Behind the characters 1: Rina “Redwing” Seiko

In this post, I’ll be talking about the creation of Guilty Red’s main heroine, the Kitsu Rina “Redwing” Seiko, a former revolutionary warrior and hitokiri. Now you may be asking why I chose to make game full of kemonomimi (a human character with either animal ears and/or tail) rather than regular humans, given my past record of games with human female leads. Who were admittedly boring in retrospect.  Laine was a cool merc but there wasn't much apart from her lineage and Tristian was too stiff.

Rina is a Kitsu, a humanoid race based off a fox. And just for clarification--

Kemonomimi are not furries.

One reason is that I was starting to get bored of human characters, 2, I became heavily influenced by two mobile games. I so loved the designs of Arknights that I started doing prototypes for an eventual game set in a modern-ish skydom. And because I grew to love foxes/kitsune, everything else started to fall into place. Rina was also a combination of my two favourite characters in media. After doing some extensive research on late 19^th century Japan, I came up with a story that would do justice to her character.

 “A Kitsu who bloodied her blade on a hundred battlefields in her never-ending quest for peace and salvation, she disappeared towards the end of Kurozaki’s large major civil war which saw the Imperialists emerge as the victors.”

As a former hitokiri, Rina feels the burden of the lives that she took during Kurozaki’s violent civil wars and tries her best to make amends with her past. But Rina alone knows that the tremendous warrior sleeping deep inside of her could come alive at any moment. She’s beautiful, elegant and deadly, but her soul yearns for peace and to cherish and protect the ones she loves. The burden of both her past and the desire to see her country freed from the Staten Union’s martial law makes her one of the Redwings most powerful warriors. 

Furthering her burden and guilt is that her family skystone is being used to manufacture a weapon of devastating power: a weapon with enough power to obliterate an entire sky isle. And it is this terrifying power that is driving the conflict between Kurozaki and Staten. So at the end of it, you’re sitting with a many-layered heroine who is more complex than Laine or Tristian. She’s also more fun to write because she has her cute quirks as well, like getting flustered if you pet her ears or tempt her with *kitsudon, her favourite dish. Also, her ear flops are adorable.

*Based off the actual kitsune udon dish sold in Kyoto. It literally means fox noodles. So cute! No, no actual foxes are used in the dish! According to Japanese mythology, kitsune are said to be very fond of aburaage or sweet pockets of deep-fried tofu. Aburaage is one of the main ingredients used in kitsune udon.

As for her nickname, I figured giving her a badass red longcoat would suffice over a simple crop top and shorts.

Rina's full body art. Every playable character in Guilty Red has full bodies. If GR was a gacha game, Rina would be a 4* or an SR. And the player would obtain her 5* or SSR version later down the line. That's if it was a gacha XD

Next update drops on 17 August! Until next time!