New Tetsuya Nomura Interview with Famitsu reveals new Kingdom Hearts IV & Missing - Link Information

Famitsu recently published an early look at an interview they conducted with Tetsuya Nomura regarding Kingdom Hearts IV and Kingdom Hearts Missing - Link. Prominent community translator, Audrey, translated significant information from this interview pertaining to Kingdom Hearts IV, so immense credit to her. 

We will be updating this article when the information surrounding Missing - Link is translated, and when the full interview releases on April 28th, 2022. For now, the summations of Audrey's work are listed below:

• Quadratum is entirely unrelated to the Shibuya found in The World Ends with You. There are no connections to speak of. Further, this is a new world unrelated to any we've seen before.
• Sora's apartment is located in Aoyama, Tokyo, and it will act as the base/hub for the game's early stages.
• The Reaction Command mechanic from Kingdom Hearts II will be returning.
• The fourth option of the command menu says "Build," relating to the concept of the "Scrap and Rebuild system" that will be discussed more at a later date. Translator Xenosaga states this to be the concept of destruction and reconstruction.
• One of the central story ideas will be exploring how Sora's home realm is fictitious to Quadratum natives and vice versa.
• The message Nomura left at the Anniversary Event venue containing the "x" symbol has not been fully deciphered yet.

Our team's Ryuji has translated the currently available Kingdom Hearts Missing - Link segment of the Famitsu interview, viewable below:

Quote

Interviewer: Please tell us more about Kingdom Hearts Missing - Link, the game that was announced for smartphones alongside Kingdom Hearts IV’s “Lost Masters Saga”.

Nomura:  The Kingdom Hearts series spans three sagas/arcs in total. You have the Seekers of Darkness Saga that goes until the end of Limit Cut of Kingdom Hearts III and the Lost Masters Saga that will be Kingdom Hearts IV. The third saga is the "χ (chi)" saga, which encompasses Kingdom Hearts chi (* browser game), Kingdom Hearts Union Cross, and finally, Kingdom Hearts: Dark Road. Kingdom Hearts Missing - Link is a title that fills in the blanks and it will function as a bridge-like work, connecting two games together. (Translator note: He reiterates how Missing Link is between Union Cross’s finale and the beginning of Dark Road.)

Interviewer: In the trailer, we can see that Brain appears. Will he be the main character?

Nomura:  No, he won’t. The main character will be yourself. Much like Union Cross, the protagonist will be a custom player avatar created by yourself. 

Interviewer: Missing - Link seems to be centered on action-packed battles that can also be enjoyed in multiplayer, with the addition of so-called location-based game elements that utilize augmented reality technology. You say that you can move around without actually going out, but in that case, do you perhaps mean that you can move around while moving your character in the game?

Nomura:  Yes. It works similar to Google Street View, where you can tap on the arrows to go forward or back in a street. However, I’ve chosen to make it feel more faithful to the series. (He means as in, you won’t “tap arrows to go forward and back”, like Street View does)

Interviewer: So you can even walk around Okinawa, if you wanted to!

Nomura:  Yes, but if you want to go far, far away, it will take a certain amount of time (laughs), but you can also use points to teleport right to where you want to go.

Interviewer: So if you do not want to walk, you can spend points and teleport wherever you’d like, or you can simply choose not to and walk around yourself. It’s all up to who plays it.

Nomura:  Precisely.

Interviewer: If the game is linked to the real world, does that mean that there will be no Disney worlds?

Nomura: We are experimenting with a variety of things, but depending on the timing, the terrain and atmosphere will be partially based on the Disney worlds motifs. In the early stages of development, we covered the entire map with a texture change, but it seemed like overkill, so we are trying to make it more consistent.

(Translator’s comment: He most likely means that, whenever there’s an event of sorts, the overworld would be covered in a different way.)

Interviewer: Collecting figure-like pieces sounds interesting, and the multiplayer action battles look fun.

Nomura:  We are trying to develop some new things that wouldn’t be normally possible in the main series of games. I hope you look forward to testing those out on the Closed Beta, as it is scheduled for Fall of this year.

UPDATE: The anniversary message riddle has been solved by user @kh_skrvat and several other Japanese fans. 

Our translator, Ryuji, provided the following image for visualization.

This means that the narrator for the Kingdom Hearts IV and Kingdom Hearts Missing - Link trailers is Sigurd, a character introduced in the epilogue of Kingdom Hearts Union χ.

The explanation for how this was solved is below, via our team's Ryuji.