is the fictional character and co-protagonist of Square's (now Square Enix) 1999 role-playing video game Final Fantasy VIII. She is a teenaged member of a resistance faction known as the Forest Owls. After she recruits protagonist Squall Leonhart and his friends, she decides to stay with his group and falls in love with Squall in the process. During their adventure, she is briefly possessed by the evil sorceress Ultimecia and becomes a sorceress herself once the spirit leaves her body. After defeating Ultimecia, Rinoa and Squall become a couple. Rinoa has also made cameo appearances in other Final Fantasy and Square Enix games. Character artist Tetsuya Nomura designed her to be cute, not beautiful, as he wanted to create a character whose personality would leave an impression on the player. He felt that the more realistic graphical capabilities the original PlayStation could provide, along with advances like full motion video, made female characters too beautiful and was overshadowing their personalities. The design team set out from the beginning to make Rinoa's clothing more realistic than past Final Fantasy games. Critics and players alike have praised Rinoa for her personality and her beauty. They also praised her romance with Squall, calling both their relationship and Final Fantasy VIII one of the most romantic Final Fantasy titles. Some reviewers, however, called their relationship forced and criticized that they expressed their feelings so late in the story. Character design Character artist Tetsuya Nomura found Rinoa the hardest character to design in Final Fantasy VIII. Nomura emphasized that he tried to avoid letting the possibilities presented by the recent advancements in full-motion video technology become the entire focus. He believed that these innovations might tempt developers to make their female characters "too beautiful" and focus more on physical appearance than personality. With this concern in mind, Nomura set out to avoid making Rinoa gorgeous and simply make her "cute" instead. To further emphasize this, he wrote a list of vocabulary traits and physical habits for Rinoa's character that he felt conveyed this idea of "cute, not gorgeous", and sent them to scenario writer Kazushige Nojima along with the character's design. Designers also based Rinoa's appearance on feedback Nojima got after developing Final Fantasy VII. The women on the development team wanted a different design as they were concerned it was not realistic for a female character to fight in a miniskirt. Yoshinori Kitase, the