Trio of New Portable Kingdom Hearts Games

No signs yet of a new console game in the series.

Disney is popular, Square Enix is popular. It was little surprise, then, that when the two teamed up for Kingdom Hearts gamers lapped it up. There has since been a foray onto the Game Boy Advance and a full sequel on the PS2, pushing full series sales to more than 11 million units. The future of the series, however, is mobile.

Franchise sales are now over 11m worldwide

At the Tokyo Game Show this week Square Enix announced three new Kingdom Hearts games, all coming to portable platforms.

There's Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, a DS game directed by Final Fantasy head man Tetsuya Nomura about Roxas and Axel, two boys who work for Organization XIII collecting hearts from the beastly Heartless creatures. The game's singleplayer mode will be supplemented by an online multiplayer mode.

Joining Nomura on new PSP game Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep is Tai Yasue, who previously worked on the GBA game. This one predates the original Kingdom Hearts, telling the story of three new characters and their adventures with series hero Sora's weapon, the Keyblade.

The third of the trio of newly announced games is also the one least likely to be released outside of Japan. Kingdom Hearts Coded is Square Enix's latest RPG for Japanese mobile phones. It stars Jiminy Cricket and Sora who go on a virtual romp through Mr. Cricket's journal in search of the meaning of a mysterious message.

None of the games has a release date yet and Square Enix has yet to confirm any release details for outside of Japan. However, given that the company's UK office sent out the information on the games, and that all the previous Kingdom Hearts have been released outside Japan, it's a fair bet we'll find out more about a Western release for the games at some point.

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo