For all the hate that Hanzo gets, he's honestly one of my favorite characters. Sure, if I'm playing competitive, I'll use him rather sparingly. But he was one of the first characters I used as a main, if not my very first. Probably because I'm a big fan of his namesake, and both Samurai and archers are generally super badass. I love his kit. I love that he can run up walls, and his footsteps are so quiet. The sonic arrow is so useful, and those scatter arrows are deadly. His ultimate is a little clunky, but if used unconventionally, or if timed right, it can really rack up your kill count. I always see other Hanzo players just shooting their Ult off across the map for no reason. I save mine up and wait for the opportune moment. I usually use my sonic arrows, go around a corner, and catch a whole group of them through a wall. Sure, sometimes I'll panic and pop it off at a stupid time, but honestly wasting your ultimate is occasionally par for the course.
Anyhow, all that said about how much I like Hanzo, I really don't love his skins. I usually use the demon skin, which I do like a lot. The two wolf skins are cool, but they're so over-used (probably because he hardly has any legendary skins). I do like the design of the Young Hanzo a lot, but honestly before I got the demon skin, I just stuck with his default one. I do really like the new cyberninja one quite a bit, as well (the artist who designed that skin as well as Pharah's Bedouin skin is on Instagram and has some really cool art. Can't remember his name, but... yeah.) Anyways, all this to say, when I thought I'd try designing my own Overwatch fan-skins, Hanzo was easily the first person to come to mind. Because he's SUCH a cool character, and I think he may have the least amount of skins. He's definitely towards the bottom, along with a lot of the newer characters.
For my design, I had the whole "dragon bros" motif in mind. I thought, "Man, it'd be cool if I did both Hanzo and Genji as anthropomorphic dragon-elf-lookin dudes." So, thus, you have my Dragonkyn design. The idea is that his clawed feet would allow him to climb up the walls, and his footsteps already sound kind of soft and padded, so the idea that he could just as easily have really thick, scaly feet would work well and you wouldn't have to change his sound design. He has a kind of mohawk thing going on, which I thought was pretty dragon-like. Ditched his bandana thing, so I think there's actually less going on physics-wise than his default skin. The one complexity about this design would be the texture of his skin. You'd probably have to zoom in to see, but he has these kind of rainbow-scales that I imagine being kind of shiny and luminous when rendered in 3d. The other big change is that his arrows are actually magic, as opposed to all techy. So instead of floating medal shards, hovering around the tip of his Scatter Arrow, it'd be luminous magical segments swirling about. Which sure, tactically speaking, would probably give you away and definitely clue in other players as to what technique you're using, but isn't the whole point of Hanzo to strike from afar before the other player knows where you are, anyways? But yeah, all in all, I like how this came out. It's very much my own style and palette, but applied to a character that I already like the design of. Definitely want to do more of these.
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Thanks for reading my novel about Hanzo!
--Ev
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