Kingdom Hearts 4 was announced over two years ago, but apparently no one took the time to tell Sora’s English voice Haley Joel Osment.
Back in April of 2022, for Kingdom Hearts’ 20th anniversary, Square Enix finally revealed that Kingdom Hearts 4 was in the works. It wasn’t a surprise that a new game is in the works, Kingdom Hearts 3 ended on quite the cliffhanger and Melody of Memory set that up even further, but in a recent interview with IGN, Sora’s voice actor Haley Joel Osment shared that he didn’t actually know the game was in development. “I hope that we hear something about [Kingdom Hearts 4] sometime soon, I guess it’s rumored that there’s going to be another one,” the actor told IGN.
“I’m always the last to know, because I’m the last step in the process. So hopefully, sometime soon, I’ll be back in the studio finding out what happened to everybody.” As Osment points out, English voices are typically one of the last things done for Japanese games, so don’t take him not knowing it exists as reason to be worried (he is also more of a live-action actor these days, so it’s understandable if he’s not keeping up with every last update like the rest of us).
IGN did let him know that the fourth game was on the way, and that series director Tetsuya Nomura did recently share that with it he’ll be moving the story towards its end. In turn, Osment responded, “You know, I’m sure that [Nomura] has great plans to wrap it up in a satisfying way. And I think that sometimes that’s the best thing to do, even if you have something that you love and you feel like you want to play it forever, to tie it up in a nice way and not let it drag out beyond where the creator wants it to go. I think that’s the way to go. And clearly there’s many, many hours of gameplay for people to go back and revisit.”
Since Kingdom Hearts 4 there’s been essentially no news about it, and a new mobile game called Missing Link is due out this year, but that one’s MIA too. And with a very important older mobile game also being delisted in August, it’s a bit unclear what’s next for the series.
