The D23 event’s “Disney Entertainment Showcase” panel announced on Friday that an “anime” titled Kingdom Hearts The Series is in development for release on Disney+ and The Disney Channel. The event did not reveal what studio is producing the series.

Update: Deadline reported that Disney is developing the series in partnership with game creator Tetsuya Nomura and the creative team at Square Enix. Deadline also reported the series “reimagines the iconic adventure with a brand-new story that will expand on the Kingdom Hearts universe.”

The same panel also revealed that Square Enix‘s Kingdom Hearts IV game will launch in late 2027 and will include a world based on the film Coco. Actor Benjamin Bratt confirmed he will reprise his role as Ernesto de la Cruz in the game.

The game will launch simultaneously for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC via Microsoft Store, Steam, and Epic Games Store.

Disney Games had stated on Thursday that the Kingdom Hearts game series is one of nine billion-dollar game franchises for the company.

D23 will host the “Deep Dive into Kingdom Hearts” panel on Saturday at 4:30 p.m. PDT (7:30 p.m. EDT), and a livestream will be available on both the official Kingdom Hearts franchise’s YouTube channel and on The Game Awards YouTube channel.

Square Enix revealed the Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link and Kingdom Hearts IV games in April 2022, but had not revealed much information about Kingdom Hearts IV since then before releasing a new trailer in June. Square Enix canceled development on Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link in May 2025.

Square Enix had also announced in early June that it will release Kingdom Hearts Collection [I~III] — a collection of Kingdom Hearts – HD 1.5 + 2.5 ReMIX, Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue, and Kingdom Hearts III + Re Mind (DLC) — for Switch 2, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Microsoft Store.

Square Enix released the Kingdom Hearts III game in January 2019 in Japan and the West for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The game had shipped more than 5 million copies worldwide, including digital sales, as of February 2019, and is the fastest-selling title in the history of the franchise. The “Re Mind” DLC launched in January 2020.

Square Enix‘s Kingdom Hearts Union χ [Cross] and Kingdom Hearts Dark Road smartphone games were both originally supposed to end service in May 2021, but Kingdom Hearts Union χ [Cross] released its final story in June 2021 instead and both games switched to offline mode in the same month. Both games are available in one app.

Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory, the first rhythm action game in the franchise, launched for the Switch, PS4, and Xbox One in the West and in Japan in November 2020, and was previously the only title in the series available for Switch.

The franchise also includes manga and light novel adaptations of the games. Yen Press released some of these in English.

Sources: D23’s Disney Entertainment Showcase panel (Egan Loo), Deadline (Justin Kroll)

Let’s have a look at what ANN readers consider the best (and worst) of the season,
based on the polls you can find in our Daily Streaming Reviews
and on the Your Score page with the latest simulcasts.

Keep in mind that these rankings are based on how people rated individual episodes of the current season, not on the overall quality or popularity of the series.
Only the titles legally streaming in North America and popular enough are being ranked, so the bottom of the list might represent ‘watchable’ rather than ‘bad’.
Series that lack enough user votes will not qualify for the ranking.
See the notes for further details.

Don’t forget to head over to Your Score to rate the episodes you’ve watched this week

Episode Rankings for the week of August 5-11

Along the actual ranking for this week’s episodes, this graph chronicles the change in position from week to week.
While some series are stable, others swing wildly in the rankings depending on the strength of each episode.
When a series has no episode for a given week, the previous week’s episode is used instead as a placeholder.
The first episode of each series is considered as part of the first week, even if it really streamed during the second week.
Click on the numbers to highlight a particular series.

Series Cumulative Ranking as of August 11

Each week’s ranking takes into account the scores given to previous weeks’ episodes.
As we reach closer to the end of the season, each series’ rank will start to solidify and we’ll get a look at the real winners and losers.
Click on the numbers to highlight a particular series.

Notes

Disclaimer: the rankings are just an average of opinions, published for entertainment and information purposes.
ANN makes no claims regarding statistical significance or invulnerability to spam.

The rankings are computed using the Ranked pairs method,
with the variation that unrated titles are considered as abstentions instead of lower than the rated titles.
This roughly means that if, out of all people who rated both A and B, 60% preferred A, it will be ranked higher than B.

The rankings indicate relative quality (A is preferred to B), not absolute quality (B is good/bad).
While the titles are ranked from ‘best’ to ‘worst’, sometimes the difference between #1 and #10 can be very thin.
So if your favorite is near the bottom of the list, don’t take it personally.
It doesn’t mean it’s a bad show, it just means that ANN readers, on average, have preferred the ones above.

If a series has no episode for a given week, we use the rating data for the previous week’s episode in order to compute the weekly ranking.
This is not officially counted as a position in the ranking (it has no impact on the cumulative ranking), but it makes it easier to compare weeks if they each have the same number of series ranked.

It should be noted that long-running series (and sequels) have an advantage in the sense that only people who like the series are still watching it, and they are likely to give each episode a high rating.
But if such a series is going through a low-quality filler arc, the season will get low rankings that are not indicative of the true overall quality of the series.
Conversely, there are fewer people rating the show so it’s less likely to have enough votes to qualify for the ranking.

While many parts of this episode work on paper, the show is finally past the point where it can keep getting away with being vague about the details for the sake of a slow narrative progression. I thought the first couple of minutes of this episode were fantastic, showcasing Sheena getting a firsthand account of what a lot of the returning students look like or go through after combat. While I think it would’ve hit harder if the show was a bit more graphic with Mimi putting herself back together in front of Sheena, her reaction to it just being tears while apologizing for burdening Mimi with the prospect of coming back in one piece worked really well. The two didn’t understand what the other person was feeling, but sometimes when you’re confronted with overwhelming amounts of trauma, you just need to cry.

I have to push back on Sheena’s words that she was being overly naïve. I don’t think that she was, or at the very least, I don’t think that’s consistent with how Sheena had been acting up until this point. As early as the first episode, Sheena was clearly letting the weight of everything terrible happening rest on her shoulders. The show literally starts with her roommate dying and Sheena feeling like she is worthless in this pointless war. Granted, it doesn’t seem like Sheena had ever been directly exposed to any violence outside of the training exercises…except for the time she lost her arm. I’m not saying she should be used to any of this; rather, naïve is the wrong thing for Sheena to say. The only thing that Sheena was naïve about was the idea that Mimi is invincible. While she can technically keep coming back, she still has to put herself back together physically, and it’s implied that Mimi still feels the pain; she’s just desensitized to it. The last episode set up the idea of Sheena trying to find a solution to both Mimi’s situation and the war itself, but this episode’s character writing goes backward to give her something to think about.

Speaking of the war, apparently things are getting so bad that even Mimi’s unstoppable might might not be enough to keep the opposing forces at bay. It looks like the school staff needs to start considering sending more kids out on the front line, but considering a lot of the upperclassmen who would be used to test the younger students are injured or dead, desperate times call for desperate measures. A practice match between Mimi and Lizzy is about to be set up, with the emotional weight of that confrontation as one of the main dramatic beats of this episode. It works well enough, but there is a little bit of disconnect. The teachers weren’t thinking much about the bond between Lizzy and Mimi being used as something that needed to be tested. It really came off like the adults just figured Mimi was the best person to test their students, given how capable she is. So that whole scene with Lizzy and Ali talking about the resolve to take down enemies without emotion feels weird. It’s a good scene in a vacuum, but it doesn’t match with other information that’s being delivered in this episode or previous ones. I think it would have helped if Mimi and Lizzy had shared any screen time before this point. I genuinely can’t remember a single conversation shared between these two.

The episode is consistent with the cast’s characterization, but it’s presented like a different person wrote every scene. None of this is helped by the fact that I still don’t know anything about this war or how much of the information setup is supposed to tie into anyone’s character. Lizzy finally goes into a little bit of detail about why she wants to prove herself: she feels she owes the school for saving her as an orphan. It looks like all the students here are orphans who were saved either during the war or in the fallout from the last one. However, this school is not a good place; this is indoctrination.

There’s not much to talk about whether the kids have a choice in the matter or if everyone is just expected to go along with this because that’s the way war is. This episode was supposed to build on a lot of ideas, but it ended up a little disjointed. I am looking forward to the match between Mimi and Lizzy, but I don’t know what emotional weight it carries or what the ideal outcome between them is supposed to be. The suspense in this episode could work well if it were better written. But right now, all I feel is confusion.

Rating:

Bolts also streams regularly on Twitch as the indie VtuberBolts The Mechanic where they talk about and play retro media!

I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day is currently streaming on
Crunchyroll.

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