Radiant Garden Map and Theories

As a Saix/Isa roleplayer, I really felt like I needed a better sense of the actual layout of Radiant Garden, and unfortunately KH games only give you a map of the area you’re in. So I sat down and drew out all the areas in both Birth By Sleep and KH2 and connected them to make a full map, and oooooh boy did this process give me Some Theories about Radiant Garden.

Theories under the cut;

First off, the first thing to notice (that isn’t on the map but is something I noticed while making it) is that Radiant Garden has that circle-and-spike motif the Nobodies use absolutely everywhere. Which tells us that that motif isn’t Xemnas’s in particular, but Radiant Garden’s echoed in the Nobodies. Second, notice the overall shape of Radiant Garden from above. Where have we seen that shape before?



So the Nobodies are HUGELY influenced by the homeworld of the original eight. And Radiant Garden has an enormous “eight” motif going on, so given that we’ve seen the first eight members all literally in Radiant Garden, it seems really unlikely that Demyx, Luxord, Marluxia, or Larxene would have been from there (impossible in Marluxia and Larxene’s cases since we know from Final Mix and from the short stories that they joined the Org only a few months before Chain of Memories).

(This is kind of an aside, but it’s also my theory that longer hair on men was a status or power symbol in Radiant Garden. ALL of the Radiant Garden Organization characters except for Lexaeus (who sees himself as a servant) and Zexion (who is not interested in social status or power) grow their hair out long, with Xigbar growing his the longest, just slightly beating out Xaldin. All of the non-Radiant Garden Organization members have hair no longer than shoulder-length, but Xemnas, Xigbar, Xaldin, Vexen, Saix, and Axel all grow theirs out, even if their hair was short in Birth By Sleep.) Leon’s hair is also quite long in comparison to say Sora.

Furthermore, if you’ve played the Final Fantasy games, Radiant Garden also bears resemblance to the Gardens of FF8 (thanks to Ax for pointing this out to me).

Considering Leon would have been roughly Squall’s FF8 age when Radiant Garden fell, this probably isn’t a coincidence, and Radiant Garden was a literal mobile FF8-style Garden at one time.

Now for the Norty theories.

While directing Terra to Radiant Garden, Xehanort also refers to it as “The City of Light.” We know that Kairi is a Princess of Heart who lives in the castle, and we know from KH1 that the Door to Darkness is located inside the castle’s chapel. From this, we can surmise that Xehanort was probably specifically targeting Radiant Garden. This is why he’d already cozied up to Braig, a guard at the castle, and it’s likely why Terranort went straight there even while his memories were a mess.

As for how the city ends up looking like Hollow Bastion in KH1, we know that there is a huge amount of water that drains out of the city into the vast purification facility beneath it (where Terra fights Braig). The water seems to be coming out of small slits in the walls into the facility. We also know from KH2 that there was a defense system in place that Cid manages to redirect towards attacking the Heartless, but one of the machines early in the game (which is destroyed when the wall of the Bailey is blown up) has a dialogue box describing it as part of the mechanism protecting the town. We also know from KH1 that Hollow Bastion has some sort of magic which allows people and areas to be encased in bubbles to go below the surface (i.e. how you access the chests at the Rising Falls). We also know that the city has some kind of reactor that likely generates its power.

My theory is that when the world was being overrun by the Heartless, the reactor began to overheat, triggering the city’s defenses (which were built to protect from outside invasion or to prevent the reactor melting down, not to defend against an internal threat like a Heartless apocalypse from the castle). The city likely engaged the bubble magic around residential areas to protect the houses and closed the drains, flooding the city (which is why in KH1, the castle is surrounded by a vast expanse of endless water). After Leon and the others reclaimed the castle, they let the water drain, resulting in the empty canyons where Radiant Garden used to sit on a lake