I'll be doing my coverage of Wednesday's Nintendo Direct here soon, I just haven't had a ton of time to work on it the last few days. In the meantime, I wanted to go ahead and cover this as I find it fairly pressing and worth getting the word out on.
So, the morning of the Nintendo Direct, I woke up to some... less than ideal news on my most anticipated title.
Scrolling through my YouTube subscription feed that morning, I saw some of the Kingdom Hearts channels I’ve started following recently in the wake of all the big news reporting on an alleged massive leak that Kingdom Hearts IV had suffered, with one even saying in their description that it may ruin the game’s hype cycle. That’s not what you want to hear when we’re still over a year out from the game’s release.
While I haven't looked into any specifics, and you won't find any in this post or any future posts I write, I have learned more about how exactly this happened and what the leaks contain.
These leaks come from a seemingly unprecedented Steam database leak revealing the achievements for many upcoming games, including the likes of Persona 6 and, of course, Kingdom Hearts IV. And based on what I know about the achievements lists for previous Kingdom Hearts games, uh... that's not good. Like, really, REALLY not good.
If I had to hazard a guess, this likely means that with over a year to go before the game comes out in late 2027, stuff like the entire list of Disney worlds, unrevealed gameplay details, major story spoilers, and perhaps even post-game content like superbosses, is all out there circulating on the internet.
I cannot express this enough: this sucks, not just for us as Kingdom Hearts fans, but for the teams at Square Enix and Disney who've been working hard to deliver the game to us. My heart goes out to the developers who's work is being spoiled well before it was supposed to be released to the public.
And of course, this leak goes beyond Kingdom Hearts IV as well. I already mentioned Persona 6 was also affected, and we don't even know when that game is coming out. Plus, there's apparently a bunch of other games, even unannounced titles, affected by this leak that I refuse to look further into. Nothing short of an unmitigated disaster for every team and studio affected.
If you really wanna know, I'm sure you can find the information rather easily, but I sure as heck won't be pointing you in that direction. I don't plan to cover this story any further unless there's a major development that I catch wind of and feel is worth mentioning. I just wanted to write this post as a word of warning.
I'll be doing everything I can to avoid these leaks, as I want to experience the Kingdom Hearts IV hype cycle the way Square Enix intends, not by reading a compiled list of Disney worlds, plot points, and other unrevealed things on Reddit or something.
If you want to learn a bit more, you can check out these videos from the Daily Kingdom Hearts IV News channel on YouTube, which goes into a bit more detail while staying spoiler free.
Needless to say, what was an exciting period for Kingdom Hearts fans now that the marketing floodgates for IV have opened, has now turned into a treacherous year ahead as we wait for the game to launch while trying to avoid the leaks. If this happened a few months before launch, that'd be one thing, but as I've reiterated multiple times, we still likely have over a year to go! The whole situation sucks, plain and simple.
All I can say is, if you're a fan of Kingdom Hearts, Persona, or any other franchise affected by this leak, well... good luck out there, and may your heart be your guiding key.
Just another reason to add to the pile for why I have leaks. This is why we can't have nice things!
