Inspirations to Kenshin's Designs

As anyone knows, I can't quite decide his design. Or at least I thought I couldn't. Until now. After looking at a character from Phoenix Wright: Dual Destinies, I got to thinking: How about a samurai? Well, after much thought I came to use Simon Blackquill, the main prosecutor to said game as a base.

Now, you may think: why him? It's easy, really. I am a rather huge fan of samurai characters in general, with the code known as 'bushido' or 'samurai way' and the whatnot. That and his honor-bound ways are rather intriguing for a character that would normally be seen as a villain upon first look. And his dialogue insists that he speaks in an old way of speech that makes you think he's seen far too many samurai movies. I also found that heavily amusing.

His hair, I decided to go with a reverse scheme. While Simon's is rather round in nature, I decided it best to go with something like this: 

Mostly white, but that little patch on on his right black. Bit weird to most, but I believe it to be a unique trait to Kouga. (Which is a little funny to Garo fans because they'll notice that his look is inspired by Ryuga -who is the title bearer of Garo after Kouga, who I presume has died since the end of the last Garo movie-) 

His pants on the other hand are slightly baggier than the one depicted on Simon Blackquill. In fact, his waist area and thighs are taken from one of my favorite fighting games, Guilty Gear. More notably one of my mains, Order-Sol. Note that he has a rather large buckle. I intend to put that there, but instead of "FREE", I was thinking of something along the lines of  Justice, or "正義" which is Justice in Japanese and to have it seemingly scratched on.

Now, for the upper design part. His coat that has the Blackquill crest on it is rather interesting on its own. That played a rather strong role in bringing Kouga's coat to life. I added a different logo however, with something that could be a subtle reference to an item in LoL that everyone loves so much, the Trinity Force. How I intended to execute this was by taking a design from the Taiko Drum shown below.

That isn't the end of it. That flame design will be the layer under the TF reference. Whereas the swords in the Trinity Force logo are pointed outwards, I intend to put the swords crossing one another with said swords facing the opposite of how the blades in Trinity Force are. Color on the other hand will remain black and white because it'd look plain silly if there were a blue/yellow family crest.

As for the samurai armor, I went with a basic armor concept with a few twists of my own to make his Asuran (humanoid Voidborn) ancestry more apparent. 

I took the shin and arm/shoulder plating and decided it was best to fit the arm plating with a gap between 

each half of the outer shell to allow the aura to radiate as the arm-mounted blades were activated. While I also gave the shin plating a little change, I kept note to keep it like its incarnation in City of Heroes shown below:

I did however design it so the feet are also armored, the slipper does not affect the design of the armor covering the toe, though.

Then there's the slightly tougher part in my book. The Armored Form. The reason why I say this is because of the concepts in which I derive it from. But I believe the picture below may provide some answers to questions I may not be able to answer to my best ability.

Ignoring the VS thing, I suggest you pay attention the armor. Note how the outer part of Garo's helm has something akin to a wolf-like appearance. But what about the face? I'll get to that.

I intend to use the face of Karas's helm to fill it in while making the portion derived from Garo more akin to its third season's incarnation in Garo: The One Who Shines Through the Darkness. The body armor will be more inspired by the same season as well.

While maintaining the light chestplate, I intend to put something in the middle of its chest to look like something that could be an ancient version of Iron Man with the glowing circle and the whatnot. However in this case I drew the chest plate with a portion of the center being a glowing circular space with runic inscriptions on its perimeter. As for the armor protecting the stomach area, I decided it best to make it three parts instead of six as shown above. That way it looks layered, but still anatomical. As for the space between that, the chest plate and the lower armor, I went with a thin armor plating so it wouldn't clash so much with the outer plating. The armor on the shoulders. Yes I did in fact have a LOT of trouble deciding that. While I do like the design as is, I decided to not go with it because it resembled that of Jarvan IV's a tad too much. 

So I decided it best to go with something that was more form fitting and dropped the shoulder pads and just armored up the shoulders, keeping its body shape without altering the idea. I also went with a segmented look and the plates would be stacked vertically, unlike the ones shown below, which if you look closely the plates are stacked horizontally. However: You'll notice that there is armor on the waist. With the final design, I omitted it and decided it best to avoid any headache and possibly impracticality. That and I didn't like the ideas I had when attempting to make something original for it and thought it'd look better with a thin and flexibly layered under armor as seen and explained on the area explaining the parts under the stomach/chest plating.

Because I thought the Karas armor to be too thin, and the Garo armor a tad thick, I decided to go with a compromise. I went with the design style that Garo's armor had but gave it dimensions slightly thicker than Karas's to make it seem not as bulky, but not as thin either so it doesn't give the idea that he's just a squishy ninja.