So as the title states, this armor was inspired, in part, by Overwatch, the Objective-based class-styled FPS by Blizzard. The character designs from Overwatch are very futuristic and distinct, and often carries cultural inspiration from the character's own homelands. For example, Mei's parka resembles a wintery version of a qipao/cheongsam, and her gloves have a very oriental design as the trim. McCree resembles a character from spaghetti westerns, complete with poncho and cowboy hat (and a spur on his six-shooter). Hanzo is wearing a typical samurai outfit alongside is armored legs. Zenyatta resembles Buddhist monks, complete with his eyes resembling a moxipuncture pattern. The list goes on. As a result, I knew that this character I wanted to create would also have to have some cultural influences.
The first step to designing my character was to pick a theme. Genji was a ninja, Hanzo was a samurai. Reinhardt was a paladin. And so on. One thing I noticed was Overwatch lacked a "true" melee character. Granted, it would be hard to focus on being "up-close and personal" when everyone else used ranged weapons, but it still bothered me nonetheless. This led to the decision that my character would focus on Chinese Martial Arts, or Wushu. The animal theme of a Tiger came shortly after. Of course, if you know me, you'd know that my first idea was to have this character based on a Chinese Dragon. It's my schtick at this point. However, with both Genji and Hanzo summoning "aura" dragons, having a dragon themed character that is aesthetically similar but is not Japanese probably would be confusing to the average American. So I went with the next best thing: The rival. In Chinese mythology, the Dragon and the Tiger are rivals. One is wiser and more guile, the other more straightforward and powerful. Not to mention, the Tiger is more closely identifiable as a style of martial arts to the layman than a Dragon is. So the idea to have my martial arts themed character to be designed after a Tiger (and therefore use a "Tiger Style" of martial art) stuck.
Figure 1: The collar and its inspiration When I started to design the armor, I looked to Genji for inspiration. After all, between him, Reinhardt, and Pharah, the only three characters in Overwatch wearing full armor, he is the character with the highest level of mobility, a key for any martial art. As such, the armor would have to fit to the human musculature quite a bit. However, in my experience, if your clothes is too tight around your muscles, no matter how elastic the fabric may be, it will still be limiting your range of motion. As such, I decided that the areas around the joints would be more looser fabric than skin-tight armor or spandex. Going back to the Chinese martial arts theme, you can see it in two places: the collar and the lower leg armor. Most people, when they hear "Chinese Martial Arts' think of Qing Dynasty, or Republic-era clothing, complete with mandarin collar and frog-loop buttons. As a callback to this design, I implemented a mandarin collar-like plate around the neck, with a glowing orange light that resembles the frog-loop button at the top of the chest plate (Figure 1). The black stripes across the armor are to invoke the Tiger theme.
Figure 2: The leather wrapping and its inspiration The leather wrapping on the lower leg armor is meant to call back to the bindings around the legs of Shaolin Monks (Figure 2).
Figure 3: The armor's backside and its influence (PC: Shishioh.info) The armor itself had more interesting origins. Of course works in more utopian futures or more tech-based futures have designs that have a lot of glow-y bits (Overwatch does this quite a bit, Tron, and the like) and paneling reminiscent of Mecha anime. Gundam is probably the most obvious influence of a lot of non-post-apocalyptic future media. The smooth paneling on the armors has become very evocative of Future-tech, as seen with Wall-E and EVE from Pixar. No doubt, it had some kind of influence on Overwatch. However, what this armor resembles the most is the future Ultraman armor from the recent Ultraman Manga. In fact, a lot of design decisions were based on this future design. The butt-panel and raised spine, for example is taken directly from the future Ultraman suit, as did the idea of having the top part of the helmet come off to reveal the hero's face and hair.
Figure 4: The helmet, GekiRed's helmet, the helmet without the main mask, and Ultraman without his mask The helmet more closely resembles that of GekiRed of Jyuken Sentai Gekiranger. This decision was a no-brainer for me-what else to inspire the design of a Character who uses Tiger-Fist Kung Fu than with another character that does Tiger-fist Kung Fu? The color scheme and the jets on the back are also reminiscent of Super GekiRed, but this was not intentional.
Figure 5: The Shoulder pauldron and its inspiration, The Tasset and its inspiration The shoulder pauldrons came about through experimentation. The original shoulder pads were originally the curved pieces that mounted and protected the shoulders, and the pauldron pieces lied flush with the armor. However, when I completed the paneling for the armor, I saw that the single piece can be raised up to resemble the pauldrons on traditional Chinese armor, albeit smaller. The idea to evoke traditional Chinese armor also led to the addition of the tassets hanging off his belt, and above the cuisses.
Figure 6: The leg armor and its inspirations The lower leg armor were very much inspired by Hanzo's own leg armor. As stated above, I wanted to base most of the design off of Genji, the armored character with the best mobility. However (again, at the time of writing), Blizzard did not release Cosplay reference guides for Genji. As such, I had to take inspiration from Hanzo's leg armor. The Kneepads came from Mercy's design, but only because it fit from a Lore point of view (I will discuss this later, as with the character's moveset).
Figure 7: The final armor and the design it ended up resembling The original color scheme of this was originally going to be pure red with black stripes and orange glow-y bits. After all, Red, as a color, invokes heroism and bravery, as well as strength and boldness. After all, a lot of heroic character are associated with red. In western media, any character representative of the Gryffindor House in Harry Potter is often characterized with courage and boldness, while heroes like Iron Man, Spider-Man, The Flash, and Wonder Woman (among others) have red as a primary color. Red, when paired with black trim (not the inverse, mind you), is often paired with aggressiveness and stubbornness. Asuka (Souryuu) Langely and Rin Tohsaka (From Evangelion and Fate/Stay Night, respectively) have prominent Red-with-black color schemes and are known for their outward aggressiveness to the idiot hero. GekiRed is also outwardly aggressive, although due to him BEING the idiot hero (and being essentially a feral child), this aggression is more of a primal instinct of self-defense and protection than it is any kind of emotional attachment to a character. When I started coloring this, I soon realized that this design had a lot more red than I anticipated, and I decided to simply color some parts of it red, and leave the other parts blank so I could come back to it later. As such, the "important" parts that I colored were the helmet, the main chestplate (and ab piece), the shoulder pauldrons, the tassets, the gauntlets, the belt, codpiece, butt-plate, boots, kneepads, and a chevron-like panel on the legs. I then realized that I really liked the white paneling on the rest of the armor, and decided to keep it, soon after realizing that it pretty much resembled a very armored interpretation of Super GekiRed. Whoops. However, after much thought with regards to my character's lore and move-set, I decided to keep this design.
Figure 8: The weapon and its inspiration The weapon was the second thing to be designed. As stated above, with everyone using ranged weapons, it would be hard to get within range to use martial arts techniques, but RoosterTeeth's own RWBY ended up helping with this design. The character Yang Xiao Long is a character who relies on Close Combat Techniques in a world that has a lot of guns. As such, every time she punched, the forward momentum of her arm caused a section of her gauntlet to push forwards, launching a bullet, with the recoil bringing the section back. (In layman terms, every time she punched, a bullet fired) This was such a good idea, that I kind of had to use it for my martial arts based character. Every time he punched, he would fire a pulse of energy. Of course when it came to potentially balancing this, I came up with the idea that the strength of the shot was dependent to how close the opponent was to his fist. The closer, the more damage, the further, the more likely it is to simply stun. Of course, one of the main tenets of Tiger Kung Fu is the mimicking of the Tiger's mauling motion. A good example of this is from
this fight from Forbidden Kingdom, where Jackie Chan switches from Drunken Fist to Tiger Fist to fight Jet Li. In the fight, (and it is indicated by the usage of a Tiger's roar as a sound effect), he fashions his hands into a claw-shape and swipes at Jet Li's head. This inspired the retractable claw element to my character's weapon.
One of the things that sets Chinese martial arts apart from other martial arts is the focus on weaponry. Of course the original idea was to have my character use a staff, one of the weapons most heavily associated with martial arts. However, I realized that there would be no real way of storing this weapon without sacrificing something else. As a result, my only option was to remove the character's ranged harass and sacrifice it for a slower weapon with long range, or change the weapon that could accommodate to the character's relatively fast pace. The option to use a straight sword came from the fact that we already had a character who used a curved blade (Genji's katana).