Last month, Square Enix made headlines around the world when, following the release of the Kingdom Hearts 3 DLC story adventure ReMind, they announced that a new mobile game would be coming “sooner than anyone thinks,” and it was going by the working title of “Project Xehanort.”
Now, just a few short weeks after that initial announcement, we have a title for this game. It will be called Kingdom Hearts Dark Road.
Square made the announcement from the game’s official Twitter account.
https://twitter.com/kh_dr_na/status/1223093749246382080
“There seems to be a lot of other announcements, so we’ll announce the title a little early,” Square said in the tweet. “Please view the video below for the official title of Project Xehanort.”
The video at the bottom was a short four second clip where the title Kingdom Hearts Dark Road flashes across the screen.
The official title for Project Xehanort is KINGDOM HEARTS DARK ROAD
Additional info will be released after mid-February.
For the winners of our #KHNameContest, we will begin sending direct messages through this account soon. Thank you for your patience. #KHDR pic.twitter.com/gkwr2podgv
— KINGDOM HEARTS DARK ROAD (@kh_dr_na) January 31, 2020
The pinned tweet at the top of the page also offered news on the title. It went on to say that additional information on Kingdom Hearts Dark Road will be released after mid-February.
Direct messages will also be going out soon for those who entered and won the Kingdom Hearts Name Contest from the game’s official Twitter account.
Of course, handheld games are nothing new for the Kingdom Hearts franchise. The majority of titles released for Kingdom Hearts as a series have been via handhold consoles and mobile platforms. There have been only three major platform releases for this series: Kingdom Hearts, Kingdom Hearts 2, and Kingdom Hearts 3.
Games like Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories, Birth By Sleep, Re:Coded, 358/2 Days, UnchainedX, and Dream Drop Distance all released on either a handheld system or a mobile device before being compiled into anthology sets and released on the PlayStation 4.
That’s how the Kingdom Hearts crew likes to tell their stories. You have a massive world-spanning platform title and then a number of smaller titles that tie the story together.
While these mobile and handheld games might be smaller in scope, they are hugely important to the plot. Anyone going from Kingdom Hearts 2 to Kingdom Hearts 3 without first playing through the multitude of games that came between them would have been completely lost from the start.
It seems likely that, in this new mobile experience, players will be able to take on the role of the series’ primary antagonist, Master Xehanort, following him on his journey from respected Keyblade Master to the Seeker of Darkness who devoured the hearts of entire worlds.
