D23 is on in Anaheim as I write this — it runs 14 to 16 August — and the Deep Dive into Kingdom Hearts panel on the 15th finally gave Kingdom Hearts IV something it has been missing since the announcement: a Disney world, and a date.
Here is what was shown, and then the part I actually want to talk about.
What they announced
Coco is the first confirmed Disney world. The panel ran an extended four-minute trailer set in the Land of the Dead, considerably more than had been seen before. Sora gets a Coco-themed Keyblade for it, and Benjamin Bratt is back as Ernesto de la Cruz.
Donald and Goofy are playable. For the first time in a mainline Kingdom Hearts, you control them directly rather than watching Donald forget to heal you. Mickey gets playable segments too, and both Donald and Goofy have their own Coco-world designs.
Late 2027, and they committed to it. Co-director Tai Yasue put it about as plainly as a developer ever does — not eighty percent, not ninety, a hundred. That is a striking thing to say out loud for a game announced in 2022, and it either ages very well or very badly. Platforms are PS5, Xbox Series, Switch 2 and PC.
Riku turns up in Quadratum to help Sora, and Tetsuya Nomura said Maleficent will play a key role, despite not appearing in any footage yet. Nomura also mentioned the game does something that was considered back during Kingdom Hearts III and could not be done then — he did not say what, which is very much the house style.
There is an anime. An original Kingdom Hearts series is in development for Disney+ and Disney Channel, telling a new story inside the same universe, with Nomura involved.
And in the bit that got the room: Haley Joel Osment and David Gallagher, Sora and Riku in English since 2002, recorded a scene together live on stage — the final scene of Kingdom Hearts II.
The part I keep thinking about
Kingdom Hearts IV runs on Unreal Engine 5, with Nanite and Lumen, and Quadratum — the Shibuya-like city Sora wakes up in — has been shown as something close to photoreal. Real signage, real traffic, hard midday sun doing what midday sun does.
Now put the Land of the Dead next to it.
Coco’s world is saturated orange and magenta, lit by marigold petals and paper lanterns, populated by skeletons whose faces work because they are drawn, not simulated. It is one of the most deliberately non-photoreal things Pixar has made.
Those two have to be the same game. Same renderer, same lighting model, same character shader stack, with Sora unchanged as he walks between them.
Kingdom Hearts III solved this by not really having the problem. Everything was stylised, so a Pixar world and a Disney world and Sora all sat inside one consistent, slightly plasticky look. Move the baseline to photoreal and that compromise stops working, because now the stylised world is the outlier rather than the norm.
There is no clean answer to this. The approaches I would expect, in rough order of how much work they are:
- Per-world lighting rigs. Lumen does the physically correct thing, so you fight it with exposure curves, artificial fill and colour grading tuned per world. Cheap, and it looks cheap if that is all you do.
- Per-world shading. A different character shader in Coco — flatter diffuse response, clamped speculars, a hand-authored ramp instead of a physically based one. Expensive, and it means two sets of materials to maintain for every character who travels.
- Sora as the constant. Keep his shading fixed and let the worlds move around him, so the player’s anchor never shifts. This is what I would bet on, and it puts the burden on environment art rather than character art.
The reason this matters beyond Kingdom Hearts: this is the problem every licensed crossover game now has. Photoreal rendering became the default, and the properties worth licensing mostly are not photoreal. Whoever works out how to hold two art directions in one frame without either looking wrong is going to be copied for a decade.
What I would watch for
Trailers are graded shot by shot and tell you nothing about what holds up in motion under player-controlled cameras.
Watch instead for the first uncut gameplay in Coco, and specifically the transitions — the moment Sora arrives, the moment a cutscene hands back control. That is where a per-world lighting trick shows its seams, because the grade has to change and there is nowhere to hide the change.
And watch Donald and Goofy, for a duller reason. Making them playable is not a small feature. It means full move sets, full animation coverage, camera work and readability for three body shapes instead of one, in worlds where they also get redesigned. Announcing that alongside a hard release date is confident. Late 2027 is eighteen months away.
Details from the Deep Dive into Kingdom Hearts panel, D23, 15 August 2026, as reported by the outlets covering it. The engine and rendering points are from Square Enix’s earlier statements about the move to Unreal Engine 5; nothing at the panel changed them.