Some jokes write themselves. The mobile game Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link is becoming the true missing link in the franchise. Three years after its simultaneous announcement with Kingdom Hearts IV, the ambitious spin-off has just been officially canceled. The news was shared by the development teams via the title's official social accounts. "We have made the decision to cancel development on Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link," the statement reads in the introduction. "While we worked hard to develop and adapt the game in the hopes that it would be enjoyed by many players, we determined that it would be difficult for us to offer a service that players would find satisfying over an extended period of time, which led us to make the decision to discontinue development."
A disappointing but far from surprising decision. By focusing its gameplay on players' GPS location, Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link was hoping to ride the wave of Pokémon Go, which was far too late. Faced with the risk of spoiling too many important story elements in a title that the community might ignore, Square Enix certainly made the right choice by canceling this failure in the making.
However, Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link was far from being a barely finished concept. Initially planned for a launch in 2024, the mobile game was ready to be invited to our smartphones, as the various beta testing phases in certain territories suggested. A handful of players were able to discover the beginnings of the game, its characters and its cinematics and agree that the title had great ambitions. But what will become of all these story elements abandoned overnight?
Kingdom Hearts IV still on the way but still delayed?
“The Kingdom Hearts franchise will continue. We are working hard on Kingdom Hearts IV and hope that you will continue to support the franchise while waiting for further announcements,” the press release states, without mentioning the future of the content of Missing-Link. Players of the saga are well aware that the narrative of the games is particularly complex, and was once spread across too many platforms, until the introduction of the compilations Kingdom Hearts 1.5, 2.5 and 2.8. The cancellation of the new mobile game is therefore in line with simplification, but the outright removal of these elements could be detrimental to the next main title.
The director of the franchise, Tetsuya Nomura, had also confided to GameInformer that “the easiest way to get new information and other clues about Kingdom Hearts IV would be to play Missing-Link” and that “some characters that appear in Missing-Link are linked to Kingdom Hearts IV.” The halt in development of the mobile game is likely to involve a lot of restructuring for Kingdom Hearts IV, and therefore slow down the development of this highly anticipated opus.
Square Enix certainly won't abandon the world building it began during the development of Missing-Link, and could even use it for a spin-off intended for traditional gaming platforms. But for now, players will have to do without this additional context. The franchise's composer, Yoko Shimomura, nevertheless posted on her X account (formerly Twitter): “I hope that one day, the songs I wrote for this project will reach your ears again“, enough to leave a little room for hope… And hope springs eternal.
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