Samurai Kai - no armor

After seeing Zaeta-K's recent rendition of Afro Samurai, it inspired me to draw an armor-less Kai Ibrajin wielding his harmonic katana! In fact, if you've been paying attention to my polls lately, you'll find I've been going through a small "identity crisis" regarding the design and abilities of Kai. I kind of think making him a nigh-overpowered cyborg taken straight out of a shonen anime like DBZ or s-CRY-ed would make him rather imbalanced against most of his foes, such as Dash, who have much more modest powers and actually rely on weapons, like the majority of characters in my universe.

However, I *REALLY* don't wanna give up Kai's trademark power fists, even if his ability to fling himself at his enemy fist-first is a bit too grandiose, implausible and even quite silly and impractical, especially against most baddies who could easily see him coming and just shoot him out of the air. Maybe he could simply wear powered gloves that channel his Iluric energy into destructive force, similar to the Space Marine power fists from Warhammer 40K meets Knuckles the Echidna's metal punching gloves. And of course he'd also need to be able to use other weapons, like guns and his harmonic katana here. Maybe his katana is powered by his Iluric energy!

But I don't wanna forget the fact that he's an Ibrajin, AKA THE single most powerful kind of warrior in the entire Holy Xandu Nation, so he HAS to be special...it seems the dominant vote on my poll is to keep Kai a cyborg, but to tone down his armor and make it less ridiculous (and much easier to draw,) making him much more on par with a normal, weapon-using warrior like Dash, and also to definitely give him an arsenal of weapons to choose from. But that won't change the fact that he simply MUST be known for using his fists in combat just as much or more than any weapon, since he is mostly an affectionate tribute to Kazuma the Shell Bullet, right down to how I'd imagine him being sounding like a cross between Kazuma and Mugen from Samurai Champloo, albeit with an Afro-American dialect (even though he's not black, I just imagine him talking like that for some reason, always have.)

Finally, the Kanji displayed next to him ("天罰") means "divine punishment," and will actually be on one of his arms as a tattoo. Even though Kai is not a human, he is a Yakaru from the planet Corstachi, he is fascinated by Japanese culture on Earth, and idolizes the Samurai. Hence the reason he requested the harmonic blade forged for him by the Xandu weapon masters was in the pattern of a katana from Earth, rather than the traditional Xandu scimitar. So yeah, also if I ever ponify Kai again, his kanji tattoo will be his cutie mark.

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Kai is © 2007-2012 Chris Ädren
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