Something important I'd like to bring up, in the KH1 manga Cid mentions he used a gummiship to bring the FF kids to Traverse Town meaning if Rinoa somehow made it out of Ansem's devastation of Radiant Garden then she'd be trapped and left behind there. I'd imagine Squall and the rest assumed she died and that letter in KH2 was to let him know she's ok. Another, darker meaning of the letter is that she really did die prior to KH1 and the letter was a final farewell that Squall didn't have the heart to open until post KH2.
I think the most likely conclusion is that Rinoa died during the original fall of Hollow Bastion in the fight. The symbol on Leon’s jacket was in her memory and the letter was an unopened message to him from just before that he’d sworn not to open until it was all over.
Couldn't she had lost her heart to the Heartless? That might set up a storyline where Squall must reunite Rinoa's heart with her Nobody who is currently MIA as of the fall of Radiant Garden. Would certainly be an amazing side quest for KH4.
If Rinoa is dead, does that mean we have to speculate that Squall/Leon is also secretly somebody else through time travel shenanigans? (Which is probably unironically easier in KH to explain that it would be in FFVIII lmao)
Couldn't she had lost her heart to the Heartless? That might set up a storyline where Squall must reunite Rinoa's heart with her Nobody who is currently MIA as of the fall of Radiant Garden. Would certainly be an amazing side quest for KH4.
People go crazy for 0.2 "explaining" Mickey's absence of a shirt, while this thread that's been hanging since 2005 is "just a reference, don't think too hard".
the wings fly up like a heart floating up, in the same way a heart released from a heartless floats up. perhaps the letter was her form of lingering will, in that the letter was her final words to leon before she can gained closure/peace and die peacefully or something
Couldn't she had lost her heart to the Heartless? That might set up a storyline where Squall must reunite Rinoa's heart with her Nobody who is currently MIA as of the fall of Radiant Garden. Would certainly be an amazing side quest for KH4.
This is legitimately the first time in over a decade someone has actually added something new to the conversation with this franchise. I hope Nomura didn’t “forget” outright. I hope it gets some textual explanation and closure before Nomura’s retirement in the games.
It's technically already known why. Nomura cutout most of Nojimas story with the Final Fantasy characters so fans can speculate for themselves. So it's not really a "mystery" as to why Nomura decided it to be this way.
If she is “dead” then she may be in Quadratum or the Final World, so we may yet see her again. Also, interestingly enough, the VA for Rinoa from the Dissidia series was recently interviewed and when asked when we’ll see Rinoa again, she said she signed an NDA but stated she’s very excited for the future of the character. So I’m optimistic, she’s one of my favorite FF characters!
It'd be neat, but given how they tried to cut final fantasy characters in kh3 i doubt we're going to see many of them again if any. I doubt we'll even get an ending for cloud
@@peridusk6128 while it’s unlikely, I’m hoping Sqaure saw peoples’ complaints about the lack of FF characters and is course correcting. I mean, hell, even Yazora is based on proto-Noctis so maybe??
Couldn't she had lost her heart to the Heartless? That might set up a storyline where Squall must reunite Rinoa's heart with her Nobody who is currently MIA as of the fall of Radiant Garden. Would certainly be an amazing side quest for KH4. PS: Might be that Squeenix is working on a _remake_ of FF8? Unlikely, but wow would be that awesome.
KH4 is kinda the perfect time to introduce her to the series. She could pop up in Unreality and that’d explain her absence. Where’s she been? Well… dead. But also, gives some justice to her character as it seems like not just anyone can end up in Unreality (maybe idk, we have no idea what they’ve got cooking for KH4).
I wouldn’t be surprised if they planned to have her in a future game where you help Leon find her, but didn’t happen because of how crazy is own story got
Couldn't she had lost her heart to the Heartless? That might set up a storyline where Squall must reunite Rinoa's heart with her Nobody who is currently MIA as of the fall of Radiant Garden. Would certainly be an amazing side quest for KH4.
@@ernjdasdd Thats literally not true. Nomura himself said in an interview that the reason the FF characters had fewer and fewer appearances as the series went on is because he personally felt they'd overstayed their welcome and that they were a relic of the series past that wouldn't be missed. It wasn't until fan reaction to KH3 having none that he realized people really wanted them so he had the Radiant Garden crew show up in Re:Mind.
@@Evnyofdeath I double checked and googled around and you're correct. Can't remember where I saw but at the time everyone was saying Disney owned majority of the property and wanted more disney and less Square properties in it.
your caption/comment/author note at 3:46 is a slam dunk - some fans will genuinely wax about sora being the MoM and the inclusion of the Type-0 cast, it's wild to see them dismiss ANYTHING as "just an easter egg"
Clearly, Rinoa was possessed by a sorceress who time traveled back from future events to take her body. In Kingdom Hearts, this time-traveling sorceress is probably Maleficent, who used the link to Rinoa to being Heartless into Radiant Garden in the first place and trigger the events that made it become Hollow Bastion.
I'm a FF fan getting into KH and honestly, I never noticed the design choice for Leon at the time. That is a cool detail to point out. I really hope she does make an appearance somewhere in KH one of these games.
Nomura: "You want me to add *another* woman into Kingdom Hearts? I-- how-- Don't you have *enough* women? I don't even want to add Final Fantasy Characters anymore and here you are asking me for a lady FF character in the year of our lord 2024???"
@@Darth_Spyro ngl my comment was intended as a joke but you are the second person to get offended by it (the first person deleted ther comment but they were very spicy about it...) I was also going to throw in something like "And on top of that you want a- A final fantasy woman that ISN'T from Final Fantasy 7?! The- how- are there EVEN final fantasies that aren't 7???" But forgot. Though if we were to have a serious discussion about how the female original characters in KH are handled, while Aqua and Larxene stand out pretty well Kairi, Xion and Namine end up feeling a bit too samey personality-wise? Also for how important Kairi is she sadly doesn't get to do a lot and I am still disappointed in how she was handled in KH3.
@@rosies69 to be hateful would require hate in my heart for what we are talking about lol! And as I said in another reply in this comment thread, it was supposed to be funny
So there's actually a lot of cut story content from KH2. It's not just Rinoa that's a mystery but also Auron, Tidus, Yuna, Rikku, and Paine. Kazushige Nojima actually wrote most of the Final Fantasy characters in Kingdom Hearts. He actually wrote so much for them that they would even be tied back into the main story of KH2 but Nomura decided to exclude half of what he wrote so that fans can fill in the blank. That's why Sephiroth appears in a Major Cutscene. They originally had much bigger plans for them in KH2 but instead focused on the Organization. It wasn't until KH3: ReMind we see a significant role for the Final Fantasy characters in Kingdom Hearts with Yozora and his connections to Quadratum. KH2 was essentially going to spell out exactly why Yuna was a pixie, where's Rinoa, and what exactly is going on with Sephiroth but completely abandoned them to allow fan speculation. It's a shame too because people swear KH3 had no Final Fantasy involvement because by the end they have the most importance at the end of the story. If the wings on his jacket are meant to represent his story has already happened then it makes Seifer, Raijin, and Fuijin much more mysterious because now they're kids. But that doesn't make sense at ALL. Seifer gave Squall his scar back when they were working for the SEED Garden. So how do they have their scars if they're ages apart from when their battle was supposed to happen? There's a lot more mysteries surrounding the Final Fantasy characters I wish the writers actually focused on. You can find most this information from interviews and the Ultimania sections questioning about Yuna, Tifa, and Sephiroth.
I checked those Ultimania sections and none of them mentioned anything about Nomura removing things related to the FF cast to encourage speculation. The Nojima interview in the Ultimania, aka the one that talks about Yuna, Tifa, and Sephiroth, doesn't have him mention anything like that OR writing so much for the FF chars it'd tie into the main plot. The main Nomura interview of the Ultimania has him give a reason for why YRP are pixies and it's literally just that he "wanted to have a FF character showing up as "something that looks human but isn't human"." The "major cutscene" Sephiroth shows up in, the "ooh look at the FF characters fighting the heartless" one, has him be focused on just Cloud and nothing else because it's an FF fanservice scene.
@@cillbipher2613key phrase "INTERVIEWS and ULTIMANIA". There's a shit ton of interviews. I think it was Famitstu if memory serves? You're really bad at researching. I didn't just make up some head canon. I read this. Multiple times across multiple videos. Matter of fact how did you fail so spectacularly? It's not hard to find information really. Just niche.
Alternate universe shenanigans at play. Leon doesn’t know Seifer in Kingdom Hearts, and yet he has that scar. As George Lucas would say, “It’s like poetry. It rhymes.” We have to assume that Leon managed to get an identical scar to Squall by sheer coincidence
@@Gloomdrake Exactly. With the dubious exception of Auron, every FF character in KH is an alternate counterpart not related to the original. Leon could have gotten his scar from the initial Heartless attack on Radiant Garden when he was a teenager. In contrast, Seifer could have gotten HIS scar from a mundane accident as Twilight Town never really had much trouble until Days...where even then no one ever seems to notice the Heartless.
I actually really like Rinoa. I like her trying too hard, even when she was a little clueless about the 'how' part. It was a nice switch, normally that's the 'guy' role in games. As for the letter, I think it would literally be the words from the ff8 intro. That would be fitting. You have to remember, ff8 was needlessly convoluted. The idea is that if everything else fails, they would find each other at the beach by the orphanage again. It makes sense that they both go looking for each other there. So, to answer your question about where Rinoa is? I'd bet the beach by the orphanage. Whether that's a literal place in Kingdom Hearts, or if it has some variant, I don't know.
I just had some Thought: In Melody of Memory we see the Fairy Godmother can enter the Final World at Will. What if she does this regularry. Basicly she speeks to the Hearts lingering there, helping them to move on. If Rinoa asked to write her final Message down and give it to Leon that would be her Salvation. This would also fit into the Symbolism of her Symbol flying up.
So informative! So interesting. I hope Nomura revisits this in KH4, because he's not shy about picking up old plot threads and doing the unexpected with them.
Considering FF8 proper has scientists blast rinoa off into space, it's not impossible something similar happened before or during the heartless' attack. The key difference being, within the kh universe, being sent off into space could have her end up in a whole different world.
I genuinely don't believe this moment was meant to be any deeper than the writers running out of things for Squall to do, so they gave him a semi-canon epilogue before phasing him out. It's not commital in the miniscule chance an official sequel is made, but it's just enough for fans to understand.
Hehe! Was super looking forward to this, and once again this was just as good as expected. Also "God DAMN Setzer!!" I'm glad you doubled down on that from after the chat on the podcast ❤ - Jack
Omg omg omg omg fuckin finally someone is talking about this, I been wondering for years what happened to rinnoa, especially when I beaten ff8 in 2022 likeeeeee where is my girl at
I love how after 22 years of me being a half dedicated KH fan, knowing a lot about the scrapped content and the beta stuff, and storyline elements and incredible combat, from the upcoming SQ event to KH: Missing Link being slated for later (maybe), to learning speedrunning tricks and out of bounds stuff, in the end I'm learning something new. And Rinoa being Kingdom Hearts as a mystery... This i have not even heard of. This is completely new. And in KH2 i always thought the symbol floating from the letter was feom Aerith, and before i even touched anything FFVII related, i thought it was a cute thing that happened. I would expect Nomura to be like "Um... Let's have a retcon okay? Lets give a reason on why she can't appear in KH, but not explain, even explicitly." And like... KH lore pretty much was is... Well... Calling it a weird mess is a bit... Off. Thank you for introducing me to a new mystery with Kingdom Hearts. Much love to ya.
I can't believe in the 20 or so years since I first played Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2, I'm just now learning about this entire Rinoa subplot from a video in 2025. (For reference, I only ever played a couple hours of FF8.) I've beaten KH2 several times yet never knew about her wings on his jacket, never knew the letter he was reading was supposed to be from her, and never knew what the symbol was that floats up from it. I always assumed he was reading a letter from Sora relaying the letter he got from Mickey, and had no idea what the symbol was supposed to be (totally forgot this part of the ending even existed). Crazy, still finding new stuff about KH2 even now.
5:10 Cloud and Zack were both in Olympus from BBS through KH1. Auron was also technically in Hercules' world, but it seems like every world shares the same hell so I'll only give that one half points
Y'know the symbol that flies off that paper has the same hue and sparkle effect that a released heart does. Maybe Rinoa spent that time as a Heartless and the letter was like a "If you're reading this, I died." kind of message?
She's literally immortal. That was like half the plot in FF8. The sorceress power makes you immortal. Which is why Squall and party had to allow her to do Time Compression or else the Sorceress Power would always be a problem.
@@feiradragon7915Unfortunately theories like these I have to assume you know your history and knowledge. It's impossible to navigate fan discussions like this in Kingdom Hearts without spoiling a lot of Final Fantasy. Maybe that's why Rinoa wasn't added. She would've added a whole different angle that would've confused kids. Sorry if that hurt your chances of trying FF8.
@tylercafe1260 Eh, I don't mind spoilers on old games. FF is a franchise I've slightly delved into but mostly because it's adjacent to KH. I'm most familiar with 7 and 10.
Honestly when I heard about her more I thought this Rinoa woman maybe was one of the experiments of Apprentice Xehanort or just a random victim of the Heartless Experiments he was doing and one got loss which killed her.
Ultimecia is super dead. By having the powers shift from Adel > Edea > Rinoa > Ultimecia then back to > Edea she made it so the sorceress power will no longer exist in the future besides Rinoa.
I agree with you, Squall really can’t exist in something without Rinoa to some degree. Very interesting video! Kingdom Hearts is this giant thing that’s always looming around things I like, yet I still don’t really know anything about it
Movement between worlds You know that black hole thing characters from the organization like to use to teleport? Technically anyone can do it or at least some form of teleportation. If you just really want it enough. That’s how the Beast got to Hollow Bastion He just wanted to find Belle in there he was on the front doors of Hollow Bastion. And Rinoa is already a sorceress She would probably have an easier time traveling between worlds or for that matter even across Time. I think Maleficent already has parallels with Ultimecia. So maybe Maleficent captured Rinoa And something happened where Rinoa is lost in time maybe does not exist anymore
I’ve been begging for Lightning to show up and be Kairi’s “Leon/Cloud” figure going forward, but I can’t deny I’d love to see Rinoa finally get her due time in the limelight.
They did though. They just decided to not add the rest of the Final Fantasy story in the KH2 script. But they actually did write an explanation but Nomura only left enough so fans can speculate but no direct answers until KH3. But Sephiroth in KH2 has been well documented to have a much bigger relevancy in the main plot before the final draft.
i understood the scene as leon/squall finally allowing himself to read a final farewell she may have written to him, something that he had held on to until he was ready to open it definitely agree that she was slain or is in someplace unreachable even in KH standards
I mean Leon has only showed up in 2 games, and that letter hinting at Rinoa only appeared in the epilogue of the second. All of the Final Fantasy characters had their side plots and development cancelled when Nomura decided he wanted a redo on Final Fantasy Versus 13 instead of making Kingdom Hearts, so presumably she's off hanging out with Sephiroth and Vaan and all the other cameos that would have been present if the game was made 15 years ago instead of 5. If we're lucky maybe she'll show up in Kingdom Hearts 4D when we replay through the story of KH1 again for the 17th time
Great analysis! Maybe Rinoa was another person captured and used in experiments alongside Subject X? It could be a good place to add her, maybe she even escaped with Subject X and eventually wrote the letter. I'd love for Nomura to tie this thread together and honestly now is the perfect chance.
My theory since in KH3 it was semi established that the Station of Awakening is also The Final World and that The Final World has a Direct Connection to the possible location Sora is. I'd say she is likely somewhere there or one of the countless fragmented spirit stars in The Final World we just can't decipher which one.
Tifa wears an outfit that resembles Rinoas in KH, this made me wonder about the alternate lives theme in ff8 that Cloud also goes through. Possible that Tifa and Rinoa are the same spirit, and when faced with both Cloud and Squall, she is there for Cloud first, so is there as Tifa, but with hints of Rinoas outfit due to Squalls presence.
She's literally just wearing her outfit from Advent Children, just like all the other FFVII characters in KHII. It's not meant to reference Rinoa at all.
I don’t think she’s dead, but I think she might be trapped between worlds in some way. I think what most likely happened is she got trapped in Radiant Garden when Cid evacuated the others by Gummi ship and Squall wasn’t able to protect her hence his wearing her wings on his back. I think this version of Rinoa is still a sorceress and tried to use her magic to teleport her elsewhere and that didn’t exactly work out. Like she escaped from Radiant Garden and is still alive, but not able to return to normal space for some reason.
The funniest answer is that she broke up with him and he's just never gotten over it. She never shows up because squall always makes an embarrassing scene every time she does
ok but imagine if in kh4 she's a main party member and the entire point of quadratum is that it is acutally death, and those that go there can never go back fully.
the kingdom hearts canon is completely seperate canon from the final fantasy world.. lol... each universe has no correlation to one another whatsoever. the only reason final fantasy characters were in KH in the first place was to make it familiar to other people until KH created and established its own original cast. pretty much just placeholders, there likely won't be FF characters in it anymore in the future so there isn't really anything to speculate about.. lol. FF = filler.
First of, very solid points, and I don't necessarily disagree. But I do have an objection or two. For one, yes, the ultimania interview did explicitly say that Nomura "added the wings to imply something happened in the past", and it is reasonable to assume that the "something" relates to Rinoa, since it's a symbol related to her. And he did say yes when asked if the wings were based off of her image. But technically, he didn’t explicitly say that the wings meant something happened *to Rinoa* in the past. Just that something happened, and he thought that the wings from Rinoa's design could imply that. If he, for some insane reason, had decided to repurpose Rinoa's wing symbol for KH Leon to *just* be about Radiant Gardens past (probably not, would be insane, but this *is* KH), then having the print on the back does not actually confirm her existance. Like, we cant really know if the wings (in KH context) are something that Rinoa had worn, or maybe planned to be the crest of some noble family of Radiant Garden that Squall had a knights duty towards and failed, or some 3rd thing. I know, very unlikely and absurd. Just saying. And if the wing symbol was just a Radiant Garden symbol, then the appearance of them at the end of KH2 would fit as simply symbolising Squall having finally made amends for his past failures. ^ Now, I don't believe the arguments I made above, but my mind did go there, so meh. For something else, Rinoa could have "died" in the past and still written that letter Squall reads in KH2. Could be that she wrote down something for him shortly before they parted ways, and the letter simply wasn't found until much later. Basically just saying that even though he reads it in the presence where she's presumably "dead", it may have been written in the past long ago. Love seing these kinds of vids though, obscure theories are one of the best thing of this franchise :D
Well, maybe Rinoa is in The Final World as one of the Stars that reside there, I mean whe could have died whe Radiant Garden became Hollow Bastion (either from the darkness or the flood) and the only thing she left was the letter Leon reads at the end of KH2.
Yea Laguna in BBS would have been great, but I would like to see Rinoa at some point. But now that the KH cast has filled out, I don't think it's likely.
This makes me wanna play FF8, bc that credits scene in KH2 always confused me and I want more context! I mean, considering this video exists I doubt there’ll be too much closure on that specifically, but Rinoa sounds like a fun character :3
Not adding anymore ff characters but she’s already someone who existed in the series so she will actually be in quadratum in kh4 🧠 masterful gambit nomura
With all this conjecture im surprised no one is considering that the Nameless Star could be Rinoa and not Stella. The things she says about the person she pines for could easily be applied to Squall as much as Noctis. So very strange.
I still think the letter is just an easter egg, same as baby Kiara in the same credit sequence. but it is interesting to ponder, even if i don't think the series has evolved in a direction where it'll come back. though it would be really funny for rinoa to show up as like, strelitzia's roommate lol
Bug stretch but if Rinoa ever gets put in the KH series, they can pull it the themes of 8 and make it so they're lost and will find each other. Or they pull that Rinoa is Ultimecia theory and say she was "corrupted by darkness".
Considering Sora seems to have gotten isekaied and is greeted by a new character in the trailer for KH4, we might have a lot of those original characters taking a step back. At least until Sora finds a way to reconnect with them in this new situation he finds himself in, of course. I'm on a lot of hopium and copium but maybe we get a few FF characters in the new saga and maybe one of those ends up being Rinoa, leading to us finally getting full closure for Squall!
I think it's alot simpler than you're making it. Leon is ashamed of not being able to save her when Raident Garden fell to darkness and became Hollow Bastion. She was likely returned to life when everything was reset at the end of KH1 but Leon doesn't feel like he can show himself to her yet. Not until he's fixed everything.
I don't really get what they were thinking. I haven't played through 8, but isn't it implied that Rinoa is a powerful sorceress? She could have somehow traveled to another world somehow. And if anyone is canonically dead, it's Aeris. Which is why I found it weird that she's in the game. Cloud and Squall should have switched places, Cloud being the one who feels like he failed because Aeris died. I don't know, I'm a loony myself.
We have been thinking that subject x was scold. But what if its been Rhinoa the whole time and kh4 may be a mostly final fantasy cast like we've been begging for
Well, the easiest solution to me in that she died during Radiant Garden fall and the letter Leon is reading would have been written by her prior to the incident. I mean, we know for a fact Sora had a mother back in KH1, before the events of the game, but no one in the series even question what happened to her (or Riku's parents for that matter), like Kairi's grandmother who was in Radiant Garden back in the day.
KH Rinoa may not be dead. She could have been placed in restraint like Adel. She could be in Time Compression. She could be a few other places as well. Maybe she wasnt anywhere near Squall was he was teleported between the two universes, but the others that showed up were. For whatever reason.
I feel like, if he does have any intention of expanding on the FF side of the story, Nomura is definitely going to have it all link to Quadratum and the World of Fiction. Like that’s their true World of origin or something (Quadratum just being Latin for square feels like a big gimme). It would explain why the FF characters have always felt like they’ve got their own thing going on that we don’t know about (Auron’s past and the Cloud-Sephiroth conflict come to mind) and KH4 feels like the perfect opportunity to answer a lot of questions about the FF side of the story, especially considering it seems they may have completely different or at least heavily altered backstories from their original FF games. Idk man, I just feel like the KH franchise has so much to offer its side-characters. While I liked KH3 being focused on the core cast for the grand finale of the saga, my fear is that-with how scarce new KH games have become recently-we’ll never be given time to see these side-stories be resolved.
Rinoa is a lot more complex as a character. The entire theory she’s Ultimecia is a big risk to add to KH. Had KH3 actually added any FF characters they could have easily had her as a Nobody and made Squalls arc complete when you free her. But they decided to fuck the fan base and exclude anything FF because of the directors grudge at being sacked from FF15
Game Dove: "Rinoa is dead or whatever disneyfied version of death exist in kingdom hearts." Me: "So the shadow realm. GOT IT!" 👍 Also the Aya almost being in KH I am so glad never happened. Still will never forgive him for making the 3rd birthday and what he did to her character and the other characters in that series. As well as putting in the clothes removal gameplay thing for them when you know the game's ending twist. This is just me, but he can not write female characters well other then Aqua. He only designs characters and writes what he THINKS the character is like from the series, and puts them in KH, which is really sad he just doesn't play the games or watch a video on youtube. I know JP has let plays he can watch to take notes on. Sorry just really salty what he also did with Kairi as well. Girl fought better the then guys and Yensid said, "Still more training." LIKE? Do you not have eyes? Kairi was doing more, then Sora and Riku did with there first time with the keyblade. Story reasons be damn.
i always thought the pink wings from the letter was actually aerith, hinting at a romance between them. They were clearly wings akin to rinoa's but i felt that specifically was the element to signify romance, just with someone else. it also cuts immediately to aerith so yeah. squall also really cares about the dalmations in kh1 which could also be connected to rinoa, the start of a soft spot for dogs, maybe he failed to proctect one too, ya know?
I've been saying for years that Rinoa is just Blue Aeris on a sugar high. They already had Aeris and Yuffie (whether or not they had a bias toward FF7 is another subject ((they did but its my favorite one so i aint mad)) ) so Rinoa wouldn't have added much by being there. Sadly, she was more useful offscreen to fuel Leon (an overused and arguably sexist trope, fridge the girlfriend to spur the male hero on) so that's what they did.
I'm fine with Final Fantasy being removed from the main story of Kingdom Hearts, but the fact remains, Kingdom Hearts has alternate versions of Final Fantasy characters. would be really cool if people made their own Final Fantasy games based on their Kingdom Hearts variants. This is the perfect way to explore fanfics on these characters. Nomura's not using them
Wouldn’t Rinoa being a sorceress allow her the power to travel between worlds? Or if there’s argument against that and the fact that she “isn’t actually a sorceress,” wouldn’t the Rinoa is Ultimecia theory also be a way to explain her surviving and making it to a different world as well? Just saying it could fit with the way KH incorporates small character sub plots into the overarching story 🤷🏽♂️
So... what you're saying is... the designer built his pixel dream gf and can't make anything that matches the fantasy in his head that he has built up over the ensuing decades? I do kinda like the idea that, were one to remove the hyper stylized, even the old women look like they're 29, designs, Rinoa wouldn't fall into the "conventionally attractive" category.
Someone fact check me but I distinctly remember reading a rumor years ago that rinoa was actually based off of a staffer in squaresoft and she got spooked and ended up leaving because of nomura's attention, she even had the same dog irl, thus the whole angelo dog mechanic that seems a little out of place. I can't remember where I read it, otherwise I'd cite it- Can someone go internet digging and find what I'm talking about? Im not sure if its true, but its wild if it is. Story always stuck with me, idk might explain why he feels disinclined to "share" her because she means something personal to him? Wouldnt be the first time a dev is in love with a character- lightning's co-creator has a total crush on her and wanted her to be real 😳
Something important I'd like to bring up, in the KH1 manga Cid mentions he used a gummiship to bring the FF kids to Traverse Town meaning if Rinoa somehow made it out of Ansem's devastation of Radiant Garden then she'd be trapped and left behind there. I'd imagine Squall and the rest assumed she died and that letter in KH2 was to let him know she's ok.
Another, darker meaning of the letter is that she really did die prior to KH1 and the letter was a final farewell that Squall didn't have the heart to open until post KH2.
Guhhh nooo! 😢
“I’ll be there…”
Ocean sounds.
Anyone ever see the ocean opening of KH vibe similarly to FF8’s intro
I think the most likely conclusion is that Rinoa died during the original fall of Hollow Bastion in the fight. The symbol on Leon’s jacket was in her memory and the letter was an unopened message to him from just before that he’d sworn not to open until it was all over.
Couldn't she had lost her heart to the Heartless? That might set up a storyline where Squall must reunite Rinoa's heart with her Nobody who is currently MIA as of the fall of Radiant Garden. Would certainly be an amazing side quest for KH4.
This madlad has done it!
She started the "Rinoa is Dead" theory, and it renders the fanbase utterly divided 😂
History repeats itself
If Rinoa is dead, does that mean we have to speculate that Squall/Leon is also secretly somebody else through time travel shenanigans? (Which is probably unironically easier in KH to explain that it would be in FFVIII lmao)
Couldn't she had lost her heart to the Heartless? That might set up a storyline where Squall must reunite Rinoa's heart with her Nobody who is currently MIA as of the fall of Radiant Garden. Would certainly be an amazing side quest for KH4.
People go crazy for 0.2 "explaining" Mickey's absence of a shirt, while this thread that's been hanging since 2005 is "just a reference, don't think too hard".
No, seriously. Its not Rinover. We still have Kingdom Hearts 5.
the wings fly up like a heart floating up, in the same way a heart released from a heartless floats up. perhaps the letter was her form of lingering will, in that the letter was her final words to leon before she can gained closure/peace and die peacefully or something
This is my assumption as well
Couldn't she had lost her heart to the Heartless? That might set up a storyline where Squall must reunite Rinoa's heart with her Nobody who is currently MIA as of the fall of Radiant Garden. Would certainly be an amazing side quest for KH4.
This is legitimately the first time in over a decade someone has actually added something new to the conversation with this franchise. I hope Nomura didn’t “forget” outright. I hope it gets some textual explanation and closure before Nomura’s retirement in the games.
It's technically already known why. Nomura cutout most of Nojimas story with the Final Fantasy characters so fans can speculate for themselves. So it's not really a "mystery" as to why Nomura decided it to be this way.
First time in over a decade? This is not a new topic buddy.
If she is “dead” then she may be in Quadratum or the Final World, so we may yet see her again. Also, interestingly enough, the VA for Rinoa from the Dissidia series was recently interviewed and when asked when we’ll see Rinoa again, she said she signed an NDA but stated she’s very excited for the future of the character. So I’m optimistic, she’s one of my favorite FF characters!
That'd be neat if she's in Quadratum.
Oooooo very hopeful
It'd be neat, but given how they tried to cut final fantasy characters in kh3 i doubt we're going to see many of them again if any. I doubt we'll even get an ending for cloud
@@peridusk6128 while it’s unlikely, I’m hoping Sqaure saw peoples’ complaints about the lack of FF characters and is course correcting. I mean, hell, even Yazora is based on proto-Noctis so maybe??
Couldn't she had lost her heart to the Heartless? That might set up a storyline where Squall must reunite Rinoa's heart with her Nobody who is currently MIA as of the fall of Radiant Garden. Would certainly be an amazing side quest for KH4.
PS: Might be that Squeenix is working on a _remake_ of FF8? Unlikely, but wow would be that awesome.
Me seeing the ending credits of KH2 for the first time: Woooow! I can't wait to see Rinoa in KH3!!! I'm so hyped!!!
Playing KH3 and not seeing Rinoa:
The general dearth of the Final Fantasy/SE half of this Disney and Square Enix crossover series in recent games is disappointing in general tbh
KH4 is kinda the perfect time to introduce her to the series. She could pop up in Unreality and that’d explain her absence. Where’s she been? Well… dead. But also, gives some justice to her character as it seems like not just anyone can end up in Unreality (maybe idk, we have no idea what they’ve got cooking for KH4).
I wouldn’t be surprised if they planned to have her in a future game where you help Leon find her, but didn’t happen because of how crazy is own story got
How controlling disney got with not wanting final fantasy characters* fixed it for ya
Couldn't she had lost her heart to the Heartless? That might set up a storyline where Squall must reunite Rinoa's heart with her Nobody who is currently MIA as of the fall of Radiant Garden. Would certainly be an amazing side quest for KH4.
@@ernjdasdd Thats literally not true. Nomura himself said in an interview that the reason the FF characters had fewer and fewer appearances as the series went on is because he personally felt they'd overstayed their welcome and that they were a relic of the series past that wouldn't be missed. It wasn't until fan reaction to KH3 having none that he realized people really wanted them so he had the Radiant Garden crew show up in Re:Mind.
@@Evnyofdeath I double checked and googled around and you're correct. Can't remember where I saw but at the time everyone was saying Disney owned majority of the property and wanted more disney and less Square properties in it.
I like the idea that Rinoa is some how linked to quadratum, but that's probably not the case, but hey stranger things have happened.
your caption/comment/author note at 3:46 is a slam dunk - some fans will genuinely wax about sora being the MoM and the inclusion of the Type-0 cast, it's wild to see them dismiss ANYTHING as "just an easter egg"
Clearly, Rinoa was possessed by a sorceress who time traveled back from future events to take her body.
In Kingdom Hearts, this time-traveling sorceress is probably Maleficent, who used the link to Rinoa to being Heartless into Radiant Garden in the first place and trigger the events that made it become Hollow Bastion.
😂😂
That'd be really interesting actually! And ultimately not worth anything in the grand scheme but still cool!
Dang now we would get a real connection and crossover between Final Fantasy and Disney.
I wonder if she was a test subject in Radiant Garden experiments
I'm a FF fan getting into KH and honestly, I never noticed the design choice for Leon at the time. That is a cool detail to point out. I really hope she does make an appearance somewhere in KH one of these games.
Nomura: "You want me to add *another* woman into Kingdom Hearts? I-- how-- Don't you have *enough* women? I don't even want to add Final Fantasy Characters anymore and here you are asking me for a lady FF character in the year of our lord 2024???"
you just KNOW he was gritting his teeth making melody of memory
Where the hell is this "Nomura dislikes women" narrative coming from? Did you forget that he created Aqua, one of the best characters in the series?
@@Darth_Spyro ngl my comment was intended as a joke but you are the second person to get offended by it (the first person deleted ther comment but they were very spicy about it...) I was also going to throw in something like "And on top of that you want a- A final fantasy woman that ISN'T from Final Fantasy 7?! The- how- are there EVEN final fantasies that aren't 7???" But forgot.
Though if we were to have a serious discussion about how the female original characters in KH are handled, while Aqua and Larxene stand out pretty well Kairi, Xion and Namine end up feeling a bit too samey personality-wise? Also for how important Kairi is she sadly doesn't get to do a lot and I am still disappointed in how she was handled in KH3.
Yall are so hateful 😂 he added ff characters in kh3 remind
@@rosies69 to be hateful would require hate in my heart for what we are talking about lol!
And as I said in another reply in this comment thread, it was supposed to be funny
Great video. Rinoa is one of my favorite FF Heroines, so I hope we see her one day
So there's actually a lot of cut story content from KH2. It's not just Rinoa that's a mystery but also Auron, Tidus, Yuna, Rikku, and Paine. Kazushige Nojima actually wrote most of the Final Fantasy characters in Kingdom Hearts. He actually wrote so much for them that they would even be tied back into the main story of KH2 but Nomura decided to exclude half of what he wrote so that fans can fill in the blank. That's why Sephiroth appears in a Major Cutscene. They originally had much bigger plans for them in KH2 but instead focused on the Organization. It wasn't until KH3: ReMind we see a significant role for the Final Fantasy characters in Kingdom Hearts with Yozora and his connections to Quadratum. KH2 was essentially going to spell out exactly why Yuna was a pixie, where's Rinoa, and what exactly is going on with Sephiroth but completely abandoned them to allow fan speculation. It's a shame too because people swear KH3 had no Final Fantasy involvement because by the end they have the most importance at the end of the story. If the wings on his jacket are meant to represent his story has already happened then it makes Seifer, Raijin, and Fuijin much more mysterious because now they're kids. But that doesn't make sense at ALL. Seifer gave Squall his scar back when they were working for the SEED Garden. So how do they have their scars if they're ages apart from when their battle was supposed to happen? There's a lot more mysteries surrounding the Final Fantasy characters I wish the writers actually focused on.
You can find most this information from interviews and the Ultimania sections questioning about Yuna, Tifa, and Sephiroth.
I checked those Ultimania sections and none of them mentioned anything about Nomura removing things related to the FF cast to encourage speculation. The Nojima interview in the Ultimania, aka the one that talks about Yuna, Tifa, and Sephiroth, doesn't have him mention anything like that OR writing so much for the FF chars it'd tie into the main plot. The main Nomura interview of the Ultimania has him give a reason for why YRP are pixies and it's literally just that he "wanted to have a FF character showing up as "something that looks human but isn't human"."
The "major cutscene" Sephiroth shows up in, the "ooh look at the FF characters fighting the heartless" one, has him be focused on just Cloud and nothing else because it's an FF fanservice scene.
@@cillbipher2613key phrase "INTERVIEWS and ULTIMANIA". There's a shit ton of interviews. I think it was Famitstu if memory serves? You're really bad at researching. I didn't just make up some head canon. I read this. Multiple times across multiple videos. Matter of fact how did you fail so spectacularly? It's not hard to find information really. Just niche.
Alternate universe shenanigans at play. Leon doesn’t know Seifer in Kingdom Hearts, and yet he has that scar. As George Lucas would say, “It’s like poetry. It rhymes.” We have to assume that Leon managed to get an identical scar to Squall by sheer coincidence
@@Gloomdrake Exactly. With the dubious exception of Auron, every FF character in KH is an alternate counterpart not related to the original. Leon could have gotten his scar from the initial Heartless attack on Radiant Garden when he was a teenager. In contrast, Seifer could have gotten HIS scar from a mundane accident as Twilight Town never really had much trouble until Days...where even then no one ever seems to notice the Heartless.
I actually really like Rinoa. I like her trying too hard, even when she was a little clueless about the 'how' part. It was a nice switch, normally that's the 'guy' role in games.
As for the letter, I think it would literally be the words from the ff8 intro. That would be fitting. You have to remember, ff8 was needlessly convoluted. The idea is that if everything else fails, they would find each other at the beach by the orphanage again. It makes sense that they both go looking for each other there. So, to answer your question about where Rinoa is? I'd bet the beach by the orphanage. Whether that's a literal place in Kingdom Hearts, or if it has some variant, I don't know.
oh i love that actually! what a great idea
She is on destiny islands, teaching the FF youngsters at some Destiny Island Garden 😂
I just had some Thought: In Melody of Memory we see the Fairy Godmother can enter the Final World at Will. What if she does this regularry. Basicly she speeks to the Hearts lingering there, helping them to move on. If Rinoa asked to write her final Message down and give it to Leon that would be her Salvation. This would also fit into the Symbolism of her Symbol flying up.
let us all descend into madness together lol
onward we go!
May chaos take the world!
Perhaps Zack, Cloud and Sephiroth are now also in Quadratum? What about the TWEWY crew too? I feel like TWEWY could be very important to KH's future
So informative! So interesting. I hope Nomura revisits this in KH4, because he's not shy about picking up old plot threads and doing the unexpected with them.
Considering FF8 proper has scientists blast rinoa off into space, it's not impossible something similar happened before or during the heartless' attack. The key difference being, within the kh universe, being sent off into space could have her end up in a whole different world.
I genuinely don't believe this moment was meant to be any deeper than the writers running out of things for Squall to do, so they gave him a semi-canon epilogue before phasing him out. It's not commital in the miniscule chance an official sequel is made, but it's just enough for fans to understand.
Loving these videos!
thank you so much, glad you enjoy!!!
Hehe! Was super looking forward to this, and once again this was just as good as expected. Also "God DAMN Setzer!!" I'm glad you doubled down on that from after the chat on the podcast ❤ - Jack
thank you!! my grudge against setzer is eternal
Omg omg omg omg fuckin finally someone is talking about this, I been wondering for years what happened to rinnoa, especially when I beaten ff8 in 2022 likeeeeee where is my girl at
For once, a kingdom hearts tidbit I had no idea about. This was fascinating.
She'll show up in Quadratum
I love how after 22 years of me being a half dedicated KH fan, knowing a lot about the scrapped content and the beta stuff, and storyline elements and incredible combat, from the upcoming SQ event to KH: Missing Link being slated for later (maybe), to learning speedrunning tricks and out of bounds stuff, in the end I'm learning something new.
And Rinoa being Kingdom Hearts as a mystery... This i have not even heard of. This is completely new. And in KH2 i always thought the symbol floating from the letter was feom Aerith, and before i even touched anything FFVII related, i thought it was a cute thing that happened.
I would expect Nomura to be like
"Um... Let's have a retcon okay? Lets give a reason on why she can't appear in KH, but not explain, even explicitly."
And like... KH lore pretty much was is... Well... Calling it a weird mess is a bit... Off.
Thank you for introducing me to a new mystery with Kingdom Hearts. Much love to ya.
I can't believe in the 20 or so years since I first played Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2, I'm just now learning about this entire Rinoa subplot from a video in 2025. (For reference, I only ever played a couple hours of FF8.) I've beaten KH2 several times yet never knew about her wings on his jacket, never knew the letter he was reading was supposed to be from her, and never knew what the symbol was that floats up from it. I always assumed he was reading a letter from Sora relaying the letter he got from Mickey, and had no idea what the symbol was supposed to be (totally forgot this part of the ending even existed). Crazy, still finding new stuff about KH2 even now.
As someone who has beaten KH2 around 100 times, I can’t believe I never noticed Leon’s moment with the letter in the end credits 😮💨
5:10
Cloud and Zack were both in Olympus from BBS through KH1. Auron was also technically in Hercules' world, but it seems like every world shares the same hell so I'll only give that one half points
Y'know the symbol that flies off that paper has the same hue and sparkle effect that a released heart does. Maybe Rinoa spent that time as a Heartless and the letter was like a "If you're reading this, I died." kind of message?
She's literally immortal. That was like half the plot in FF8. The sorceress power makes you immortal. Which is why Squall and party had to allow her to do Time Compression or else the Sorceress Power would always be a problem.
@tylercafe1260 I never played FF8 so that detail wasn't in my knowledge.
@@feiradragon7915Unfortunately theories like these I have to assume you know your history and knowledge. It's impossible to navigate fan discussions like this in Kingdom Hearts without spoiling a lot of Final Fantasy. Maybe that's why Rinoa wasn't added. She would've added a whole different angle that would've confused kids. Sorry if that hurt your chances of trying FF8.
@tylercafe1260 Eh, I don't mind spoilers on old games. FF is a franchise I've slightly delved into but mostly because it's adjacent to KH. I'm most familiar with 7 and 10.
It would have been cool to see her for 5 seconds in Re:Mind. Her plot hole could have been incorporated in saving Sora
Honestly when I heard about her more I thought this Rinoa woman maybe was one of the experiments of Apprentice Xehanort or just a random victim of the Heartless Experiments he was doing and one got loss which killed her.
she became ultimecia duh. :D
Ultimecia is super dead. By having the powers shift from Adel > Edea > Rinoa > Ultimecia then back to > Edea she made it so the sorceress power will no longer exist in the future besides Rinoa.
I agree with you, Squall really can’t exist in something without Rinoa to some degree. Very interesting video! Kingdom Hearts is this giant thing that’s always looming around things I like, yet I still don’t really know anything about it
kingdom hearts was how i got into final fantasy haha i totally get what you mean!
Movement between worlds
You know that black hole thing characters from the organization like to use to teleport? Technically anyone can do it or at least some form of teleportation. If you just really want it enough. That’s how the Beast got to Hollow Bastion He just wanted to find Belle in there he was on the front doors of Hollow Bastion. And Rinoa is already a sorceress She would probably have an easier time traveling between worlds or for that matter even across Time. I think Maleficent already has parallels with Ultimecia. So maybe Maleficent captured Rinoa And something happened where Rinoa is lost in time maybe does not exist anymore
I’ve been begging for Lightning to show up and be Kairi’s “Leon/Cloud” figure going forward, but I can’t deny I’d love to see Rinoa finally get her due time in the limelight.
Sadly, most writers don’t think this carefully about their stories.
They did though. They just decided to not add the rest of the Final Fantasy story in the KH2 script. But they actually did write an explanation but Nomura only left enough so fans can speculate but no direct answers until KH3. But Sephiroth in KH2 has been well documented to have a much bigger relevancy in the main plot before the final draft.
that's a.. werid comment
great video
I hope we see Rinoa just chilling at some cafe in Quadratum
i understood the scene as leon/squall finally allowing himself to read a final farewell she may have written to him, something that he had held on to until he was ready to open it
definitely agree that she was slain or is in someplace unreachable even in KH standards
I mean Leon has only showed up in 2 games, and that letter hinting at Rinoa only appeared in the epilogue of the second. All of the Final Fantasy characters had their side plots and development cancelled when Nomura decided he wanted a redo on Final Fantasy Versus 13 instead of making Kingdom Hearts, so presumably she's off hanging out with Sephiroth and Vaan and all the other cameos that would have been present if the game was made 15 years ago instead of 5. If we're lucky maybe she'll show up in Kingdom Hearts 4D when we replay through the story of KH1 again for the 17th time
Great analysis!
Maybe Rinoa was another person captured and used in experiments alongside Subject X?
It could be a good place to add her, maybe she even escaped with Subject X and eventually wrote the letter.
I'd love for Nomura to tie this thread together and honestly now is the perfect chance.
My theory since in KH3 it was semi established that the Station of Awakening is also The Final World and that The Final World has a Direct Connection to the possible location Sora is. I'd say she is likely somewhere there or one of the countless fragmented spirit stars in The Final World we just can't decipher which one.
Tifa wears an outfit that resembles Rinoas in KH, this made me wonder about the alternate lives theme in ff8 that Cloud also goes through. Possible that Tifa and Rinoa are the same spirit, and when faced with both Cloud and Squall, she is there for Cloud first, so is there as Tifa, but with hints of Rinoas outfit due to Squalls presence.
Huh? That's just her Advent children design
She's literally just wearing her outfit from Advent Children, just like all the other FFVII characters in KHII. It's not meant to reference Rinoa at all.
I don’t think she’s dead, but I think she might be trapped between worlds in some way. I think what most likely happened is she got trapped in Radiant Garden when Cid evacuated the others by Gummi ship and Squall wasn’t able to protect her hence his wearing her wings on his back. I think this version of Rinoa is still a sorceress and tried to use her magic to teleport her elsewhere and that didn’t exactly work out. Like she escaped from Radiant Garden and is still alive, but not able to return to normal space for some reason.
The irony of missing link being missing lol
The funniest answer is that she broke up with him and he's just never gotten over it. She never shows up because squall always makes an embarrassing scene every time she does
ok but imagine if in kh4 she's a main party member and the entire point of quadratum is that it is acutally death, and those that go there can never go back fully.
the kingdom hearts canon is completely seperate canon from the final fantasy world.. lol... each universe has no correlation to one another whatsoever. the only reason final fantasy characters were in KH in the first place was to make it familiar to other people until KH created and established its own original cast. pretty much just placeholders, there likely won't be FF characters in it anymore in the future so there isn't really anything to speculate about.. lol. FF = filler.
I really hope they pick up the Squall x Rinoa and Cloud x Sephiroth plotline in KH4.
god i would PAY to see that happen....
I hope Cloud and Sephiroth finally get to kiss on screen
First of, very solid points, and I don't necessarily disagree. But I do have an objection or two.
For one, yes, the ultimania interview did explicitly say that Nomura "added the wings to imply something happened in the past", and it is reasonable to assume that the "something" relates to Rinoa, since it's a symbol related to her. And he did say yes when asked if the wings were based off of her image.
But technically, he didn’t explicitly say that the wings meant something happened *to Rinoa* in the past. Just that something happened, and he thought that the wings from Rinoa's design could imply that.
If he, for some insane reason, had decided to repurpose Rinoa's wing symbol for KH Leon to *just* be about Radiant Gardens past (probably not, would be insane, but this *is* KH), then having the print on the back does not actually confirm her existance. Like, we cant really know if the wings (in KH context) are something that Rinoa had worn, or maybe planned to be the crest of some noble family of Radiant Garden that Squall had a knights duty towards and failed, or some 3rd thing.
I know, very unlikely and absurd. Just saying.
And if the wing symbol was just a Radiant Garden symbol, then the appearance of them at the end of KH2 would fit as simply symbolising Squall having finally made amends for his past failures.
^ Now, I don't believe the arguments I made above, but my mind did go there, so meh.
For something else, Rinoa could have "died" in the past and still written that letter Squall reads in KH2. Could be that she wrote down something for him shortly before they parted ways, and the letter simply wasn't found until much later.
Basically just saying that even though he reads it in the presence where she's presumably "dead", it may have been written in the past long ago.
Love seing these kinds of vids though, obscure theories are one of the best thing of this franchise :D
Pretty interesting nice video btw
Squall: I miss my wife Sora
Well, maybe Rinoa is in The Final World as one of the Stars that reside there, I mean whe could have died whe Radiant Garden became Hollow Bastion (either from the darkness or the flood) and the only thing she left was the letter Leon reads at the end of KH2.
Yea Laguna in BBS would have been great, but I would like to see Rinoa at some point. But now that the KH cast has filled out, I don't think it's likely.
This makes me wanna play FF8, bc that credits scene in KH2 always confused me and I want more context! I mean, considering this video exists I doubt there’ll be too much closure on that specifically, but Rinoa sounds like a fun character :3
Not adding anymore ff characters but she’s already someone who existed in the series so she will actually be in quadratum in kh4 🧠 masterful gambit nomura
With all this conjecture im surprised no one is considering that the Nameless Star could be Rinoa and not Stella. The things she says about the person she pines for could easily be applied to Squall as much as Noctis. So very strange.
I still think the letter is just an easter egg, same as baby Kiara in the same credit sequence. but it is interesting to ponder, even if i don't think the series has evolved in a direction where it'll come back. though it would be really funny for rinoa to show up as like, strelitzia's roommate lol
Why are the wings red? Red is usually associated with corruption, maybe there's something there?
clearly that means she became ultimecia and we'll fight her as a boss in kh4
@flutterdice4195 clearly! Master of Masters was Hyne all along!?
Love the Irish accent.. need to go visit my family over there 👀
Occam's razor is she wrote the letter before she died
Bug stretch but if Rinoa ever gets put in the KH series, they can pull it the themes of 8 and make it so they're lost and will find each other. Or they pull that Rinoa is Ultimecia theory and say she was "corrupted by darkness".
Considering Sora seems to have gotten isekaied and is greeted by a new character in the trailer for KH4, we might have a lot of those original characters taking a step back. At least until Sora finds a way to reconnect with them in this new situation he finds himself in, of course.
I'm on a lot of hopium and copium but maybe we get a few FF characters in the new saga and maybe one of those ends up being Rinoa, leading to us finally getting full closure for Squall!
I think it's alot simpler than you're making it. Leon is ashamed of not being able to save her when Raident Garden fell to darkness and became Hollow Bastion. She was likely returned to life when everything was reset at the end of KH1 but Leon doesn't feel like he can show himself to her yet. Not until he's fixed everything.
Keep it a stack, she's probably one of the stars in the final world in KH3 and everybody missed it.
No, I don't want to imagine it. I'm not about to go crazy
I don't really get what they were thinking. I haven't played through 8, but isn't it implied that Rinoa is a powerful sorceress? She could have somehow traveled to another world somehow. And if anyone is canonically dead, it's Aeris. Which is why I found it weird that she's in the game. Cloud and Squall should have switched places, Cloud being the one who feels like he failed because Aeris died. I don't know, I'm a loony myself.
Rinoa is like Tifa, Aerith and Yuna combined
We have been thinking that subject x was scold. But what if its been Rhinoa the whole time and kh4 may be a mostly final fantasy cast like we've been begging for
Well, the easiest solution to me in that she died during Radiant Garden fall and the letter Leon is reading would have been written by her prior to the incident.
I mean, we know for a fact Sora had a mother back in KH1, before the events of the game, but no one in the series even question what happened to her (or Riku's parents for that matter), like Kairi's grandmother who was in Radiant Garden back in the day.
I think the dead of all the worlds end up in the same place, with hades ruling over them. So the letter might just be from there...
Aya would’ve been hilarious to see in KH1, mainly bc she would feel somehow more out of place than the final fantasy characters.
KH Rinoa may not be dead. She could have been placed in restraint like Adel. She could be in Time Compression. She could be a few other places as well. Maybe she wasnt anywhere near Squall was he was teleported between the two universes, but the others that showed up were. For whatever reason.
I feel like, if he does have any intention of expanding on the FF side of the story, Nomura is definitely going to have it all link to Quadratum and the World of Fiction. Like that’s their true World of origin or something (Quadratum just being Latin for square feels like a big gimme). It would explain why the FF characters have always felt like they’ve got their own thing going on that we don’t know about (Auron’s past and the Cloud-Sephiroth conflict come to mind) and KH4 feels like the perfect opportunity to answer a lot of questions about the FF side of the story, especially considering it seems they may have completely different or at least heavily altered backstories from their original FF games.
Idk man, I just feel like the KH franchise has so much to offer its side-characters. While I liked KH3 being focused on the core cast for the grand finale of the saga, my fear is that-with how scarce new KH games have become recently-we’ll never be given time to see these side-stories be resolved.
Rinoa is a lot more complex as a character. The entire theory she’s Ultimecia is a big risk to add to KH. Had KH3 actually added any FF characters they could have easily had her as a Nobody and made Squalls arc complete when you free her. But they decided to fuck the fan base and exclude anything FF because of the directors grudge at being sacked from FF15
Game Dove: "Rinoa is dead or whatever disneyfied version of death exist in kingdom hearts."
Me: "So the shadow realm. GOT IT!" 👍
Also the Aya almost being in KH I am so glad never happened. Still will never forgive him for making the 3rd birthday and what he did to her character and the other characters in that series. As well as putting in the clothes removal gameplay thing for them when you know the game's ending twist. This is just me, but he can not write female characters well other then Aqua. He only designs characters and writes what he THINKS the character is like from the series, and puts them in KH, which is really sad he just doesn't play the games or watch a video on youtube. I know JP has let plays he can watch to take notes on. Sorry just really salty what he also did with Kairi as well. Girl fought better the then guys and Yensid said, "Still more training." LIKE? Do you not have eyes? Kairi was doing more, then Sora and Riku did with there first time with the keyblade. Story reasons be damn.
i always thought the pink wings from the letter was actually aerith, hinting at a romance between them. They were clearly wings akin to rinoa's but i felt that specifically was the element to signify romance, just with someone else. it also cuts immediately to aerith so yeah.
squall also really cares about the dalmations in kh1 which could also be connected to rinoa, the start of a soft spot for dogs, maybe he failed to proctect one too, ya know?
They as aren't shamed enough to put 8 on sale (along with every other ff game) EXCEPT FOR FF13, THEY DONT LIKE 13
I love this! FF8 is my favorite!
I've been saying for years that Rinoa is just Blue Aeris on a sugar high. They already had Aeris and Yuffie (whether or not they had a bias toward FF7 is another subject ((they did but its my favorite one so i aint mad)) ) so Rinoa wouldn't have added much by being there. Sadly, she was more useful offscreen to fuel Leon (an overused and arguably sexist trope, fridge the girlfriend to spur the male hero on) so that's what they did.
I see now. Obviously Rinoa is secretly the Master of Masters and Sora's mom! It all add up when you're bad at math.
I'm fine with Final Fantasy being removed from the main story of Kingdom Hearts, but the fact remains, Kingdom Hearts has alternate versions of Final Fantasy characters.
would be really cool if people made their own Final Fantasy games based on their Kingdom Hearts variants. This is the perfect way to explore fanfics on these characters. Nomura's not using them
It could be that she was the escaped girl from Xemnas's lab
Wouldn’t Rinoa being a sorceress allow her the power to travel between worlds? Or if there’s argument against that and the fact that she “isn’t actually a sorceress,” wouldn’t the Rinoa is Ultimecia theory also be a way to explain her surviving and making it to a different world as well? Just saying it could fit with the way KH incorporates small character sub plots into the overarching story 🤷🏽♂️
So... what you're saying is... the designer built his pixel dream gf and can't make anything that matches the fantasy in his head that he has built up over the ensuing decades?
I do kinda like the idea that, were one to remove the hyper stylized, even the old women look like they're 29, designs, Rinoa wouldn't fall into the "conventionally attractive" category.
Was nomura just a simp of his own creation and dint want to share?
I wanna know where Zell is, no i sont care that we have Hayner, wheres Zell?
How do we even know it's a letter?
I also just remembered that Sorceresses in Final Fantasy 8 can't die. So Rinoa being dead? Actually doesn't make sense.
Exactly the level of insanity i like.
Kingdom hearts three came out six years ago. This is punishment
Clearly Rinoa is in Quadratum
Why are you using old 2006 cutscenes and not the hd ones?? Also yeah missing link is delayed. Kh4 is probably 2026
Hear me out... Rinoa became Maleficent
Someone fact check me but I distinctly remember reading a rumor years ago that rinoa was actually based off of a staffer in squaresoft and she got spooked and ended up leaving because of nomura's attention, she even had the same dog irl, thus the whole angelo dog mechanic that seems a little out of place. I can't remember where I read it, otherwise I'd cite it- Can someone go internet digging and find what I'm talking about? Im not sure if its true, but its wild if it is. Story always stuck with me, idk might explain why he feels disinclined to "share" her because she means something personal to him? Wouldnt be the first time a dev is in love with a character- lightning's co-creator has a total crush on her and wanted her to be real 😳