts 4 is different, and we now know the reason. Previous games have all been part of the "Seeker of Darkness" saga, with Xehanort as the main antagonist. Now that he has been defeated, KH4 begins a new arc, know as the "Lost Master". There could finally be answers about the Master of Masters and the Foretellers, last seen at the end of Kingdom Hearts 3. While Kingdom Hearts is notorious for setting up more questions than it answers, it looks like the Master of Masters will be the main antagonist for the next set of games.

    Let me know what YOU saw, and what you may be the most excited to potentially see!

    If you haven't seen the trailer, here is the link to GameSpot Trailer's YouTube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcm_dfhnP8Q

    This is my first of hopefully many articles with Latter-Day Saint Geeks. Be sure to check me out on my different socials, which are currently being revived.
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