Ever since the reveal trailer for Kingdom Hearts 4 dropped, fans both old and new have been asking who is Strelitzia, the orange-haired girl in the white dress that appeared in the trailer?
Unfortunately, as should be expected with the Kingdom Hearts series, there isn’t a straightforward answer. If you’ve played the mobile game, Kingdom Hearts: Union X, however, Strelitzia (pronounced like "struh-lit-see-uh") should be a household name to you, but for those coming in fresh to Kingdom Hearts 4 you may want to keep reading on.
Spoiler warning: The rest of this story will delve into the events of the Dark Seeker Saga in the Kingdom Hearts series, meaning if you haven’t played all of the games yet but still want to, we suggest you come back and read this later.
To understand who Strelitzia is, you first have to understand the mobile game Kingdom Hearts Union X (also known as Kingdom Hearts X, Kingdom Hearts Unchained X or Kingdom Hearts: Dark Road - just to make everything even more confusing.) In Union X players are sent to Daybreak Town - which is set prior to the events of the mainline series (Sora, Donald, and Goofy’s story) - and find out the series' main antagonist Xehanort’s origin story and how he turned to darkness.
To put it as plainly as possible, Strelitzia is a keyblade wielder from this time and her story takes place years before Sora picks up a keyblade and teams up with Donald and Goofy. As mentioned above, Strelitzia was introduced in Kingdom Hearts: Union X and unfortunately - spoiler warning - also meets her end during the mobile game too. Which is why it’s such a surprise that she’s popped up in the Kingdom Hearts 4 trailer, considering she and Sora haven’t crossed paths much before and she is supposedly dead.
Nothing should come as a surprise to Kingdom Hearts fans anymore though, as series creator Tetsuya Nomura has a reputation for making the lore of the games extremely complex. That isn’t to say that Strelitzia and Sora have no connection, however - as revealed in Kingdom Hearts Union X, Strelitzia is the younger sister of Lauriam aka Marluxia from Organisation XIII - if you’re familiar with the Kingdom Hearts villain - who Sora has had several run-ins with throughout the series.
In Kingdom Hearts Union X, Strelitzia is portrayed as an original keyblade wielder who was chosen by keyblade master Master Ava (who you may have seen in the Kingdom Hearts X Back Cover film on the Kingdom Hearts 2.8 compilation) to be a leader of the faction called the Dandelions - a group of wielders who represent each of the five Unions (a team players choose at the start of the game.)
Way too much happens in Kingdom Hearts Union X for us to go into fully. After all, it did originally release back in 2013, but essentially what you need to know is that Strelitzia - along with four other keyblade wielders - were tasked with collecting light (aka Lux) and were eventually forced to move onto "another world" in order to avoid the light expiring during the Keyblade War as told in the Book of Prophecies.
Unfortunately, Strelitzia doesn’t make it to the other world as she is killed by who we later find out is Ventus (who has his own stuff going on in Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep) but she makes sure to visit her aforementioned brother Lauriam before mysteriously passing on. It is however unclear if this means she is actually dead or has perhaps gone on to more sinister things following a brief scene in Kingdom Hearts Union X where she wears a white cloak that covers her face before she disappears.
There’s no way of knowing how Strelitzia plays into Kingdom Hearts 4 at the moment, but as we discovered via the trailer, Sora and Strelitzia are both located in Quadratum which the ex-Dandelion calls "an afterworld." so it’s possible that she and Sora are currently residing in some kind of afterlife following the events of Kingdom Hearts 3.
Feel out of the loop on all things Kingdom Hearts? Don't worry too much as even Goofy's English voice actor was surprised to hear that Kingdom Hearts 4 had been announced.
Kingdom Hearts 4 has been radio silent for 1,005 days, but don’t worry - Tetsuya Nomura teases he has the story planned out
The original Kingdom Hearts was initially "more hardcore" until Square Enix toned it down: "We had some puzzles in there that would make you go, 'what is this, Takeshi's Challenge?'"
