Kingdom Hearts 4 will, notably, not be the fourth entry in the famously convoluted lineage of the series, and director Tetsuya Nomura knows that all the backstory is intimidating for new players. That's part of why there's been a story "reset" leading into the new game.
"As everyone has said, 'Kingdom Hearts 4 was just announced, but it's really just like 'Kingdom Hearts 13,'" Nomura says in an interview with Japanese magazine Young Jump (Google translated). Nomura adds that, while players intimately familiar with Kingdom Hearts lore will have a deeper appreciation for both Kingdom Hearts 4 and the upcoming mobile game Missing Link, they're both "being made with a stronger focus on being new titles rather than sequels."
To that end, Nomura has tried things like bringing in devs who've never worked on Kingdom Hearts before to participate in writing the story. "I do think of Missing Link and 4 as a reset," Nomura says. "I wanted to end it with 3 or rather reset it, so I appointed new writers and even made a new logo to make it easier for new people to get into it."
This notion of a "reset" isn't entirely surprising - after all, the devs have been calling Kingdom Hearts 4 the start of a new story arc since it was first announced. But it's not as if the new game will completely ignore everything that came before. For example, Nomura teases that the famous line - "I’ve been having these weird thoughts lately like, is any of this for real, or not?" - has come to fruition in the new game's concept of Quadratum.
"For those who know how KH3 ends," Nomura says (this time translated by aitaikimochi on Twitter), "the reason why Sora ends up like that in the ending is because we wanted to reset the story in a way. This should make it even easier for newcomers to join the story starting from KH4. Fans of the Kingdom Hearts series will also be able to feel like 'oh so it's THIS,' but we're making this game with the hopes that new players can enjoy it as well."
Kingdom Hearts 4 has been radio silent for 1,005 days, but don’t worry - Tetsuya Nomura teases he has the story planned out
The original Kingdom Hearts was initially "more hardcore" until Square Enix toned it down: "We had some puzzles in there that would make you go, 'what is this, Takeshi's Challenge?'"
