Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link gets thrown on the trash heap before its actual release

I have made my disdain for the way Square Enix treats its mobile portfolio pretty clear, depriving the player base of excellent games as soon as they don’t bring in enough profit. They enjoy cancelling their games so much that they have gone a step further, scrapping Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link before it even released.

To recap the game that never was, it was going to be a GPS take on the Kingdom Hearts series. You would explore the world, encounter monsters, think Pokémon Go, but you wailed on Heartless with a big key. It sounded pretty good, and like it would replace the hole left by Kingdom Hearts Union X. Apparently, mobile doesn’t deserve the Disney love. 

After a couple of betas last year, we got hit with a delay notification in November 2024, then silence, and now here we are. At least this time, Square has put out an announcement that isn’t just pithy sales talk. You can check out the Tweet/x/TwiX post for the full deal, but the crux of the reason is, word for word, “we determined that it would be difficult for us to offer a service that players would find satisfactory over a long period of time”.

So, Square decided they didn’t have enough ideas to run with this. But, may I point out, Pokémon Go and Monster Hunter Now aren’t exactly putting out epic sagas with their updates. They still pull in the players. It is incredibly disappointing Square would scrap all that hard work just for fear that, let’s be honest, people wouldn’t spend on the microtransactions in the long run.

They signed off the announcement by saying that the team is hard at work on Kingdom Hearts IV, a series where the previous main title took 14 years to release. But, seeing as it won’t be coming to mobile, maybe Square will let this one see the light of day.